Describing complete streets practices across the United States

Complete Streets (CS) projects provide an opportunity for urban planners to influence transit use and public health. More than 1,000 jurisdictions in the United States had adopted CS policies as of 2016, yet limited research has explored the implementation and evaluation of CS projects on a national scale. In response to these gaps, the current study sought to identify common CS implementation practices and assess how well jurisdictions gather data on CS project outcomes. Fifty-eight jurisdictions with an active CS initiative participated in a national web-based survey that asked about their CS implementation and evaluation practices. The findings suggest a widespread prioritization of context-sensitive projects that utilize locally created CS design guidelines. The results also indicate that jurisdictions with CS initiatives do not systematically collect data that demonstrate the impact of individual projects. Although jurisdictions with CS initiatives vary tremendously in their CS implementation practices, they should all evaluate their CS projects in order to demonstrate the benefit of CS for improving public health, safety, and multimodal transportation efficiency.