DART: A Statement
Note: Over the winter the DART Board of Directors discussed and ratified the following text representing DART’s most succinct statement of what it is about. It seemed appropriate to make it the first post to “DART Dispatches.”
In years to come the most livable, equitable, and prosperous regions will be those where one can get around easily without a car. DART wants our region to be one of them.
Whatever one’s priorities for making greater Madison a better place to live, reducing the need to drive will bring those goals within closer reach. But becoming a truly “car-optional” region itself hinges on three key objectives:
Better transit. Our region needs bus, rail, and other public transportation services so fast, frequent, and convenient, and so woven into the fabric of our communities, that using them becomes as habitual and commonplace as driving.
Less pavement. Our region must fully use the infrastructure it has before adding costly new roads, lanes, and parking facilities that disrupt and divide communities. It must also make its infrastructure, old or new, more useful to those who walk, bike, roll, or ride transit.
More choices. Our region should offer many different safe, simple, and easy ways to make any given trip or accomplish that trip’s purpose—including multiple ways that require less driving or no driving at all.
DART’s support for these objectives, and for transportation planning and investment concerned more about people and places than traffic and cars, takes three main forms:
Research. We learn how communities around the nation and the world successfully encourage car-free travel, then translate those lessons and other data into information to foster similar efforts here.
Outreach. We communicate the value and benefits of a more balanced, less automobile-centered transportation system, using publications, presentations, and social media to spread our message and build community support.
Advocacy. We influence local transportation policy through correspondence, comment, and public testimony on behalf of programs and projects that encourage alternatives to driving, and we invite and equip the public to do the same.
Transportation matters because it affects so many other things that matter even more. Concentrating solely on transportation, but on all modes of transportation, and exclusively on transportation in greater Madison and Dane County gives DART a unique focus and distinctive voice. Connecting a vision of driving-optional mobility with deeply-held values about the communities we call home will make that voice uniquely effective in advancing a new transportation agenda for our region.