By Sean Doyle, March 19, 2019
State departments of transportation (DOTs) direct most of the transportation spending in the United States but they’re often focused on building highways and are ill-equipped to address the far more diverse mix of challenges they’re tasked with solving today. In a six-part series, we examined how we got here, what state DOTs need to change, and how one state is putting its intentions into practice.
Over the past few weeks, we’ve taken a deep dive into how current practices and policies at state departments of transportation (DOTs) lead to the construction of huge, expensive road projects (i.e. highways) as the ‘solution’ to almost every transportation problem. Big, over-engineered road projects waste precious funds, generate more driving and more pollution, and prioritize high-speed vehicle travel over the safety of every other road user.
Through our work directly with state DOTs over the last two years we know that some states are trying to change their practices to better reflect today’s realities: addressing climate change, dealing with shrinking funding sources, and new transportation options, for example. While state DOTs were created as highway agencies a century ago, their modern day missions are multimodal. Their policies and practices need to adapt.
With a ‘practical solutions’ approach, state DOTs can do just that, bringing their policies and practices into line with broader state goals around health & safety, equity, sustainability, and economic opportunity. We started our series on practical solutions with two posts from Transportation for America Director Beth Osborne, who sets the stage by looking at the big picture.
With the background taken care of we walked through seven different areas that state DOTs need to address to save money, accomplish their full missions, and actually create a transportation system that meets the needs of citizens in this century. These three posts summarize a series of more technical white papers that we developed as a result of our work with state DOTs.
And finally, we wrapped up the series with a concrete look at how one state is augmenting some of its practices. While there are a handful of states that are on the forefront of this work—and we cite many of them in our white papers—Tennessee provides a helpful illustration of how states are taking their mission to build a safer, more equitable, and more multimodal transportation system to heart.
For more information on practical solutions, download the white papers or reach out to us about providing assistance in your state.
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