Henry Underwood, Presentation on Linking Transportation & Environment in Southwest New Hampshire
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Henry Underwood, Presentation on Linking Transportation & Environment in Southwest New Hampshire
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Southwest New Hampshire, Linking transportation & environment, Presentation by Henry Underwood at 2023 NADO's Transportation Conference.
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Henry Underwood, Presentation on Linking Transportation & Environment in Southwest New Hampshire
- 1. Linking Transportation & Environment in Southwest New Hampshire Henry Underwood
- 2. Planning and Environment Linkages (PEL) represents a collaborative and integrated approach to transportation decision-making that 1) considers environmental, community, and economic goals early in the transportation planning process, and 2) uses the information, analysis, and products developed during planning to inform the environmental review process. Linking Transportation & Environment in Southwest NH 2 Planning and Environment Linkages Planning and Environment Linkages | Environmental Initiatives | Environmental Review Toolkit | FHWA (dot.gov), The Transportation Planning Process Briefing Book: Key Issues for Transportation Decisionmakers, Officials, and Staff (trb.org) SWRPC
- 3. Agenda • Southwest NH • Putting PEL Into Practice • Corridor Studies • NH’s Ten Year Plan • Context Sensitive Solutions • NH Stream Crossing Initiative • Hinsdale-Brattleboro Bridge Project
- 4. Southwest NH 4 Linking Transportation & Environment in Southwest NH
- 5. Southwest NH Linking Transportation & Environment in Southwest NH 5 Jon Platek
- 6. Environmental Constraints 6 Linking Transportation & Environment in Southwest NH
- 7. Putting PEL Into Practice • To provide transportation planning assistance to municipalities, partner organizations, transit agencies and NHDOT in support of local, regional, state and federal livability, climate change, and sustainability initiatives. This task includes activities that coordinate land use and transportation. • Topics having a nexus with transportation include expanding affordability, accessibility, energy efficiency, climate change, support of local economy, air quality, environmental protection, personal health and social capital. 7 Linking Transportation & Environment in Southwest NH
- 8. Corridor Studies 8 Linking Transportation & Environment in Southwest NH
- 9. Corridor Studies 9 Linking Transportation & Environment in Southwest NH
- 10. PEL in NH’s Ten Year Plan 10 Linking Transportation & Environment in Southwest NH
- 11. Natural Hazard Resiliency 11 Linking Transportation & Environment in Southwest NH
- 12. Natural Hazard Resiliency 12 Linking Transportation & Environment in Southwest NH
- 13. Context Sensitive Solutions 13 Linking Transportation & Environment in Southwest NH
- 14. Context Sensitive Solutions 14 Linking Transportation & Environment in Southwest NH
- 15. NH Stream Crossing Initiative Tablet or Smartphone 15 Linking Transportation & Environment in Southwest NH
- 16. NH Stream Crossing Initiative 16 Linking Transportation & Environment in Southwest NH
- 17. Hinsdale-Brattleboro Bridge 17 Linking Transportation & Environment in Southwest NH
Editor's Notes
- My name is Henry Underwood. I work as a planner at Southwest Region Planning Commission in New Hampshire. We are one nine regional planning agencies in the State, have been around for over fifty years, and serve 34 municipalities with around 100,000 residents covering 1,000 square miles. This also covers some or all of three different counties. Our work program covers a pretty wide range of mostly planning-related services: broadband, community & economic development, GIS, natural resources, brownfields, emergency management, local planning, public health – and of course transportation. Transportation planning mainly supported by our State’s federal transportation planning funding as part of our Unified Planning Work Program or UPWP. But other transportation planning initiatives are funded by entities such as the Centers for Disease Control, member municipalities and even private donors.
- Read definition
- Alright, here are the topics in my presentation. Our region, what makes us unique. PEL in New Hampshire. Ways the State implements PEL-related practices in our State and region in tandem with regional planning agencies. After that, I’ll zoom in to a particular work activity for SWRPC that involves assessing stream crossings for hydraulic vulnerability and fish passage. We use the information in everything from local hazard mitigation planning to regional transportation project ranking. And lastly a couple of project case studies.
- Our region also goes by the name “the Monadnock Region” named for the mountain pictured. It happens to have the reputation as the most-climbed mountain in North America and it’s scenes like this that are prized among residents and visitors. Because we are a rural region interspersed with historic downtowns and villages, the types of Planning and Environmental linkage issues that our transportation planning program tends to see involve cultural and historical resources (Keene was settled in 1736, for example), wetlands, rivers and streams.
- Our region also goes by the name “the Monadnock Region” named for the mountain pictured. It happens to have the reputation as the most-climbed mountain in North America and it’s scenes like this that are prized among residents and visitors. Some of the most notable environmental issues related to transportation projects involve cultural and historical resources (Keene was settled in 1736, for example), wetlands, rivers and streams.
- Our plentiful natural resources can be serious constraints when it comes to transportation projects. We host over 30,000 acres of wetlands, for example. The image on the left shows watersheds and rivers according to SWRPC’s Natural Resources Plan. Ultimately potential impacts are the project developer’s responsibility to map and address, however our transportation planning program strives to identify key PEL related issues and important stakeholders to inform transportation projects well before engineers start working on a project. While some projects may get a pass if they commit to following best practices through the State’s environmental resource agency, other transportation improvements that cannot avoid impacts to wetlands require payment or mitigation activities. That might be payment into a grant program used to fund stream crossing upgrades, or on-site mitigation through the construction of wetlands. On the right is a map showing forested lands. We are the most forested state (with the exception of Alaska), and much of this area is aligned with unfragmented, high quality wildlife habitat as well as federal and state endangered species. Partly due to funding constraints, partly due to our slow growth, but also often because of environmental constraints, our experience in SW NH is that new highway alignments and bypasses are extremely rare. Most projects in the next 10 years will involve work to improve facilities within existing right of way.
- The place where regional planning agencies describe PEL related work activities and projects is in our Unified Planning Work Program or UPWP. This document is published every two years. At a high level, our work activities are categorized as policy and planning, public involvement and coordination, plan support (this is mostly data collection and management in support of planning initiatives), and technical assistance. PEL issues are considered in nearly every UPWP task. However, we do have a specific task that specifically focuses on PEL. Most of the activities under this task involve engaging with and helping planning partners consider transportation linkages with other planning and policy issues that are focused on community and economic development, environmental issues such as climate change, land use planning, public health or other topics. By doing this, we are not only thinking about these linkages ourselves, but we are encouraging others to do the same. Our goal is to foster the growth of a shared paradigm that values understanding linkages to solve problems while also reducing siloed thinking. For our current UPWP, we’ve also set aside funds to better understand climate change’s impact on our environment and the risks it places on our transportation infrastructure . The work will involve analyzing climate data, historic and anticipated natural hazard issues and its effects on our transportation assets as a way to more strategically inform decision making on future capital improvements. A similar list of activities has appeared in past work programs since at least 2012. Next, I want to share a little bit about more specific projects and activities that implement PEL concepts.
- Over the years SWRPC has conducted various corridor studies involving multiple towns and sometimes multiple regions to comprehensively evaluate operational issues like traffic and safety. The purpose of the study is to plan for transportation based on an understanding or existing conditions and potential future growth and are an important way to identify PEL-related issues early on, even before a project is identified. Our corridor studies routinely study the presence of environmental or cultural resources . We also examine environmental or cultural constraints, For example we routinely consider the potential for future development and constraints to that development by identifying steep slopes, surface waters and aquifers. The location and qualities of cultural and natural environmental resources in the study area often include identification of: resources with statutory standing under NH or federal law; landscape characteristics which impose physical limitations on development; and those attributes of the natural and social landscape that impart community character, principally visual character. Resources having statutory standing include surface water, wetlands (hydric soils), floodplain, resources included in the NH Natural Heritage Inventory (rare and endangered plant and animal species, rare or special ecological communities and archeological resources), historic resources, and public recreation land or other public projects created with certain funding sources. These resources have protected status under the National Environmental Policy Act, whereby projects using federal funds must avoid, minimize and/or mitigate diminution of the protected resources. As an example, the corridor study shown on this slide identified two rare plant species, dozens of historical resources and threats to groundwater.
- More recently, SWRPC undertook a smaller study of highway corridors in individual communities. As with the previous corridor study, there was a significant emphasis on inventorying and mapping out environmental constraints such as soil-related issues, cultural resources and flood-prone areas, pictured in the slide. One commonality the studies have in common is that they are a stepping stone to nominate projects for the State’s transportation improvement plan and a bigger 10-year version of the plan called the ten year plan – naturally. In both cases, our corridor studies involve developing project ideas and flagging potential environmental impacts associated with the projects so that the State or a community can make a well-informed decision of whether to nominate the projects to the State plan. The environmental information compiled in the corridor study can then be used again if that project is considered for the State Plan this time providing context for project selection and ranking.
- Let me give you a little more background about NH’s Ten Year Plan... Every two years, NHDOT initiates and updates the State’s Ten Year Plan in partnership with regional planning agencies. Communities review plans and studies (sometimes corridor studies) and nominate projects to be considered as a regional priority project.. All RPCs are apportioned a set aside budget that typically funds one or two regional priority projects each time the TYP is updated. SWRPC staff’s role is to coordinate this process with sponsoring municipalities, a Transportation Advisory Committee that reviews and ranks projects, with consulting engineers and with NHDOT staff. One place you see practices of PEL is through the project review critieria shown at the right. TAll RPCs the sub-criteria shown in the right column to evaluate projects. Among the factors that are PEL-related, criteria look at things like economic condition, equity, environmental justice, and natural hazard resiliency. Here’ I’ll cover just one of those—natural hazard resiliency.
- In the project nomination depicted on the left, the sponsor proposed highway reconstruction and the potential for a new bridge crossing and intersection location to resolve safety issues. SWRPC staff and members of the Transportation Advisory Committee are tasked with evaluating and scoring the hazard risks associated with this area. All else being equal, projects that have natural hazards documented in a plan or study will receive more points in the scoring process. So, it is our job as staff to scan previous plans and resources, in this case for flooding-related issues, so that the TAC, SWRPC’s consulting engineers, and ultimately NHDOT can use the information in their decision-making process.
- Next, the TAC rates how well the proposed project will mitigate and adapt to known hazards. For this score, SWRPC provides information based on the scope as well as results of hydraulic modelling or stream crossing assessments.
- Another PEL-related process in New Hampshire is the Context Sensitive Solutions approach to Planning. Context Sensitive Solutions is a public involvement approach to planning and designing transportation projects based on active and early partnerships with communities and project stakeholders. Context Sensitive Solutions involves a commitment to a process that encourages transportation officials to collaborate with stakeholders from the community and environmental resource groups so the design of the project reflects the goals of the people who live, work and travel in the area. Numerous NHDOT engineers, planners, project managers and community relations representatives, as well as consultants and community leaders have been trained in CSS techniques: flexible design, respectful communication, consensus-building and community participation, negotiation and conflict resolution.
- In Dublin, NH, the Context Sensitive Solutions approach led to a “right sized” project that avoided impacts to historical, cultural and environmental resources and addressed safety-related concerns of participants in the process. The design of street lighting for instance resulted in a design that reflected the historic nature of the Town’s village area.
- As I mentioned earlier, some of SWRPC’s PEL related activities involve data collection... SWRPC has collected information to support hazard mitigation planning, municipal budgeting and the ten year plan project scoring process since roughly 2012. It originally started out on paper forms and like many things has been digitized utilizing GIS services for both field data collection and visualization. The initiative is also unique in that we collect the information directly.
- I mentioned earlier how rivers, streams and wetlands played a major role both in evaluating risk and resiliency. The New Hampshire Stream Crossing Initiative is a fundamental way these issues are identified and evaluated in transportation planning projects. Today, the Initiative includes participation from all nine regional planning agencies but also many other State agencies – Departments of environmental service, fish & Game, Safety, Transportation and our local technical assistance program at the University of New Hampshire. Together, we maintain a shared methdology and data collection platform to collect and share information about stream crossings. This ranges from condition information and dimensions to scored or rated scales related to aquatic organism passage, geomorphic characteristics, and their ability to pass a range of precipitation events.
- A more recent, large bridge replacement currently under construction spans the Connecticut River between Hinsdale, NH and Brattleboro, Vermont. A Project Advisory Committee was convened to define the purpose and need of the project and serve as lliaisons to the wider community to bring ideas and issues to the attention of NHDOT and it’s consultants. The Project Advisory Committee included RPCs, SWRPC and WRC working as partners with NHDOT to advance and evaluate project ideas. The Project Advisory Committee’s work was used to inform the Environmental Assessment and the Project Advisory Committee helped NHDOT work with the public to determine a preferred alternative. The preferred alternative involved building a new bridge over the river, but keeping the existing bridges in place for bicyclists and pedestrians and emergency response SWRPC convened an Existing Bridges Subcommittee after that to work on a vision for reimagining the island and two historic bridges. PEL related research and collaboration activities led to a vision that creates new riverine habitat, provides the river communities a new community gathering space with access to the river with the creation of a park, and serves as a gateway to regional trail systems in VT and NH.