Charlotte and Denver Join Urban Innovators at NACTO

The group that brought you the Urban Bikeway Design Guide and the Urban Street Design Guide is expanding.

The National Association of City Transportation Officials added Charlotte and Denver to its list of member cities this week, bringing the total to 18. In addition, NACTO has added Louisville, Kentucky, and Somerville, Massachusetts, to the list of 12 “affiliate members,” the organization announced today at its “Designing Cities” conference in Phoenix.

NACTO has served as a forum for cities to share best practices in designing safer, multi-modal streets, and its design guides have quickly become an important counterweight to the more hidebound, car-centric engineering guidance offered by the Association of American State Highway and Transportation Officials. Additional NACTO member cities include Atlanta, Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Detroit, Houston, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, New York, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Portland, San Diego, San Francisco, Seattle and Washington, D.C.

In addition to the new member cities, NACTO will have a new president. The organization recently elected San Francisco MTA Director Ed Reiskin to the post. Reiskin will replace New York City’s trailblazing Janette Sadik-Khan, who is rumored to be departing for the private sector at the end of Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s term this year.

Reiskin has been car-free since 1991. At the last NACTO conference, he told attendees, “The most cost-effective investment we can make in moving people is in bicycle infrastructure.”