Interesting community revitalization publication

From the Capitol Region Council of Governments (Hartford, CT area), which has a Transportation and Community Systems Project, is a toolkit of strategies for better policy, planning, preservation, and development. The toolkit, called the Livable Communities Toolkit: A Best Practices Manual for Metropolitan Regions, is in the publications section of their website, and has sections on agricultural land preservation, transfer of development rights, village preservation and development, transit-oriented development, Traditional Neighborhood Design (New Urbanism), Main Street revitalization, shared parking, and streamlined zoning.

The sections on Transit-Oriented Development, Main Street Revitalization, and Shared parking are particularly interesting and relevant to cities.

As I have mentioned before, shared parking would have been an option in the central business district of Washington, and was something I was gearing up to promote before 9/11. Now it will never happen. But imagine if it could have, with say the GAO office on the 400 block of H Street NW, and an underground parking structure perfectly situated to support night-time events. Speaking of which, a couple weeks ago I was going to an ANC meeting (held at NPR on the 600 block of Massachusetts Ave. NW) and was riding (by bike) down 7th Street, apparently before an event was to be held at MCI Center. Clearly, there was a great demand for parking and I saw people attempt to pull into the parking garage next to the ATF building (Atlantic Video), only to be turned away because there is no public parking there.

CRCOG also did a separate project in an urban neighborhood of Hartford, called Parkville, where they went through a number of community planning exercises, and produced a final report and an interesting executive summary.