COMMUNITY PLANNING
AND DESIGN SOLUTIONS

Tindale Oliver assists communities in envisioning their future and finding the correct balance of development, essential services, environmental protection, and innovative change. Our team of community planners, urban designers, landscape architects, graphic artists, and technical support personnel improves the quality of life for residents and their communities. Our team assists in planning, designing, and building more convenient, equitable, healthful, efficient, and attractive places to live for present and future generations. We are experienced in planning, designing, and implementing a variety of urban infrastructure. We have experience with roadways, streetscapes, parks, plazas, and municipal facilities.

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Tindale Oliver offers Community Planning and Design Solutions in the following areas:

Community Planning and Design Solutions

To meet the needs of communities nationwide, Tindale Oliver’s Community Planning and Design team includes professionals with diversified expertise in community planning, urban design, landscape architecture, and graphic visualization. Our staff is dedicated to conceiving and implementing solutions that transform communities into vital, sustainable, thriving, safe places to live. Our experience includes developing master plans, small area plans, parking master plans, transit-oriented development plans, and form-based and land development codes and guidelines.

Community Redevelopment

The presence of urban blight, such as decaying infrastructure, affordable housing shortages, insufficient roadways inadequate parking and public safety challenges, contributes to the decline of our neighborhoods, communities, and cities. To mitigate and reverse the effects of these deteriorating conditions, Tindale Oliver’s Community Planning and Design team includes professionals experienced with the law and who have the financial planning expertise to establish a Community Redevelopment Area (CRA), author an adoptable Finding of Necessity study or a community redevelopment plan, and create a redevelopment trust fund to raise capital for recommended improvements.

Complete Streets

Complete Streets are streets for everyone, designed and operated to enable safe access for all users, including pedestrians, bicyclists, motorists, and transit riders of all ages and abilities. Complete Streets make it easy to cross the street, walk to shops, and bicycle to work. They allow buses to run on time and make it safe for people to walk to and from train stations. Creating Complete Streets means transportation agencies must change their approach to community roads. By adopting a Complete Streets policy, communities direct their transportation planners and engineers to routinely design and operate the entire right-of-way to enable safe access for all users, regardless of age, ability, or mode of transportation. This means that every transportation project will make the street network better and safer for drivers, transit users, pedestrians, and bicyclists—creating a better living environment.

Urban Design

Tindale Oliver understands the complex interaction between people, nature, and the built environment. Our urban designers are experienced at developing functional, efficient, sustainable, and aesthetically-unique urban visions. In collaboration with our planners, public finance specialists, landscape architects, transportation engineers, and graphic visualization specialists, we have planned, designed, and implemented a wide variety of urban infrastructure, including roadways, streetscapes, buildings, parking garages/lots, pedestrian corridors and plazas, storm water management facilities, parks, trails, and recreational facilities. Many of these assignments have been completed in collaboration with Community Redevelopment Agencies (CRAs) that Tindale Oliver assisted to establish. The following are included in Tindale Oliver’s urban design expertise:

• Visioning
• Master planning
• Downtown plans
• Design standards and guidelines
• Site planning
• Station area plans
• Streetscape design
• Transit-oriented development planning

Landscape Architecture

Landscape architecture focuses on the design of outdoor public spaces, landmarks, and structures to achieve desired environmental, social-behavioral, and aesthetic outcomes. It involves the investigation of existing social, ecological, and geological conditions and processes to guide the design of solutions that will produce the desired outcome. Tindale Oliver’s design staff includes registered landscape architects, landscape designers, irrigation designers, horticulturists, and park planners who work in concert with our community planners, urban designers, graphic designers, public outreach professionals, and Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design (CPTED) Specialists as well as technical and administrative support personnel. This diverse group of experts provide professional services to private and public clients to plan, program, design, and implement a wide variety of projects, including roadways, streetscapes, buildings, transit and parking facilities, courtyards, plazas, pedestrian corridors, parks, trails, and recreation facilities. The following are included in Tindale Oliver’s expertise:

• Construction phase services
• Design review services
• Hardscape and special features
• Horticulture and grounds management programs
• Landscape design
• Pedestrian and multimodal facility design
• Permitting
• Planting and irrigation design
• Project management and construction administration
• Recreation facility design
• Site planning
• Sports field design including lighting
• Streetscape design and highway beautification
• Water feature design, fountains, and aquatic facilities

Community Outreach and Visioning

Tindale Oliver’s design team includes professionals experienced in authoring and managing Community Awareness Plans (CAPs) that inform and engage, solicit public opinion, and create the brand of unified community consensus that fosters project adoption and implementation. These plans are individually tailored to each community and structured in a manner that encourages communication, collaboration, and cooperation, resulting in successful consensus and project implementation, even in difficult geographic, political, and socio-economic environments. Our design team uses community engagement techniques that include focus groups, stakeholder interviews, whole community outreach (directed at a specific demographic such as minorities, older adults, and youth), Art-4-Planning, best practices and user manuals, charrettes, citizen surveys, education programs, keypad polling, media relations, project websites, virtual whiteboards, training programs, and communication materials. Tindale Oliver Design’s community outreach expertise includes:

• Innovative outreach and techniques, state-of-the-art polling techniques
• Design charrettes, focus groups, meeting and workshops facilitation
• Stakeholders/special interest group interviews
• Effective community surveys, e-mail and mail campaigns
• Positive media relations
• Graphics and conceptual visualization
• Creative and effective graphic technical support services and coordination
• Consistent website management
• Attractive, informative flyers, newsletters, presentations, websites, and support materials
• Construction information services

Graphic Design

Graphic designers apply a variety of techniques to creatively combine words, symbols, and imagery to visually communicate ideas and information. Our design staff includes graphic designers and technicians who support our firm and client missions by developing visual tools that communicate design intent for a variety of planning, urban design, landscape architecture, and public outreach projects. Tindale Oliver’s graphic design expertise includes:

• Banner systems
• Environmental graphics
• Gateways and monument signage
• Displays and exhibits
• Print collateral
• Project branding, identity, logos
• Public art
• Public outreach tools
• Publishing
• Visualization graphics
• Wayfinding signage systems
• Website design and content management

Accessibility and ADA Compliance

Tindale Oliver provides assistance to federal, state, and local agencies in implementing the provisions of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 (ADA). We have participated in a variety of research projects concerning accessible transportation systems and innovative service designs, and we offer expertise in ADA facilities and equipment accessibility solutions as well as other paratransit service planning and evaluation, ADA paratransit eligibility, technical assistance with ADA facilities, services, training, and transit operations compliance, including:

• Design and construction review
• Facilities and services assessments
• Remediation and solutions reports
• Vehicle and system access assessments
• ADA training
• Legal assistance and expert witness services
• Paratransit service planning and eligibility evaluation and solutions
• Vertical transportation systems and equipment ADA compliance reviews
• FTA and FHWA relationship for ADA program compliance efforts

Our Strengths in Community Planning and Design Solutions

• Sensitivity to client needs
• Understanding of economic implications of planning efforts
• Belief in effective public involvement
• Understanding the importance of the public’s role in urban renewal
• Experience in connecting land use, transportation, and financial solutions
• Strong commitment to urban design at any scale
• Understanding of the correlation between physical improvements and social/economic performance