As communities work to reopen and recover from COVID-19 and the appetite for re-imagining streets and public spaces improves, the National Association of City Transportation Officials (NACTO) released a resource displaying transportation and street design practices in response to the pandemic.

The NACTO resource highlights cities’ current efforts to re-organize streets to best manage this crisis and support economic recovery, which includes an example from Boston – specifically, a move to create dedicated bus lanes.

This guide is also timely as a wave of age-friendly funding opportunities have emerged to support infrastructure changes. The Mass. Healthy Aging Collaborative encourages communities and interested partners to review these funding opportunities and use the NACTO resource to think about what could work to support older adults locally.

NACTO stated that their resource is evolving and not a comprehensive list of options, nor is it calibrated for the needs of a specific community; every city should assess local context and need, as well as the trajectory of the pandemic in the community, to inform a response
and implementation strategy.

These emerging practices are organized into standalone implementation sheets. Additional sheets will be released as they are developed in order to help cities
rapidly innovate, and this resource will be continually updated and expanded over the coming weeks and months based on evolving practices.