Photo Credit: Courtesy New Hampshire Department of Transportation
In Meredith, NH, the state's new approach of engaging local citizens in transportation decisions has received positive results.

Radical Departure: A New - New England Model?

By Neal Peirce and Curtis Johnson

America’s state highway departments have historically been overbearing Goliaths. They’re usually run by technocrats, talk in hard-to-decipher jargon, and almost always prefer asphalt-first solutions.

Carol Murray, New Hampshire’s reform minded Transportation Commissioner, notes the way they’ve often communicated with towns:

“Your Main Street is a state-numbered route, and we have to get traffic through more quickly. So you’ll have to eliminate your on-street parking and narrow your sidewalks. We’re going to make the road wide and straight, with 10-foot shoulders. And you’re going to like it.”

The ice, though, may be starting to thaw. Under Gov. Mitt Romney and Commonwealth Development Chief Doug Foy, for example, Massachusetts has developed a “fix it first” and “context sensitive design” approach to highways. The state highway department’s written a new design guidebook pledging to listen to communities and make roadways compatible with such community surroundings as classic New England downtowns, stone walls and historic districts. Vermont has had similar standards in effect since 1997.

The most remarkable change may be in New Hampshire, previously a roads-roads-roads constituency. Recalling her growing up years in the charming up-country town of Littleton, Murray recites how she could walk to school or to Main Street. She worries New Hampshire has been losing its quality of life through thoughtless transportation decisions. “Each community,” she asserts, “should be able to shape its own future.”

The town of Meredith on Lake Winnipesaukie was a case in point. Faced by congestion of two major roads converging and immense summertime traffic, the highway engineers were adamant for wider roadways and fast 24-hour “throughput.” Townspeople saw their quaint town and its peaceful lake views imperiled.

To break the impasse, Murray promised a fresh start. She reached out to independent consultants including Fred Kent of the Project for Public Spaces, to talk with townspeople about alternatives. For the town’s major intersection with its traffic lights, the idea of a space-saving roundabout emerged. The new concept: it’s impossible to design for fast Fourth of July-volume traffic, so at least offer motorists a pleasant view, not just more asphalt.

Similar discussions produced “softer” highway plans for Keene and Littleton. But they were rejected by citizens of Berlin, a hard-hit old lumber town that values its main highway strip boxes as a sign of economic strength; the townspeople nixed a remake into a tree-lined boulevard.

No matter what outcomes, Murray and her allies want to move from pro-forms highway briefings to earnest discussions, highlighting alternatives and engaging local citizens.

And now they’re trying even more. Murray took writing of the state transportation plan for the next 25 years -- combined road, rail, bus, freight, aviation and more -- out of the hands of transportation officials who’d normally handle it. Instead, she entrusted the task to a Citizens Advisory Committee, co-chaired by Lew Feldstein, president of the New Hampshire Charitable Foundation, and Executive Councilor Raymond Burton. The committee was a kaleidoscope of New Hampshire opinion, from the truckers to the Society for the Protection of New Hampshire Forests, municipal officials to business leaders, legislators to children’s and housing advocates.

Last month (January), the group produced its draft report -- an eye-opening document claimed to be “the first and only effort nationwide to ‘put the customer in the driver’s seat’ of transportation planning.” The central message: barring some fiscal miracle, New Hampshire will fall hundreds of millions of dollars short yearly in the money it prospectively needs -- from gas taxes or federal funds -- to maintain its existing roads, and rehab its already-aging interstates, and add all the new highways its current sprawling form of development demands. “Just building more roads isn’t the answer,” the committee concluded.

So what to do? The group’s objective: join transportation with land use planning in an effort to reduce travel distances, tamp down new highway demand, and start considering needs of the state’s non-drivers -- increasing numbers of elderly, children, the handicapped, bikers and pedestrians.

A raft of ways to get there, focused on more compact development, are suggested. Among them: stop segregating land uses (residences here, shopping there, offices somewhere else); instead promote mixed use including zoning overlays to promote traditional town centers. Site schools in towns, so more children can walk or bike there (combating, simultaneously, rising rates of obesity.) Develop corridor plans, multiple towns participating, with an enhanced role for regional planning commissions that also engage citizens. Gear in programs for energy efficiency and economic development. And demystify transportation language and information so ordinary citizens can grasp it.

The report’s less innovative on finances. Though it does suggest developers pay more of access road costs. And to get rail rolling in a state that’s resisted financing it, the committee endorses tax-increment financing, a device Nashua is now considering to pay for proposed train service to Lowell and Boston.

Is it certain such new, unconventional approaches will work? They do go against the grain of decades of practice. But the idea of citizen-oriented transportation planning is a fresh and reassuring breeze -- and all the more fitting in the region of America that invented the town meeting.

[Originally published February 2006]