April 26 – Co-Sponsoring FHWA Workshop for Greater Portland on Contemporary Approaches to TDM Planning

Register Here Now

We’re excited to offer a great opportunity for local municipalities and practitioners to learn more about contemporary Transportation Demand Management (TDM) planning and ways to increase the use of TDM measures in the Greater Portland region.

The Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) will be delivering this one day, no-cost workshop on April 26 at the Greater Portland Council of Governments (GPCOG)/Portland Area Comprehensive System (PACTS), 970 Baxter Boulevard, Suite 201, in Portland. Please save the date on your calendar and Register Here Now.

Those encouraged to attend are:

• transportation planners
• traffic management professionals
• transit operations staff
• transportation demand management (TDM) professionals
• others interested in vehicle trip reduction planning

Key Workshop Takeaways – participants will:

1. Identify opportunities to broaden the scope of demand management beyond traditional alternative commute mode programs and to address emerging issues, such as shared mobility.
2. Identify how to build institutional capability to support effective demand management.
3. Develop an action plan for improving integration of demand management into existing and future planning activities.

Agenda Overview
Morning:

• Introduction to the Workshop
• Overview about Demand Management/Executive Summary
• TDM and Planning Integration in the Region: Strengths, Weaknesses, and Opportunities
• Emerging Approaches, Strategies, and New Directions for Demand Management: Shared Mobility and Integrating TDM and Traffic Operations

Lunch in the Neighborhood – purchase your own tasty take-out from nearby eateries and continue the conversation
 
Afternoon:

• TDM and Planning Assessment Exercise
• Discussion: Opportunities to Integrate Additional Demand Management into the Planning Efforts in the Region
• Action Plan Development
• Wrap-Up

You can see more about the workshop in this FHWA flier. The workshop is co-sponsored by GPCOG, PACTS, the Maine Division of the Federal Highway Administration, and Cushman Transportation Consulting, LLC.

Looking forward to it and hope you can join us!

Walk With Me: Maine’s first USDOT Road Safety Audit

USDOT Secretary Anthony Foxx is sworn in – July 2013.

Anthony Foxx, the Secretary of the US Department of Transportation, reported he was hit by a car while jogging through an intersection a while back. Some say that’s part of why he announced a special bicycle and pedestrian safety initiative last September to do, among other things, road safety assessments in every state.

Photo by Wayne Emington

In early April, after much planning, a number of local and regional transportation and mobility experts conducted the state’s first ever Bicycle and Pedestrian Road Safety Audits (RSAs) – these ones along the Route 1 Corridor between Tukey’s Bridge in Portland and the intersection with Route 88 in Falmouth.

Photo by Sue Moreau

The corridor was chosen because of its importance linking communities and also because of several dicey bicycle and pedestrian segments.  These include:

• Tukey’s Bridge bike-pedestrian limitations and connectivity concerns
• the Veranda Street and Washington Avenue intersection
• the I-295 on and off ramps in East Deering onto Veranda Street
• integration of the existing Martin’s Point Bridge multi-use path with facilities on either end of the bridge
• confusion and conflicts at the Route 88 intersection.

The process was convened by Wayne Emington, a thoughtful transportation engineer with the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) here in Maine and was led by Bill DeSantis, a bicycle & pedestrian engineering specialist at VHB – a firm I work with as on-call bike-pedestrian consultants to the Portland Comprehensive Transportation System (PACTS – ah, the acronym soup). Bill helped created the federal Bicycle Road Safety Audit guide and has assisted other communities with conducting RSAs.

Photo by Sue Moreau

I led one of the Pedestrian Audit walkabout groups from Tukey’s Bridge to the Martin’s Point Bridge, which included Veranda Street and, among other things, Safe Routes to School concerns for the Presumpscot School.  We had a great team consisting of Jill Johanning, an ADA and mobility expert from Alpha One/Access Design; Meredith Graham from VHB, a traffic engineer with special expertise in signage and traffic signals (great for the Veranda Street and Washington Avenue intersection); Sue Moreau, the the Director of Multimodal Planning with MaineDOT, and Paul Legozzo from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

Photo by Wayne Emington

Patrick Adams, the MaineDOT Bicycle & Pedestrian Program Manager led the other pedestrian group to assess the north end of the section we were looking at, from Martin’s Point Bridge to the Route 88 intersection.  And Nancy Grant of the Bicycle Coalition of Maine led the Bicycle Audit group along the entire length of the corridor.

It was a cold morning, although we were grateful the snow was mostly gone – and in the process we came up with a detailed list of needed improvements and also some targeted suggestions.  PACTS is working on a Martin’s Point Shared Use Path Feasibility Study which this work will inform as well.  It was also a great chance to build relationships with new folks and hear different perspectives (which is also part of the USDOT’s intention in conducting these RSAs).  You can see FHWA’s initial summary, details on who else participated, and more photos here.