Developing an Active Transportation Plan
Are You Ready?
You know you are ready for an AT Plan when you have the following elements in place:
AT Committee – active and composed of a variety of diverse stakeholder groups.
Strategic partnerships – providing a strong base of community support.
Asset mapping and needs assessment – complete.
Goals and priorities – identified.
An engaged public – desiring more AT in their community.
Consensus on direction – a collective vision based on community feedback.
Municipal buy-in – supportive councillors and senior staff.
Funding commitment – municipal and provincial funding sources have been identified and initial conversations with funding partners have been established.
A home for the AT Plan – the logical municipal department has been chosen to coordinate the Plan.
A relationship with local Transportation and Infrastructure Renewal (TIR) officials – especially important in rural communities where most roads are owned and maintained by TIR.
Once you have all of the elements on the checklist above, you are ready to prepare a formal AT Plan for your community. Remember to draw on lessons learned in other communities and to get lots of help and input from local AT users, your strategic partners, and the municipality. Your AT Plan should set your vision and state how you are going to get there. The information in this section will help you feel confident in your abilities to both create and bring to life the AT Plan for your community.
Ingredients of an AT Plan
A good AT Plan provides strategic direction to a municipality or community for twenty or more years. It is integrated and cohesive, and should serve to motivate staff, council, and the public in creating the vision laid out in the document. The centrepiece of your plan must be the development of safe, connected, continuous, and accessible routes for AT transportation. Without this, AT infrastructure is likely to be patchy.
A good plan also integrates AT into everyday municipal activities: land use planning and design, transportation engineering, road and trails maintenance, public health, and recreation. The plan should ensure that AT infrastructure is supported by safety enforcement, public education, social marketing, policies, and supportive community planning and design.
Essential elements of a GREAT AT Plan:
Engineering
Identifying the infrastructure needed to create a connected network is key. A connected network, or “connectivity,” essentially means that barriers, such as incomplete sidewalks, non-continuous bike lanes, buses without bike racks, and inadequate end-of-trip facilities are identified and then remedied to make travel convenient for AT users.
Enforcement
Once the infrastructure is in place and more AT users take to the roads, an AT Plan needs to suggest guidelines for the enforcement of safety rules. How will “sharing the road” be enforced in order to ensure the safety of cyclists, pedestrians, and motorists? Local police and RCMP should be involved in this piece to help draft guidelines for enforcement.
Education
The plan must also outline how the municipality will educate and monitor the municipal staff who are designing and implementing the AT solutions. What do engineers, planners, and public works employees need to know and who will inform them? The plan should also outline education strategies for both drivers and AT users on using the new infrastructure. Encouragement In terms of public awareness and engagement, the plan should build on the good work you’ve already been doing. This could include more social marketing and media campaigns, and more AT events, such as participation in Bike Week and International Walk to School Month. Remember to keep track of the number of participants at each event, as this will help in quantifying the success of your projects.
Evaluation
It’s essential to establish a baseline of AT use in your community before implementing your plan. This way you’ll understand transportation patterns unique to your community. From this baseline data, you can assess whether your investments are having the desired effect of shifting transportation options.
This data can be gathered in numerous ways:
Polling of residents who use AT in their daily lives
Bike or walk counts (annually or bi-annually)
School Travel Plan surveys
Numbers of walking or biking groups
Kilometres of sidewalks, bike lanes and routes, and multi-use trails
Amount of traffic congestion
Parking demand and available parking spaces
Number of AT-related events and initiatives
New or renewed policy development
Number of media hits on AT
Number of signs, bike racks, benches, etc.
Number of community presentations on AT
Policy
Your plan should include a comprehensive scan of municipal policies that pose barriers to AT. It should list the existing municipal policies that are supportive of AT and any others that need to be changed. It should also note where new policies could be implemented to encourage and enable AT development.
Planning
Consider AT in all municipal planning projects and outline how AT will be incorporated into all city planning (municipal planning strategies, land-use bylaws, all proposed infrastructure projects, etc.).
School Travel Planning
The “school run” can represent about 20 % of morning rush-hour traffic in urban areas. Since schools are such major destinations in a community, it is important that AT Plans make special accommodation for them. The Ecology Action Centre has been working with school communities throughout Nova Scotia for ten years to increase AT use by children and youth. Staff are available to review and provide input on municipal AT Plans to ensure that AT for children and youth is represented.
The Child and Youth Friendly Land-Use and Transport Planning Guidelines for Nova Scotia may help guide you through the school travel planning portion of your AT Plan. It contains 19 policy recommendations for municipal transport and landuse planners developed as tools for achieving transportation and landuse arrangements that meet the needs of children and youth.
Funding Development of Your AT Plan
It costs money to even write an AT Plan, let alone implement it! And it’s your AT Committee that needs to secure the funding to cover the preparation of the formal AT Plan. Wondering what the ballpark range is? Contact municipalities that have already completed AT Plans or the regional representative for the Nova Scotia Department of Health and Wellness to get an idea. Funding typically comes from municipal and provincial governments, with a listing of other organizations below. The average municipal contribution in Nova Scotia to the development of AT Plans varies from one region to the next. The CBRM and Colchester-Truro financial plans are two examples.
Other sources of funding may include:
Local AT groups
Local businesses
Chambers of commerce
Community health boards
Regional development associations
Nova Scotia Department of Health and Wellness
Nova Scotia Department of Transportation and Infrastructure Renewal
Nova Scotia Department of Seniors
Nova Scotia Department of Energy
Federal Gas Tax Funds
Once funding is secure, you can begin developing your municipal AT Plan. Keep in mind that this funding is only for plan development.
The ongoing implementation of your AT Plan will require separate funding. (see Implementing an Active Transportation Plan).
Identifying roles and responsibilities within the municipality
The municipality must start to take ownership of the planning process. To that end, your AT Committee should include supportive municipal councillors and staff. In addition, the plan must be managed by a specific municipal department.
Several decisions will have to be made:
Will it be planning, public works, recreation?
Will this department provide dedicated, paid staff to work on the planning and implementation of the AT Plan?
How will an interdepartmental approach be assured in order to successfully implement the plan?
Choosing a Model of AT Planning
Basically, you have two choices when it comes to developing an AT Plan. You can do it in-house or hire a consultant. Both models are outlined below. As you decide which one to use, keep the following things in mind. Developing your community’s AT Plan requires a substantial investment of time and resources.
The person or group developing the plan must have the appropriate skill set and experience to achieve all the project deliverables, such as:
Conduct a wide review of the municipality’s operations, policies, and planning strategies
Interview stakeholders
Hold public information sessions
Create projected maps
Develop/use street design guidelines
Bringing all this information together can be a challenge for any municipality or community. Realistically, it could take years to produce, but it’s important not to rush an AT Plan. It’s equally important to keep your momentum while you are developing the plan and figuring out how to implement it. Completing and marketing fun and easy projects is a great way to keep AT in the spotlight, grow awareness, and build support.
Municipalities and communities have two options for preparing an AT Plan.
Internal Process
AT Plans can be produced in-house. Sometimes, there are municipal staff who have the skills, knowledge, and passion to do this work. Another plus is that different municipal departments can collaborate on the AT Plan, bringing different skill sets to the table. However, developing a plan in-house can put a strain on regular duties, or if combined with regular duties, may mean the AT Plan takes longer to complete.
External Process
Many municipalities hire consultants to produce AT Plans. The advantages of consultants are their high level of expertise and the relatively short period of time before delivery of the final product. The drawback is the expense. Here’s what it cost these Nova Scotia communities to have consultants prepare their AT Plans:
• Bridgewater: $47,000
• CBRM: $111,500
• Truro: $28,197 (Bikeways Plan)
A strong candidate will be able to provide numerous services. To hire a consultant, you will need to develop a clear request for proposals (RFP).
It is important to note that if senior staff or council offer their support, but will not embark on the path to a formal AT Plan at this time, ask for AT to play a prominent role in related plans. AT-related goals and objectives are in 27 of the 55 Nova Scotia municipal Integrated Community Sustainability Plans (ICSP). Other planning documents which may include AT-related goals include the Municipal Planning Strategy (MPS) and Municipal Physical Activity Leadership strategy (MPAL). Request that an AT Committee representative be included on the committees developing or overseeing both of these plans. Your AT Committee can then focus on ensuring AT-related goals and objectives in the ICSP or MPAL strategy are achieved.