In many places, roads are more than transportation corridors carrying us to and from the hustle and bustle of everyday life. They are trails into enchanted forests, breathtaking coastlines and quaint country towns. Yet ever-wider and stick-straight highways are compromising the community values and environmental integrity of these scenic and historical places.

Michigan roads are built using rigid design standards born in the 1950s. These standards focus on the ability to drive at high speeds and support projected long-term growth based on land use patterns. This has created an unusual problem for communities wishing to protect their quality of life.

Context, or community, sensitive design (CSD) arms the design engineer with the tools to build those long and winding roads we all search for on Sunday afternoons. This approach is a citizen-guided process that promotes flexible road design and transportation planning. The result is that a community's existing land uses and master plan are respected while public safety and mobility are not compromised.

With a fiscal crisis looming and transportation planning an expensive process, CSD provides an opportunity to save millions of dollars. Involving the community and listening to its concerns would have saved the state 15 years and $4 million on the Petoskey by-pass alone, a now-cancelled project that would have spent $90 million on a four-lane divided highway through the farms and fields of Emmet County.

As a new era approaches, the Michigan Department of Transportation has an opportunity to exchange their time-honored tradition of bigger and wider highways for roads that respect the community and the environment with which they coincide.

For more information on context sensitive design, please visit:

Scenic America at http://www.scenic.org/roads.htm
Federal Highway Administration at
http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/