| Linda Osten and
Kathleen McCabe spoke about Hartford's TCSP project, "Picture it Better Together," and about their evaluation approach. The project has four primary components. The first, from a regional perspective, is to examine where growth should happen and how. The remaining components focus on the integration of design, transportation, and economic development strategies in three prototype neighborhoods, one each in an urban (Parkville), suburban (West Hartfield), and rural (town of Suffield) setting. In Parkville, the TCSP project is focusing on strategies to strengthen this area as an urban walking neighborhood.
A unique and important aspect of the project is the partnerships that are being created. The Capitol Region Council of Governments (CRCOG), the City of Hartford, and the Parkville Revitalization Association originally applied separately. When they were shortlisted, they decided to combine their proposals. While this "marriage" has taken lots of work and has not always been easy, participants meet on a weekly basis, which has increased the sensitivity of all the players to each other. As a result, Parkville has become more of an actor on regional issues, while CRCOG has increased its involvement in neighborhood issues.
One example of the benefit of this process is in the design of the Hartford-New Britain busway stations located in Parkville and West Hartford. The initial design by the DOT was "nice" but very suburban with no relationship to the surrounding neighborhood. Iterative redesigns have moved it much more towards an urban concept with pedestrian linkages and a circulator bus drop-off. The redesign is now moving forward as the preferred alternative.
Better planning processes, in addition to resulting in better outcomes, are also appreciated by the public. Meetings have been held in nearly 50 different forums over the past six months. Many citizens have commented that "this is the best thing CRCOG's done in a long time." They appreciate that the agency has come to talk to them on their ground (i.e. library displays, booths at fairs). A contact at a fair booth resulted in the conversion of an opponent of a road project into a potential ally. Some of these outreach techniques are now being extended to other CRCOG projects.
Evaluation is being conducted in-house by the project team. Pro bono assistance is also being provided by Trinity College, through the use of faculty advice as well as student interns for data collection. Evaluation of the project will be based on both secondary and primary data. A zoning database maintained by CRCOG will be used for long-term trend analysis; for example, whether industrial zoning along the busway is changed to residential and commercial. ConnDOT is doing traffic counts on related projects. Economic indicators are critical, and in particular, to demonstrate economic benefits of growth in the urban core. To obtain qualitative information, the project team originally proposed keeping diaries. Since no one was keeping them, the team now tapes meetings and conducts reflections on a monthly basis as part of working committee meetings.
What has been learned about evaluation? First, it helps to have dedicated resources and a good evaluation plan. Second, focus and target your evaluation efforts - be realistic. Third, evaluation is important to the neighborhood to help build consensus and support, especially from the business community.
What's been learned from the project as a whole? First, how an MPO and a neighborhood can work together (this never happened before in this area). Second, even on a regional level, change takes place on a person-by-person basis. Third, there is a distinction between Smart Growth (the location of development) and Smart Development (what development looks like). Finally, there is a distinction between pedestrian improvements and traffic calming - traffic calming alone is not sufficient.
View CRCOG Presentation |
