CDTC’s Community and Transportation Linkage Planning Program (the Linkage Program) is an integrated land use and transportation planning program created to implement the regional transportation plan
New Visions 2030.
The program has been recognized as a national best practice in
livability planning
and is the cornerstone of CDTC’s public outreach efforts. The program provides consultant or CDTC staff technical assistance for
joint regional-local planning initiatives that link transportation and land use. For 2011, the focus of the
Linkage Program has shifted to direct support to implementation activities such as strategic zoning code
changes, zoning code overlays, the development or revision of site and street design standards, operational
modeling and follow up planning studies related to completed Linkage Program plans and other local planning
initiatives.
The Linkage Program is one of the most significant cooperative regional efforts in the nation to reflect, in practice,
what representatives of the region’s counties, cities, towns and villages as well as state and local transportation
providers have adopted as policy. In recognition of this regional achievement, the Linkage Program received a
2010 National Planning Excellence Award
from the Federal Highway Administration, the Federal Transit Administration and the American Planning Association.
As of March 2011, CDTC has funded a total of 71 collaborative, jointly-funded studies over the past eleven years. Study sponsors have included 40 separate urban, suburban and rural municipalities and counties as well as not-for-profits and other public entities. Roughly $4.5 million in federal, state and local funds have been committed to the Linkage Program since its inception in 2000.