Dan Burden

Biography Perspectives Quotable Publications Links Contact

Dan Burden is a nationally recognized authority on bicycle and pedestrian facilities and programs. He brings together many disciplines and issues - such as street design, traffic calming, public safety, bicycling, and greenways - into a holistic vision for creating healthy, pedestrian and bicycle-friendly communities.

Burden has spent the last thirty years developing, promoting, and evaluating alternative transportation and sustainable communities at national, regional, state, and local levels, and he is the founder of Walkable Communities, Inc. a non-profit consulting firm in Florida. Time magazine has identified Burden as one of the six most important civic innovators in the world, in recognition of his efforts to create better places to live, work, and play.

“Having attended many of Dan Burden's presentations, and having collaborated with him on several, I can vouch for his greatest talent: getting people with different viewpoints to agree on a vision for their community, by showing them the untapped beauty and potential they have in their greatest commonly-owned asset - their public streets. Dan can actually get Americans to care about cities again. And he does it by getting the traffic engineers on board, not by vilifying them, but by making them excited about being involved in change." -- Michael Ronkin, Bicycle and Pedestrian Program Manager, Oregon Department of Transportation.

Biography

Burden has had 25 years of experience in developing, promoting, and evaluating alternative transportation facilities, traffic calming practices, and sustainable community design. He specializes in transportation and land use planning, and the research and implementation of pedestrian, bicycle, traffic-calming, and street improvement projects.

During 17 years of collegiate education, Burden earned a B.S. in Forestry and furthered his graduate studies in Interpersonal Communications at the University of Montana. He later served for 16 years as the State Bicycle and Pedestrian Coordinator at the Florida Department of Transportation (DOT), before becoming the founder and executive director of Walkable Communities, Inc., a non-profit organization helping North America develop walkable communities.

Burden has photographed and examined walking and bicycling conditions in over 1400 cities in the U.S. and abroad. He has completed 140 week long community or transportation design charrettes and other work in 200 other North American cities and in a dozen others overseas. He worked as a bicycle consultant in China for the United Nations in 1994, and he has been to Australia and many European countries to walk and photograph their great cities. His pictures have been published in the New York Times, National Geographic, Better Homes and Gardens, Sierra Club calendars, and the Weekly Reader.

Burden served as the principal writer for the National Bicycle and Pedestrian Planning and Design Curriculum. His insights are becoming a model for college courses and lectures in civil engineering, urban planning and landscape architecture departments throughout the country. He served as one of the main course instructors for the National Highway Institute (NHI) course on Bicycle and Pedestrian Facility Design. He has given staff training to traffic engineers, planners, and community developers across the country.

A former National Geographic photographer, Burden once led a bicycling expedition from Alaska to Argentina. Burden founded Bikecentennial and, along with his wife and thirty others, worked with 90 governmental agencies to develop the longest recreation trail in the world - the 4,300 mile-long TransAmerica Bicycle Trail. In 1977 Burden worked to create the Bicycle Federation of America and served as its director for its first two years of operation.

Burden currently serves on the Florida DOT "Greenbook" Committee to draft standards for traffic calming. He has been instrumental in developing traffic calming programs in scores of cities, including: Bradenton Beach, Satellite Beach, Ormond Beach , Key Largo, West Palm Beach, South Miami Beach, Gainesville and downtown Venice in Florida; Lacey, Bellevue, Mercer Island, University Place, Maple Valley, Shoreline, Seattle and Colville, Washington; Austin, Texas; Arcata, San Diego and Santa Monica, California; Eugene, Oregon; and Asheville, Waynesville and Charlotte, North Carolina; Lansing, Traverse City, Kalamazoo, Michigan; Grand Junction, Frutia, Bayfield and Boulder, Colorado; Las Vegas, Nevada; and Honolulu, Hawaii.

Burden was celebrated by Time Magazine (See June 18th 2001 issue) as one of the world’s six most important civic innovators; in a more recent nationally circulated Associated Press article, as well as series of releases on NBC Dateline, The Discovery Channel, and ABC’s Peter Jennings programs.

Perspectives

Walkable Communities
Burden, the founder of the non-profit organization Walkable Communities, Inc., advocates for the creation of more pedestrian-friendly environments by trimming down bloated streets. He explains that our focus on auto traffic has devastated other means of transportation – walking, cycling, and transit. By replacing excess car lanes with bike paths, grassy buffers, and more welcoming pedestrian routes, Burden opens up spaces for walkers and bikers, while reducing the stress of driving. His manuals have helped a variety of cities create more walkable communities by rethinking and redesigning their transportation systems.

Healthy Streets
Burden describes how healthy street design can make streets safer and more attractive while addressing many of the problems of conventional street design. He explains that healthy streets create healthy neighborhoods, meeting the community’s basic needs and dismantling the conventional auto-dominated street hierarchy. Burden argues that conventional street design promotes higher neighborhood speed regulations and tolerances, public safety for drivers only, law enforcement difficulties, faster intersection turning speeds, and compromises in safety, access, mobility, and comfort. He instead proposes healthy street design, accomplished through walkable neighborhood size and mixed uses, interconnected and diverse street pattern, shorter block lengths, front porches, traffic dispersion, narrower intersections and lane widths, street furniture and lighting, and other measures.

Quotable

“Cars are happiest when there are no other cars around. People are happiest when there are other people around.”

"Of the 1400 communities I have walked, I have not found one where designing for the car has made it a successful place. Indeed, the most successful villages, towns and cities in America are those designed before the car was invented, and where the least tinkering has been done since.”

“We tend not to like open, scary places, and we try to get through them quicker. Somehow the canopy effect of tree-lined streets slows traffic.”

"There are the places that were built and intended to be built as bedroom communities, and you can't find a town center, you can't find a real store, you can't find anything. But you don't have to choose to live there. What I have learned is where a lot of America has been destroyed, so much of it is waiting to be recrafted and perfected."

Publications

Books
Streets and Sidewalks, People and Cars: The Citizens' Guide to Traffic Calming, Local Government Commission Center for Livable Communities, 2000.

Street Design Guidelines for Healthy Neighborhoods, Center for Livable Communities, 1999.

Articles
“How Can I Find and Help Build a Walkable Community?,” Walkable Communities, Inc., 2003

“Community Guide to Conducting a Successful Charrette,” Walkable Communities, Inc., 2003.

“Road Diets: Fixing the Big Roads,” with Peter Lagerwey,” Walkable Communities, Inc., 1999.

“Building Communities with Transportation,” lecture to Transportation Research Board, Washington, D. C., January 8, 2001.