"How we transport ourselves may look different in fifty years." It's just one consideration that James Gittemeier, Senior Transportation Planner for the City of Duluth, has to think about.
Not so long ago, transportation could be broken down into binary columns: motorized and non-motorized. Over recent years, those columns have become a spectrum. Lightweight electronic devices are getting heavier use and, for Gittemeier, this means reacting appropriately to change. "When I look at my role with the city it's looking at all the users and how people are transporting themselves and how do we continue to make our system work."
Improvement doesn't necessarily mean paving every road or building a bike path everywhere. The measure of a "complete street" considers safety, usage, and many other variables. "A gravel road can be a complete street," says Gittemeier. "All users that are trying to use that road... would be able to." And as the future unfolds and the number of new forms of transportation expands, so to will the consideration for how these streets are best serving their users.
