Planning
A Holistic Approach to Planning
For growing communities, accommodating necessary development alongside the competing needs for essential services, environmental protection and innovative change has become the ultimate balancing act. Benesch’s team of experienced planners, engineers and landscape architects are here to help. We’ll provide both the local knowledge necessary to understand your community’s unique challenges and our national expertise to leverage best practices from across the country.
By taking a holistic approach to planning efforts, we’re able to bring communities together to develop a common vision and organizational framework to achieve their goals. We consider population growth, mobility needs, environmental and economic factors to identify and implement context-sensitive solutions for transportation networks, public spaces, water systems and more.
Planning for the Future
From roadways to water systems and everything in between, creating successful communities that will serve residents well into the future all begins with a plan.
Serving as a roadmap for development and growth, a comprehensive plan is a critical tool for ensuring community goals will be met. By integrating land use, transportation, infrastructure, and environmental considerations, our plans provide a cohesive and logical framework for communities to follow as they evolve to meet the needs of residents, businesses and stakeholders.
Our planning process includes extensive analyses, studies and community engagement to create a sustainable plan that facilitates your long-term vision, offers solutions to anticipated challenges and enhances quality of life for residents.
Essential to creating sustainable, connected and economically viable communities, corridor planning ensures that growth in specific areas is managed intelligently and benefits residents, businesses and the environment alike. This planning allows us to implement solutions which align with regional goals while also meeting localized needs.
When conducting corridor studies, our experts look at key issues and goals, including:
- Enhancing Mobility: We consider all transportation modes to meet the mobility needs of the community. Whether it’s short trips for shopping and recreation or commuter trips to get you to your workplace, our goal is to provide options.
- Promoting Smart Concepts: Using existing and emerging technologies, we’ll work to make our travel safer and more efficient.
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Prioritizing Safety: A safe community provides security for all users, especially our most vulnerable users. All our concepts for the built environment consider and promote safety by design.
Environmental stewardship is vital to the sustainability of your community. Benesch has the ability to assess environmental conditions and develop solutions which enhance and protect environmental resources.
We have extensive experience with preparing environmental documentation required by the federal National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). This includes PEL, EA and EIS studies, studies assessing impacts to properties protected by Section 4(f) or 106 of the federal transportation act, and Environmental Justice (EJ) assessments.
Capturing the Big Picture
Master planning for your most critical infrastructure provides an indispensable tool to help your community grow thoughtfully. Leveraging civil/site, traffic, design, construction and architecture expertise, Benesch teams will encapsulate your community’s vision and goals into an implementable plan that takes into account a wide variety of factors and constraints.
From Concept to Concrete
Our planners bring creative and innovative solutions to communities, while understanding that implementation is key to project success. To assess feasibility and identify potential challenges to implementation, Benesch integrates constructability reviews into the initial planning phases of a project. This allows us to mitigate challenges early in the project, leading to smoother execution.
From concept to concrete, you can be confident that our proactive planning approach will pay off.
Prioritizing Safety
Using data to our advantage, we help you make informed decisions that improve the safety of your infrastructure. We’ll analyze the latest crash data and travel characteristic of the area to craft effective mobility solutions.
Our planners are supported by dedicated traffic engineers who use state-of-the-art tech to collect, analyze and interpret data, allowing us to ensure safety is at the core of your growing community.
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Leveraging Multidisciplinary Expertise
We believe that effective planning requires extensive collaboration across disciplines. By creating a team tailored to a project’s goals and anticipated challenges, we set the project up for long-term success. For Randall Road in Kane County, Illinois, we quickly identified the need for an integrated approach that called on a myriad of experts.
Serving as the primary north-south arterial for the County, a 9.4-mile stretch of the Randall Road corridor was identified as needing multimodal safety and mobility improvements. Benesch was selected to perform a Phase I preliminary engineering study to identify various alternatives for improvements including the construction of a new multi-use path, signage and signal modifications with consideration of transit access improvements.
To accomplish this, we assembled a team of transportation, multimodal, structural and public engagement experts. Together, they will develop a feasible, constructible plan that reflects an immediate desire for multimodal accommodation while fitting within the greater context of the County’s plans for future capacity improvements.
Connecting With Your Community
At Benesch, we recognize that a one-size-fits-all approach isn’t effective. Every community is unique and requires solutions tailored to their goals and vision. Through public outreach and engagement efforts, we are able to better understand the social, cultural, environmental and historical context of an area. We’ll work with you to develop a public involvement plan that incorporates the best engagement activities for your needs. This can include in-person and virtual meetings, online surveys, virtual engagement rooms and more.
The insight gained from these activities guides us as we investigate and develop infrastructure solutions that integrate with the local surroundings, preserve the community identity and enhance overall quality of life for residents.
