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, 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 specialize in the integration of land use and transportation, as well as writing comprehensive plan policy and land development code language that implements context-sensitive design.

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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, drone footage capture, spatial analysis, 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, Community Redevelopment Area Plans, transit-oriented development plans, form-based and conventional land development codes, and design guidelines.

Community Redevelopment

The presence of problems 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), to author an adoptable Finding of Necessity study or a community redevelopment plan, and to 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, transportation engineers, and graphic visualization specialists, we have planned and designed 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

Community Outreach and Visioning

Tindale Oliver’s planning and design team includes professionals experienced in authoring and managing Public Engagement Plans (PEPs) 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 to encourage communication, collaboration, and cooperation; this approach results in successful consensus and project implementation, even in difficult geographic, political, and socio-economic environments. Tindale Oliver Design’s community outreach and engagement expertise includes:

• Group polling
• Design charrettes, focus groups, meeting and workshops facilitation
• Stakeholders/special interest group interviews
• Whole community outreach, including outreach focused on specific demographics (e.g., youth, older adults, underserved racial and ethnic communities, etc.)
• 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 other communication materials
• Construction information services
• Training and education programs
• Best practices and user manuals

Graphic Design & Visualization

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, and public outreach projects. Tindale Oliver’s graphic design and visualization expertise includes:

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

Housing Planning

Ensuring adequate affordable and quality housing poses a challenge for local governments across the state of Florida and the nation. Tindale Oliver not only provides parcel-level analysis for detailed insights into a community’s existing conditions and needs, but also has collected best practices from case studies across the state and beyond in terms of regulatory allowances and incentives, development review assistance, regulatory mandates, and financing approaches and tools to address housing needs, including affordable housing. Additionally, our staff has experience implementing projects and policy amendments at the local level to provide more affordable housing.

Schools Planning

Like parks, schools are of vital importance to neighborhoods as centers for learning and community building. Tindale Oliver primarily provides long range planning utilizing the latest data to create student generation rates, community development patterns, and overall level of service for the school system. Additional school planning work consists of repurposing plans, impact fee updates, transportation network analysis, and site selection for new or expanded infrastructure.

Parks Planning

Parks serve as important social, environmental, and recreational spaces for a community. Tindale Oliver reviews the existing system inventory, State and Federal environmental lands, service standards, and community needs and priorities to understand how systems may be improved through land acquisition and new/updated spaces, facilities, amenities, and programming. Past projects have included considerations for varying interests and demographics, natural resource protection, economic development, capital and financial planning, and more.

Accessibility and ADA Compliance

Tindale Oliver assists 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. 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

• State legislation tracking to inform planning context
• Robust database and analysis of demographics, development, and economic trend data for cities and counties, particularly in Florida, for context-sensitive solutions
• Parcel-based spatial analysis for detailed community insights
• Application of new technologies, such as drone footage
• Extensive collection of case studies to understand what cities and counties have tried and what’s worked
• Integration of land use, urban design, transportation, and fiscal/financial considerations for holistic solutions
• First-hand local government experience, strong financial planning knowledge, and extensive policy-writing expertise to craft implementable goals and improvements