By Andy Lambert, Bike Fixation Global Sales Manager
The National Association of City Transportation Officials (NACTO) is a membership organization that includes 62 major North American cities and ten transit agencies, and is a leader in transportation policies and best practices development. Their annual conference, aptly named “Designing Cities 2018,” was held in Los Angeles, California earlier this month. Bike Fixation was there to connect with and listen to the hundreds of city officials, planners and practitioners who gathered to plan the future of transportation in cities.
Los Angeles NATCO
The key conference themes were safety for all ages and abilities, growing urban traffic and data collection. If you haven’t heard, data is the new natural resource and cities want all they can get. Data plays a crucial role for those fighting for policy changes. Since 2010, there have been between 33,000 and 37,000 motor vehicle fatalities in the U.S. per year. That is over 100 deaths per day due to motor vehicle crashes.
This tragic fact is motivation for cities and organizations like the Vision Zero Network to form public/private partnerships with the likes of Ford Motor Co., Uber and Lyft to start sharing data that will help inform policies and practices that manage congestion, cut greenhouse gas emissions and reduce crashes. To learn more about this exciting partnership, click here.
Figueroa Street featuring the brand new bike lane
The second theme to the conference was “There will only be Peace of the Streets when everyone has a Piece of the Street.” We discussed topics such as congestion, safety, equitable mobility with street design and engineering. Even in a historically car-centric city like Los Angeles, progress is being made on redesigning streets for all users.
A prime example is Figueroa Street, or as we would like to call it “Extreme Makeover: Streets Edition.” This Los Angeles street went from dangerous and high-stress, to safe and comfortable by reducing a lane of travel, creating a protected bike lane, and introducing bike-turn boxes.
NACTO 2018 Conference Recap
