Advocacy Issues…

Accept, recognize, and account for the harm to local communities (social, environmental, and economic) caused by current urban transportation policies and practices planning system

• Induced demand, viewed by the current planning system as rationale for adding new road capacity… produces negative outcomes for every aspect of city operations.
• The current system ignores negative externalities, incorrectly using untested flawed assumptions to justify urban freeways. Decision-makers are duped with misinformation.
• The current planning system is about funding the highway industrial complex at the expense of the well-being of local citizens living in urban neighborhoods and cities.

Stop expanding capacity

• Induced demand is considered the “Fundamental Law” for creating congestion.
• All new added capacity expands the maintenance deficit, currently at $15 billion for federal and state roads (this does not count the poor condition of local streets). Eliminate the $15 billion list of unfunded capacity expanding projects…

Prioritize maintenance

• Prioritize maintenance funding to reduce backlog (no capacity expansion)
• Subsidize local street maintenance due to growth patterns induced by urban freeways (federal & state funding incentivized infrastructure growth cities cannot afford to maintain

Update / Reform assumptions, standards and funding incentives used to justify and design urban roads / highways and local streets… Citizens and decision-makers deserve comprehensive factual information…

• Separate local from through traffic…Update traffic modeling (static to dynamic)…
• Develop truthful transportation impact measures on cities and neighborhoods, not propaganda

Redesign public engagement processes… Prioritize citizen and community values over engineering values (comprehensively design for alternative modes of transportation as system priorities)

Stop the Threat… Reinvest neighborhoods that have unjustly declined due to the long-term threats (10 to 40+ years) imposed by planning to build an urban freeway (Baton Rouge, Lafayette and Shreveport)…

Undo the Harm… Tear down inner-city cut-through freeways and replace with business boulevards and neighborhood healing investment that grow local citizen capacities (Nola, Shreveport, and Monroe)

Policy & Practices Reform Trajectory…

• Designing and Investing in a shift from unsustainable declining cities of driving more to vibrant well-being cities of driving less…
• Reforming the role of urban transportation policies and practices to support place-making for local wealth creation
• Reforming the role of transportation in the growth of cities and the relationship of cities to their surrounding regions (environmentally and economically).
• Transit strategies to reduce auto dependence, reduce infrastructure maintenance deficits, improve community resilience, and increase equity within cities of Louisiana