Press release from American Planning Association, North Carolina Chapter:
This award recognizes plans, programs, or processes of unusually high merit adopted or enacted in the current or past two calendar years by a community with over 25,000 residents.
The Awards Committee found Asheville in Motion, or AIM, to be an outstanding example of a multimodal transportation plan. Committee members were impressed with the plan’s efforts to adjust street types to community context so that transportation and land uses were successfully integrated. Plan graphics were supportive of the text and associated policies. All modes of transportation, including greenways, were assessed and analyzed in the plan.
The plan is extremely comprehensive in nature, treating transportation as a support infrastructure for addressing broader community needs. AIM will be implemented through a combination of policies and capital projects. The capital projects are prioritized based upon each project’s ability to transform the affected area in a manner which achieved objectives established in the plan.
There appears to be broad community support for the plan for which considerable credit should be given to the variety of community engagement methods, which included a video, website, workbook, and digital flipbook.
About the North Carolina Marvin Collins Planning Awards:
The North Carolina Chapter of the American Planning Association (APA-NC) is an association of 1,400 professional and citizen planners working to preserve and create great places throughout North Carolina. The APA-NC Marvin Collins Planning Awards program annually recognizes agencies and individuals that have completed outstanding plans, programs, and projects; have excelled as planning students; or have made notable contributions to the planning profession. The awards signify the highest standards of achievement for planning in North Carolina, and highlight work that is worthy of attention. The award was presented at the APA-NC annual conference held in Asheville September 13-16, 2016.
The Awards Program is named in honor of the late Marvin Collins, a former Planning Director for Orange County, North Carolina, who developed the idea for the program in 1975. He received a Professional Achievement Award from the APA-NC just prior to his death in 1998. For the 25th anniversary of the awards program, the APA-NC Executive Committee recognized Marvin’s service to the chapter by adding his name to the awards program.
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