Complete Streets in Name Only: How Federal Transportation Policy Undermines Local Outcomes

The Complete Streets movement began with a compelling, people-first vision: streets designed to be safe, accessible, and welcoming to everyone, not just cars. But as this vision was absorbed into the federal transportation bureaucracy, it became a hollowed-out shell of its former self. Instead of walkable, productive streets, we’ve ended up with expensive, over-engineered corridors that win awards but fail the people they claim to serve.

This case study examines four projects — Ager Road (MD), College Drive (MN), Obetz (OH), and Sarasota (FL) to show how a well-intentioned reform became just another wasteful, ineffective program. It also identifies the structural flaws in the federal system that make these outcomes not just possible, but inevitable.

An Original Vision Distorted by Federal Leadership

At its core, the Complete Streets concept was a direct response to the damage inflicted on neighborhoods by the federal highway era. That period prioritized the construction of high-speed roadways, even through the heart of neighborhoods, often devastating communities in the process.

The original vision for Complete Streets sought to reverse this damage by imagining a new kind of street: one that placed human beings back at the center of the public realm. These were not to be highways running through cities under a different name, but streets where people could walk, bike, take transit, and access the places they live, work, and gather with safety and dignity.

Complete Streets was never intended to be a mere design checklist or a set of aesthetic upgrades. It was meant to integrate transportation with local land use; to support social and economic resilience; and to foster a street environment that made neighborhoods stronger and more connected. Above all, it was a call to restore the public realm as a place for people, not just a conduit for cars.

What we got instead was the federalization of Complete Streets. Reformers pursued top-down change through federal transportation policy. Grants like TIGER and RAISE were tied to Complete Streets goals, and states and cities adopted checklists to stay eligible.

But instead of transformative change, we got compliance theater. Cities and states, eager to remain eligible for federal funding, began producing projects that technically met the Complete Streets criteria on paper but failed to produce meaningful change on the ground.

Many of these projects included the right mix of features — bike lanes, wider sidewalks, planted medians — but were implemented in places where they made little difference or, worse, contradicted the underlying goals of connectivity and safety.

Renderings showed vibrant, multimodal corridors filled with pedestrians and cyclists, but the final built environments remained hostile to anything but fast-moving vehicles. Instead of prioritizing the needs of people, the projects prioritized the appearance of meeting federal expectations.

Streets were called "complete" simply because they were expensive and overbuilt, not because they actually worked for the communities they passed through.

Case Studies in Failure, Folly, and Fragility

Project 1: Ager Road — Hyattsville, Maryland

The Ager Road project in Hyattsville, Maryland, cost approximately $15 million and was heralded as a model of the "Green-Complete Streets" approach. It won multiple awards from prestigious professional organizations, including the American Society of Civil Engineers, which praised it for improving safety, functionality, and aesthetics.

Yet, despite these accolades, a pedestrian — Hellen Jorgensen — was killed at the only designated crossing along the corridor. A studio examining the crash found that the crossing itself is shadowed by poor lighting, flanked by signage that obstructs visibility, and surrounded by traffic traveling well above the posted 30 mph speed limit. Strong Towns conducted fieldwork showing that 70% of drivers exceeded the speed limit, many by over 10 mph.

Features such as a mid-road fence, intended to guide pedestrians to distant designated crossings, and flashing beacons placed outside the natural line of travel for pedestrians, prioritized car movement over human safety. Despite the project’s intent to slow traffic and enhance walkability, its outcomes tell a different story.

The corridor, flanked by neighborhoods and a metro station, has become a symbol of design failure, where award-winning form masked deep functional flaws.

Project 2: College Drive — Brainerd, Minnesota

College Drive in Brainerd, Minnesota, was billed as a Complete Street and came with a $7 million price tag. The project followed a classic highway engineering model: Start with a minimum design speed, project future traffic volumes, and design for four lanes of fast-moving traffic.

Only after this framework was set did planners consider bike and pedestrian infrastructure, which were added at significant cost. The resulting corridor features wide lanes, broad shoulders, and a layout that continues to favor high-speed automobile movement.

There was no change in underlying land-use patterns, no rethinking of how the street connected to homes, businesses, or institutions. The built form around the corridor remains low-density and car-dependent. More than 15 years after its construction, there has been no additional private investment along the corridor, walking-oriented or otherwise.

In effect, Brainerd’s College Drive became an expensive road through a suburban landscape, nominally compliant with Complete Streets principles in order to obtain funding, but otherwise completely detached from its intent.

Project 3: Obetz, Ohio

In Obetz, Ohio, a federally funded project constructed a paved loop for cyclists and pedestrians between a McDonald's and a Taco Bell, outfitted with elaborate roundabouts, landscaping, and grade-separated crossings.

This "hamster wheel" of infrastructure includes two roundabouts and a grade-separated crossing mere feet from a signalized intersection. The trail network doesn’t connect to residential areas or transit; it is merely a loop between the parking lots of national franchises. There is no street grid, no small-scale connectivity, and no meaningful destination.

This is infrastructure for infrastructure’s sake — a textbook example of box-checking urbanism. It shows how federal dollars distort incentives and encourage checklist construction in places where demand is nonexistent, instead of where people truly need safe, connected streets.

Project 4: Sarasota, Florida

The Sarasota Complete Streets project — focused on 10th Street and Boulevard of the Arts — has secured a $12 million RAISE grant from the U.S. Department of Transportation, with a $3 million city match, for a total of $15 million.

Despite the project's potential to improve access in a rapidly growing area, its design reveals the same systemic flaws seen in other federally influenced projects. Key features include 12-foot travel lanes — the kind more appropriate for high-speed highways than walkable urban streets — and sharrows in place of protected bike infrastructure. These decisions prioritize the flow of automobile traffic over the safety of cyclists and pedestrians, undermining the project’s stated goals.

The emphasis on throughput over safety and placemaking is not a product of local priorities, but rather a reflection of the constraints imposed by federal funding eligibility and design guidance. As with other federally supported projects, the timeline is drawn out by multi-year grant agreements, and the design-build process threatens to strip away hard-fought elements in the name of efficiency.

Even a well-intentioned, locally supported effort like Sarasota’s can’t escape the gravitational pull of a system geared toward moving cars first. The result may look promising in planning documents, but the fundamental logic guiding the project — that traffic must flow smoothly and quickly — betrays the deeper goals of Complete Streets. Sarasota’s experience underscores just how difficult it is to produce truly complete streets under the current federal model.

How Good Intentions Created a Bad System: The Structural Failure of Federally-Backed Complete Streets

Complete Streets was a noble idea hijacked by its own success. By embedding it in federal policy, reformers believed they could reshape national infrastructure from the top down. Instead, they created a system that rewards surface-level compliance and penalizes local creativity.

States and cities adopted Complete Streets policies to access federal funds. In practice, they designed projects that technically checked the boxes while still prioritizing speed, capacity, and auto flow. Pedestrian and bike infrastructure became expensive add-ons, not integrated features.

The federal Complete Streets framework doesn’t fix streets; it makes them more expensive, less strategic, and harder to change:

• More expensive: Design mandates, consultant fees, and regulatory red tape increase costs.
• Less strategic: Cities chase grants instead of solving actual problems.
• Less accountable: Success is measured in compliance, not outcomes.

Cities often make smarter, leaner, and more locally relevant investments without federal distortion. But the promise of free money is seductive. Until the incentives change, we’ll keep getting Ager Road and other award-winning projects that fail the people they were meant to serve.

Conclusion: The Crisis of Complete Streets

The Complete Streets concept has run its course, not necessarily because the vision was flawed, but because the system it embedded itself into was never built to support it.

By aligning itself with federal funding mechanisms, proponents allowed its priorities to be diluted. Instead of producing streets that are safe, human-scaled, and integrated into the fabric of neighborhoods, we’ve ended up with expensive projects that serve as compliance exercises for grant eligibility.

Federally-funded Complete Streets projects are also crowding out other initiatives that would have had more impact. Local governments that might otherwise have built meaningful, low-cost, and quickly implemented pedestrian and bicycle infrastructure are instead chasing federal grants that demand high-cost, slow-moving, and over-engineered designs. The result is not only wasted money, but wasted opportunity.

Federal money, with all its strings and mandates, has undermined the very purpose of the Complete Streets initiative. Reformers must now face the reality that real progress will not come from within this system, but in spite of it.