Streets for Recovery

Safe Distance. Slow Speeds.

Our public health crisis created a critical need and opportunity to expand outdoor spaces for physical distance. Economic recovery also requires additional outdoor space. Streets, sidewalks, and parking are public spaces that, when skillfully re-imagined, can help us to emerge from the pandemic stronger and more connected than before.

Why Shared Streets?

Room to breathe with safe physical distance
Boost immunity and improve overall health through physical exercise and being outdoors
Reduce speeds and severity of crashes supporting Vision Zero
Support Climate Action Plans to reduce carbon emissions
Safe routes to needed services

Features

Connected networks of streets (local traffic only residential streets, open curbs, streeteries, open streets, etc.)
Maintain access for neighbors, deliveries and trash/recyling
People can walk and bike in the street or in extended sidewalks
Low speeds (10-20mph)
Maintains existing parking
Maintains emergency access
Low cost / low staff

Streets for Recovery Services

Neighborways expertise in community-based planning and engagement can help your community re-open strategically and intentionally. We’re here to help:

Plan and build shared streets networks
Inspire innovative engagement
Construct and install beautiful, low-cost DIY traffic calming measures
Expand sidewalks and program spaces with art
Monitor and evaluate progress for on-going improvements

Funding Support

Early on in the pandemic Neighborways partnered with the Lawrence and Lillian Solomon Foundation to provide Streets for Recovery grants to communities for technical assistance and materials support.

In 2022 we helped Everett, Newton, Millbury, and Danvers apply and win in total over a half million dollars in funding from MassDOT's Shared Streets and Spaces Program.

We love to support communities vision the possibilities, and help make them reality. Contact us to explore your ideas and put together a winning grant application.

Contact Us

Installing Malden Shared Streets Demonstration

Project Planning

Prioritization and Scoping

Where do we start and prioritize recovery? With strategic planning efforts that engage stakeholders and the public early and often, we can address racial and environmental justice and support network analysis, scoping, phasing, fieldwork, and budgeting.

Getting to Yes

Need help in moving projects forward? Neighborways can help navigate concerns around liability, emergency access, public support, funding, and more. We make sure the right folks are in the room early in the project planning process so we can move quickly. Especially with new treatments, we can support staff and leadership in feeling more comfortable with evaluation and monitoring protocols and designs that are responsive, adaptable, and removable.

Resident and City Counselor champions apart of Malden Shared Streets demonstration project

Community Engagement

Community-Based Equitable Engagement

How do we engage the public in the time of physical distancing, and who is missing from the conversation? Our approach spans races, genders, ages, and abilities to empower residents to be more connected and involved in their communities. We can help with how to approach engagement in new and creative ways from webinars, social media, chalking, suggestion boxes, physically distant in-person engagement strategies, and more.

Volunteer Programs

Is your staff capacity limited? Looking to scale your programs and not sure how? Get support setting up and overseeing volunteer programs to help install materials and provide eyes on the street to support monitoring and evaluation.

Hyper Local Hiring

How do we support folks getting back to work? As apart of all of our projects, Neighborways aims to empower and hire local community members on a case-by-case basis for data collection, community outreach support, and public art.

Branding + Communication

What’s the best way to communicate rapid changes to our streets? Designing branded, multilingual signs and fliers, to photo-realistic renderings, and laser cut pavement stencils, we can support folks to envision and understand changes before they happen to better communicate intentions and outcomes.

Contra-flow Bike Lane, Somerville Neighborway

Design and Implementation

Design, Estimates, and Purchasing

Need support in expanding capacity and expertise in tactical traffic calming? From materials selection, maintenance considerations, detail specifications, cost estimating, purchasing, and DIY construction, Neighborways can support your projects getting on the ground fast.

Tactical Installation

What materials are flexible and best for rapid implementation? Our staff have over 20 years of combined experience in tactical traffic calming and public art implementation. Recruiting, organizing, and coordinating install crews from staff to volunteers, we can support and oversee installation to ensure quality control and assurance, and make modifications in the field as needed.

Sample Data Collection Sheet from Arlington Shared Streets Pilot

Monitoring and Evaluation

Evaluation and Research

Is data collection and evaluation apart of your recovery response programs? In rapid response projects with limited staff capacity evaluation and data collection can be challenging. Neighborways can support data collection and specializes in research and evaluation of experimental treatments. We can adapt evaluation metrics to reflect your community values including multimodal counts, observations, surveys, qualitative interviews and video footage to help document success and learning opportunities.

Community-based Evaluation

Have you considered having the community partake in evaluation and data collection? Neighboways staff has led community walk and bike audits and trained community members to collect speed data. Measuring before and after impacts of tactical traffic calming measures helps folks to get a real sense of what different speeds feel like on their streets and understand why slow speeds save lives.