Priority: Strategic Planning
Setting Common Goals and Using Resources Efficiently
Over the past five years, over 80 cities and towns across the U.S. have engaged in visioning processes to chart a future for their communities. The strategic planning process connects growth with transportation investments and the environment on a regional basis. Strategic planning looks at things like land use patterns, density, and urban form to find innovative solutions to challenges like housing, carbon emissions reductions, agriculture preservation, and regional economic development.
Strategic planning uses a community's own values to establish common ground and common vision and develops goals and implements strategies to achieve it.
Communities greatly benefit from strategic planning because:
- Strategic planning provides a framework and process for understanding the many complex issues that surround regional growth.
- Strategic planning builds regional consensus by giving communities and the public the capacity and opportunity to actively participate in the planning process.
- Strategic planning uses data tools and techniques to assess the impact of transportation and other public policy choices on a community, and visually maps the results, making the effects of potential scenarios easy to comprehend.
- Strategic planning recognizes the impact of tradeoffs among achieving competing goals in a fiscally constrained environment.
Click here to download a whitepaper on strategic planning from Transportation For America
Strategic planning Case Study: Sacramento
The Sacramento regional blueprint is the product of a three-year public involvement effort and partnership between the regional Council of Governments (SACOG) and a local non-profit. Over 35 public workshops were held, and over 5,000 people used the project’s interactive technology to consider the best land use scenario for the region.
The Preferred Performance-based Scenario, approved in 2006, uses performance measures based on smart growth principles like offering a variety of housing types for different households and income levels, natural resource stewardship, and compact development. The plan is part of SACOG's transportation plan, and will be the framework to guide local governments in growth and transportation planning through 2050.
Sacramento is expected to save big by implementing their strategic plan:
- $9.4 Billion less for public infrastructure costs (e.g. transportation, water supply, utilities)
- 14% fewer carbon dioxide emissions
- $655 million less for residents’ annual fuel costs
- $8.4 Billion less for land purchases to mitigate the environmental harm of development
- 300% increase in public transit use
- 6% to 13% growth in number of residents who walk or bike
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