Main Street America is pleased to announce the Thriving Communities Transportation Toolkit, a new publication for Main Street leaders and local governments who want to be more effective partners in advancing transportation investments. 

Across the Main Street network, we know that Main Streets are more than just roads. They’re Civic Infrastructure: the home to our downtown districts, historic buildings, public institutions, social hubs for traditions and events, and the platforms that drive successful locally owned small businesses.

Yet we know that transportation projects — often planned and implemented at the regional or state level — can seem inaccessible. Transportation planning can be seen as a complex, top-down system better left to planners, engineers, and other specialists. As a local leader, it’s easy to feel like you don’t have a place in transportation planning or the ability to push a project forward. But the reality is that local leaders can make the difference between a transportation project that simply gets you from point A to point B, versus an impactful project that can also advance quality of life, economic growth, a sense of community and place, and tourism opportunities. 

The new Toolkit shares tools and approaches we used over two years as a Lead Capacity Builder for the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Thriving Communities Program. Through the program, we worked closely with 20 communities selected by USDOT to advance their transportation and community development goals. During this time, we:

• Conducted 20 on-site transportation assessments, reaching more than 500 stakeholders to understand local priorities and refine individual work plans for each TCP community.
• Provided 14,000 hours of direct technical assistance in community engagement, partnership development, project visioning, grant writing, and more.
• Facilitated 30 virtual and in-person workshops to expand TCP communities’ knowledge, understanding, and capability to take on transportation infrastructure work.
• Invested $1.8 million in subgrants—representing $90,000 for each TCP community — to procure professional services and build staff capacity.

Over the course of the program, these TCP communities secured over $8 million in infrastructure funding. They managed another $67 million to plan, design, or build projects, with another $11 million in applications still pending. They also learned to align transportation work with their community’s needs, ending the program with greater capacity to apply for additional grants and funding in the coming years.

In collaboration with our team of expert partners, we developed this Thriving Communities Transportation Toolkit to highlight practical guidance and tools for building community engagement, fostering partnerships, identifying and developing projects, and securing infrastructure funding.

How to Use the Toolkit

The Toolkit is divided into five parts, each focused on a core activity to plan and shape your community’s transportation investments: 

Throughout the Toolkit you’ll also find real-world examples of success stories from communities in the Thriving Communities Program, files and templates you can use to put ideas into practice, and pro tips with practical advice.

Every transportation project is different and requires a different set of partners and techniques to push forward. A simple crosswalk and a multi-million dollar bridge take different approaches. Think of this toolkit as a bookshelf, where you can pull down topics to use or share with your partners as you need them. 

Leaders across the Main Street Network can use this toolkit to build more effective partnerships with local, regional, and state officials who can help move transportation initiatives forward. In fact, Louisiana Main Street is currently part of an ongoing USDOT Thriving Communities initiative to drive infrastructure development for six Louisiana Main Streets. Building on this toolkit and related initiatives like the GM on Main Grant Program and Navigating Main Streets as Places, Main Street America will continue to equip communities and states to make transformative investments in Main Streets.

Contributing Partners

Main Street America’s team throughout the Thriving Communities Program and the development of this Toolkit include Equiticity, National Association of Development Organizations, Project for Public Spaces, Rails to Trails Conservancy, Rural Community Assistance Partnership, and CTL Engineering (contributing CTL Engineering team members are now with the firm Benesch).

Special thanks to the dozens of local leaders from Thriving Communities Program cities and tribes, who paved the way for this toolkit by shaping insights and putting these practices into action.