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.tuchen (left and center) is one of New Jerseys 16 Transit Villages. Colorados Northwest Parkway was a regional effort to preserve open space and prevo .nd examples throughout the U. S. of communities that are successfully integrating land-use and transportation. to sponsor a tour to give some of our state officials a chance to meet with other success- ful agencies and learn from them firsthand." MSHTO's Standing Committee on Plan- ning funded the national tour through the National Cooperative Highway Research Pro- gram, which is sponsored jointly by state and federal transportation departments. Additional funding came from FHW A. The sponsors then decided to expand the tour beyond the competition winners to include other state and regional transportation agencies that have successfully addressed land-use issues. Six sites were visited in two week-long trips last June. The six state and local participants were selected for their expertise, activity in profes- sional organizations, and diversity of geogra- phy and professional background. The group consisted of four state DOT planning offi- cials, an MPO planner, and a county planner. An FHW A staff person also accompanied the .ur. A university planning professor and I ere hired to organize and facilitate the visits. The group met with DOT and MPO rep- resentatives in the selected states-Kentucky, New Jersey, Vermont, Texas, Colorado, and Wisconsin. We held separate meetings with local community planners and elected offi- cials, as well as private developers, to get their perspectives on the value of their state and regional agency programs. These meetings, which turned out to be particularly useful, helped us to identifY the most and least suc- cessful aspects of each program from the community's perspective. In our visits, we studied regional planning and visioning in the Denver metro area; corri- dor planning in Kentucky, New Jersey, and Colorado; context-sensitive design in New Jersey, Vermont, and Kentucky; local com- prehensive planning in Wisconsin; transit vil- lages, downtown revitalization, and sustain- able development in New Jersey, Vermont, and Texas; and freight corridor planning in Vermont. Here are the findings from three of these programs: Bluegrass eorl'ido)' Kentucky's Transportation Cabinet is ap- plying a community-sensitive approach to planning corridors. Its philosophy is to work closely with affected communities and stake- holder groups, not only on the design of transportation facilities, but also on land- use strategies for adjacent areas. This inclu- sive approach has jumpstarted several projects stalled for years, even decades, by commu- nityopposition. The cabinet drew its ideas from the Paris Pike project, a nationally recognized example of context-sensitive design undertaken in the late 1990s in the seven-county "bluegrass coun- try" surrounding Lexington. In that project, which involved widening a busy, two-lane road between Lexington and Paris, the cabinet worked with communities and landowners to design a divided four-lane highway that fit the contours of the land. Stone fences and earth shoulders were incorporated to preserve the corridor's historic character. The cabinet also worked with the communities to creare a small area plan, revise county zoning, and establish a bicounty corridor land-use com- mission to preserve viewsheds and protect adja- cent properties from development. In 1999, the cabinet partnered with Blue- grass Tomorrow, a regional nonprofit organi- zation, to codifY its corridor planning ap- proach in a handbook and to conduct a series of training sessions.