The article above should have stated that it is all urban areas. By census definition, it would include urbanized areas and urban clusters - covering most every city and town: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_area

I assume that they did not want this to apply to country roads, and perhaps that would help us here in California overcome some of our barriers to AB 1358.

Hooray for my home state! Although, looks like Massachusetts was the first. That was way before the term complete streets was used I think.

Also, why just urban areas? Many towns and cities are a comfortable walking distance apart (and many more are a comfortable cycling distance apart), and there are lots of country and suburb dwellers (including but not limited to the elderly, teenagers and the disabled) who don't have access to cars or public transportation.

I know that urban areas might just be a first step, but I think it's important to think and talk in terms of long-term goals. Limiting this to urban areas makes no sense in the long term.

"We didn't build sidewalks here for 50 years," says Norm Steinman, planning manager for Charlotte's transportation department. "Streets designed by traffic engineers in the '60s, '70s, '80s and '90s were mostly for autos."

It's worse than that. In these years, miles and miles of sidewalks in North Carolina were removed from the streets - demapped, torn up and transferred to lawns and parking lots. If you walk around some of the older downtowns, you can still see traces (assuming you don't get run over first).

In 1996, Massachusetts enacted Chapter 90E, Section 2A:

The commissioner shall make all reasonable provisions for the accommodation of bicycle and pedestrian traffic in the planning, design, and construction, reconstruction or maintenance of any project undertaken by the department. Such provisions that are unreasonable shall include, but not be limited to, those which the commissioner, after appropriate review by the bicycle program coordinator, determines would be contrary to acceptable standards of public safety, degrade environmental quality or conflict with existing rights of way.

What Illinois did is great, but Massachusetts got there a decade ago.