NACTO Urban Street Design Guide

The National Association of City Transportation Officials (NACTO) published the Urban Street Design Guide, a ground-breaking blueprint for designing 21st century streets. BlinkTag was chosen to build the web-based version of the guide as an interactive, searchable complement to the print version. As a web-based planning document, users can browse chapters, search the text, click through interactive photos and illustrations, and browse an expanded collection of relevant photos, case studies and videos which were not included in the paper version of the guide.

City planners around the world can browse designs that calm vehicular traffic to create welcoming environments for pedestrian and bicycle use. Web-based planning documents, like the NACTO Urban Street Design Guide have the ability to be more accessible to the general public, easy to link to specific sections and the ability to be updated continuously. In addition, the guide can easily link to external resources, and include things that pdfs can't like videos and expanded photos and illustrations.

“NACTO’s Urban Street Design Guide is a toolkit for cities to create safe, multi-modal streets that meet the needs of all users, providing an alternative to existing design books that treat city streets as mini-expressways.”
Janette Sadik-Khan, New York City Transportation Commissioner and President of NACTO

The NACTO Guide can be adopted by individual cities, counties, or states as either a stand-alone document or as a supplement to other roadway guidance documents. Since being published, nine states and over 50 municipalities have adopted the Urban Streets Design Guide.

The NACTO guide, including the web-based version that BlinkTag created, was launched in front of a standing-room only audience in Washington D.C. and introduced by Janette Sadik-Khan.

Here are some of the audience members’ initial reactions.

At the @NACTO4Cities launch event the Urban Streets Design Guide. @JSadikKhan is introducing the guide. It's gorgeous. #nacto

— Greg Billing (@gregbilling) September 23, 2013

"The new Urban Street Design Guide is state-of-the-practice" says @NYC_DOT Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan. #USDG

— NACTO (@NACTO) September 23, 2013