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Smart growth is an approach to community design that connects housing, transportation, and land use to create healthy, prosperous, and resilient neighborhoods.

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Smart Growth America cultivates vibrant, sustainable communities with diverse living and transportation options, enhancing quality of life for all.

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Smart Growth America cultivates vibrant, sustainable communities with diverse living and transportation options, enhancing quality of life for all.

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Smart Growth America cultivates vibrant, sustainable communities with diverse living and transportation options, enhancing quality of life for all.

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Criminally Incomplete Streets

Sometimes we get a shocking reminder of why we are working for Complete Streets.

By Barbara McCann, July 18, 2011

That reminder comes this week in the vehicular homicide conviction delivered by a jury to a woman in Atlanta who lost her child to a hit-and-run driver.

Her crime was crossing an incomplete street.

Please read David Goldberg’s excellent post over on Transportation for America’s blog for the grim details.

Of course, the really criminal aspect of this story is that we’ve been using tax dollars to build places that are downright deadly –- and that are especially deadly for disadvantaged children and their parents.

A planner once said to me that the first benefit of a Complete Streets policy was to ‘stop the bleeding’ -– to stop creating such dangerous places.

In some cases, that bleeding is all too real.