Many municipalities are drawing on a variety of funding strategies to retrofit auto-dominant roads or design new roads to encourage biking and walking. Recent best practices have encouraged investment in "traffic calming" and Context Sensitive Design. Under both approaches, the focus is on building or retrofitting streets and roads to be used by everyone. For example, adding bike lanes can calm traffic while providing a bike amenity. Crosswalks can be striped for visibility, narrowed with bulb outs or provide mid-point protection with a traffic island. In most cases, these investments are modest and municipalities can leverage special federal ped/bike dollars by committing their own matching dollars.
Projects can also be fully funded by the municipality through sources such as general revenues (sales or income tax proceeds), special transportation funds (gas taxes, parking fees, vehicle stickers, tolls) and funds from business improvement districts, development impact fees and Tax Increment Financing (TIFs).
Pedestrian and bicycle improvements are usually extremely cost effective and provide ancillary benefits to a municipality. In addition to providing free or low-cost travel to residents and visitors, ped/bike improvements improve quality of life in a community. Active travel provides health benefits for people of every age. Ped/bike facilities offer transportation choice to everyone, but most importantly to people with disabilities, seniors, children and parents with strollers. Economic development is well served by streets bustling with pedestrians (including those who arrived on bicycle) who can easily slip in and out of stores without cruising for parking. The only potential downside is that in some climates, pedestrian and cycling facilities may be used less during inclement weather. Municipal policies about plowing streets and sidewalks can increase the number of all-weather pedestrians and cyclists.
Pedestrian and bicycle travel create no adverse impact on emissions or climate change. Since pedestrian amenities facilitate the use of transit, they can be part of an overall strategy to reduce driving and encourage transit use. Policies that link cycling with transit, like bike racks on buses or bikes-on-trains, also encourage mode change. These modes improve community livability and urban form by minimizing the amount of pavement required. Pedestrians require no parking facilities and bicycles require minimal space for parking. Because pedestrian and bicycle facilities carry much smaller weight loads than roads, a greater variety of materials can be used in constructing them. Some of these materials can be permeable. Overall impermeable coverage for ped/bike travel is nominal, creating little in the way of water management problems.
Any change to an existing facility, such as the adjustment, connection, or disconnection of equipment.A term used for significant changes over an extended period of time in the Earth's natural environments. Climate change can be produced by natural processes (e.g. changes in the Earth's orbit) or by the impact of human behavior (e.g. deforestation). See GLOBAL CLIMATE CHANGE.
