As always, free and open to public, at Science Museum of Virginia

May 14th, 2009
Wednesday 7:00 pm
Program: Reviving the Regional Bike and Pedestrian Plan and Complete Streets
Speaker: Sheila Sheppard, Executive Director, Partnership for Smarted Growth, and Dom Nozzi, Executive Director, Walkable Streets and author of “Road to Ruin”

The Partnership for Smarter Growth (PSG) was created in 2004 as an education and advocacy nonprofit organization developed by and for citizens of Greater Richmond. Its mission is to preserve and enhance quality of life by educating the public and elected officials about land use, transportation, and other growth-related issues and equipping citizens to be effective advocates for balanced, responsible growth in their own communities and in the region as a whole.

PSG has been working in the greater Richmond region, to create self-sustaining groups of citizen empowered to engage in planning and the dynamic democratic process to channel growth that will help, not harm, our communities. It has already helped establish the following local groups: the Coalition for Hanover’s Future; Powhatan Tomorrow; Envision Henrico; Envision Richmond; and Citizens Concerned with Goochland Growth.

PSG Executive Director Sheila Sheppard has been reviewing the 2003 Regional Bike and Pedestrian Plan (see view fromn the chair essay, page xx) and wants to breathe new life into it. She will present high-lights from the plan and identify some of the best recommendations, in terms of ease of implementation and best demonstration projects.

Dom Nozzi is a city planner with more that 20 years of experience in the fields of urbanism and livable communities and environmental conservation, and and currently serves on the Bike/Walk VA Board of Directors. He is the director of Walkable Streets Consulting, and his 2003 book Road to Ruin “delivers an easy-to-follow introduction to sprawl’s causes and offers common-sense solutions available to communities. The time is ripe for resurrecting the tradition of designing that makes people, not cars, happy. The key is returning to modest, human-scaled streets, parking, land use, and development regulations. Design principles encouraging walking, bicycling, and mass transit in conjunction with automobile travel are essential to creating livable cities once again.”

Mr Nozzi is a specialist in Complete Streets, Smart Growth, Sustainability, quality of life, suburban sprawl, transportation choice, parking, and traffic congestion. He will speak about how to change the car-only street design paradigm: Complete Streets can be used by all forms of travel, which promotes travel independence, safety, health, the environment and the economy. It is important that street design be context-sensitive rather than the conventional one-size-fits-all approach. Of special interest to our group is understanding effective tactics for inducing more bicycling and walking.