City council followed the staff recommendation and selected the Kimley-Horn team for Austin’s new Strategic Mobility Plan. For insight into team member Scott Polikov’s perspective, read what he’s been saying this week at CNU’s Transportation Summit in Portland.
It’s reported on this blog post. Excerpts below:
Over the past two days at the Congress for the New Urbanism Project for Transportation Reform conference, attendees have called for transportation reform at local, regional, and national levels. In a panel debate about the future of transportation funding and the role of regional planning through MPOs, several speakers argued that the foundation of transportation and development funding had to be systematically overhauled.
Gateway Planning Group’s Scott Polikov lamented not only the current funding situation — “bankruptcy” — but the reform proposals made by Transportation for America (T4A) and other advocates for only tinkering with the traditional 80 percent highway, 20 percent transit levels, not fundamentally changing the federal funding mechanism to support cites.
“If the blueprint plans, the regional plans, are not specifically tied to the funding, then as far as I’m concerned, there’s no point in doing the planning because what is ends up doing is creating expectations that are unrealistic,” said Polikov. ” If all we focus on is TOD and Regional planning, but we don’t restructure the entire policy basis for the highway funding… then I fear that we’re really just still in the margins and we’ve reinvented the same system and we’ve declared victory when in fact it’s not going to be victory.”
This article appears in November 6 • 2009.