National Association of City Transportation Officials

NACTO’s Cities for Cycling project launched in 2009 to advance the state-of-the-practice in bikeway design in the United States.

NACTO’s Designing Cities Initiative launched in 2012 with the goal of drastically advancing innovative street design and transportation engineering practices in the United States. The initiative works with government officials to improve street design in urban environments. One facet of this Initiative is the Urban Bikeway Design Guide, whose purpose is provide cities with state-of-the-practice solutions that can help create complete streets that are safe and enjoyable for bicyclists.[2]

Since 2012, NACTO has held an annual Designing Cities Conference, convening hundreds of "transportation leaders and practitioners from across the country to discuss key trends in urban street design and transportation policy."

Conference sites

• 2012: New York City
• 2013: Phoenix
• 2014: San Francisco
• 2015: Austin
• 2016: Seattle
• 2017: Chicago
• 2018: Los Angeles
• 2019: Toronto
• 2020: Boston (cancelled)

In October 2014, the Global Designing Cities Initiative was launched as a subsidiary of NACTO to bring guidance for safe streets to an international audience. It focuses on the critical role of streets within urban environments in cities around the world. The initiative facilitates the exchange of transportation ideas, insights and best practices among large international cities, while committing to working with a variety of stakeholders to help them shape streets in a manner that promotes public health and safety, economic development, environmental sustainability, and social and cultural value. The Initiative paired with Bloomberg Philanthropies' Initiative for Global Road Safety, which seeks to reduce traffic deaths, particularly in developing countries where traffic death rates are very high . The Initiative was announced at NACTO's 2014 Designing Cities Conference in San Francisco.[3]

The initiative will work especially close with the 10 cities chosen to be a focus of the Bloomberg Initiative for Global Road Safety: Accra, Addis Ababa, Bandung, Bangkok, Bogota, Fortaleza, Ho Chi Minh City, Mumbai, Sao Paulo, and Shanghai.

The NACTO Bike Share initiative aims to strengthen bike sharing programs in its member cities, with a focus on improving social equity impact and reaching underrepresented groups. The Bike Share initiative provides bike share program managers and cities with best-practices research as well as a forum to exchange knowledge.

In March 2011 the NACTO Urban Bikeway Design Guide, part of the Cities for Cycling initiative, was officially released. Janette Sadik-Khan, the New York City Department of Transportation Commissioner, announced the release at the National Bike Summit in Washington, D.C.[4] The Bikeway Design Guide provides technical guidance on over twenty different bicycle infrastructure designs. These include buffered bike lanes, cycle tracks, advanced stop line (bike boxes), and several other treatments which have not been officially adopted into AASHTO or MUTCD manuals. Many of these designs have already been implemented in cities across the United States and are widely used in Europe and Canada. Bicycle facilities from New York City and Portland, Oregon, are heavily featured in the guide, though case studies from cities all throughout the United States are represented as well. A second edition was released in 2012.

The Urban Street Design Guide, published in September 2013, provides guidance for innovative street design in urban areas. The Guide lists six principles for urban street design:[5]

• Streets Are Public Spaces.
• Great Streets Are Great for Businesses.
• Streets Can Be Changed.
• Design for Safety.
• Streets Are Ecosystems.
• Act Now!

Supported by the Bloomberg Initiative for Global Road Safety, this project will develop new guidelines to help cities across the world—especially the developing world—create safe and sustainable streets. The Global Designing Cities Initiative will assemble a Global Street Design Guide for cities around the world. This will be based on a series of principles that are ground-tested with participating cities and experts, with accompanying technical detail that outlines strategies for building high-quality public streets in various contexts for cities around the globe. The guide will be available free on their website in early 2017.

The NACTO Transit Street Design Guide, showcasing how to improve transit using innovative street design, was published in April 2015.[6]

Published in 2017, the Urban Street Stormwater Guide was created in a "collaboration between city transportation, public works, and water departments to advance the discussion about how to design and construct sustainable streets. The Urban Street Stormwater Guide provides cities with national best practices for sustainable stormwater management in the public right-of-way, including core principles about the purpose of streets, strategies for building inter-departmental partnerships around sustainable infrastructure, technical design details for siting and building bioretention facilities, and a visual language for communicating the benefits of such projects. The guide sheds light on effective policy and programmatic approaches to starting and scaling up green infrastructure, provides insight on innovative street design strategies, and proposes a framework for measuring performance of streets comprehensively."[7]

Affiliate Member Cities

Transit Agency Members

International Members