Richmond Connects Multimodal Transportation Plan 

City of Richmond, VA

Richmond Connects is the City of Richmond’s strategic multimodal transportation plan. It is a continuation of City’s Path to Equity: Policy Guide for Richmond Connects, which foregrounds safe and equitable access as the City’s preeminent transportation investment priority. Through community engagement and equity analysis, the plan will propose recommendations and projects to improve the safety and ease of multimodal transportation options, addressing inequities in access to jobs, education, health care, and other essential destinations that are the legacy of historical discriminatory planning paradigms. Renaissance was retained to lead the Richmond Connects equity analysis due to our industry-leading expertise in accessibility, equity, data analysis, and tools development, and our familiarity with the city, its history, and current policy emphases. 

Through a previous study, Renaissance developed an accessibility analysis process for the City of Richmond to measure how accessibility can vary based on the different needs, abilities, and preferences of its diverse residents. For Richmond Connects, we are enhancing that process and guiding staff in connecting the numerous insights generated by the accessibility analysis to the City’s equity-focused policy goals. This approach will generate maps of issues that undermine access to key destinations, including facility gaps or quality concerns, poor connectivity, redundancy/reliability of travel options, land use mismatches, and safety. These maps will support a needs analysis that recognizes the City’s vulnerable and marginalized communities to identify equitable multimodal investment needs from the outset of the planning process. The analysis accounts for current conditions and their relationship to historical discriminatory practices, such as redlining, Urban Renewal, and Interstate highway construction. The needs assessment will inform the definition of near-term projects. 

To ensure equitable access is at the heart of the City’s transportation planning and investment strategy for the long term, Richmond Connects also includes a scenario planning component to define, test, and compare alternative futures. The scenarios include alternative packages of multimodal transportation projects as well as consideration of uncertainties that can affect equitable access, including climate change, gentrification and demographic shifts, and transportation innovations (including connected and autonomous vehicles and shared mobility services). The scenario analysis will help guide the City’s transportation policies to anticipate and prepare for change and ensure equitable access remains at the heart of Richmond’s multimodal future.