Community Highlights

New Orleans is designated a Bronze-level community due to the city’s commitment to improving the pedestrian experience through innovative policy, public participation and engineering treatments. Highlights of New Orleans’ application include:

• The Moving New Orleans Transportation Action Plan, lays out the City’s multi-modal transportation vision centered around safety, equity, connectivity, and efficiency.
• The City partners with the University of New Orleans Transportation Institute (UNOTI) to collect and analyze nonmotorized travel and count data using both permanent, temporary and manual count locations. The data is used by the City to evaluate projects and understand long-term travel trends,
• The City’s Pedestrian Safety Action Plan identified the areas of the City most in need of safety improvement. Those locations, with State support, are being treated with safety countermeasures through both standalone projects and additions to larger roadway projects occurring throughout the City.
• Consistent with the City’s Complete Street Policy, the implementation of the Moving New Orleans Bikes program includes sidewalk and signals upgrades to improve the walking environment along and across project corridors.
• The City passed a Vision Zero resolution and is working across various departments to center its transportation goals around eliminating fatalities and serious injuries.
• Downtown New Orleans features wayfinding signs and an online interactive map to help pedestrians find destinations through public transit and by foot as well as learn about the city’s neighborhoods. The City and the Advocacy Center have been coordinating the development of “Accessible Corridors” that connect users between hotels, the convention center and other destinations.
• The New Orleans Health Department and NOLA Public Schools jointly support the Safe Routes to School programto increase walking and bicycling in among children and families in the city. NOHD staff develop School Transportation Safety Plans and work with the New Orleans Department of Public Works to address maintenance fixes identified within these plans.
• The city of New Orleans has implemented a number of innovative and progressive engineering treatments to construct road geometries that ensure pedestrian access and safety. The City is using proven safety countermeasures like road diets, leading pedestrian intervals, and rectangular rapid flashing beacons to improve safety and walkability.