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Local Information  /  Local Organizations  /  Creating Walkable Communities

For more information on Dan Burden and Walkable Communities, Inc., the Town is providing a link to that agency's website: www.walkable.org

The Towns of Amherst and Cheektowaga are working with the Harlem-Kensington-Cleveland Task Force to sponsoring a series of workshops with traffic-calming expert Dan Burden on Superneighborhood Monday and Tuesday, January 29th and 30th. Mr. Burden is the amicable director of Walkable Communities, Inc., a non-profit corporation organized for the express purpose of helping communities become more walkable and pedestrian friendly.

Few people know more about planning and design of pedestrian and bicycle-friendly communities than Dan Burden.

Mr. Burden has personally photographed and examined walking and bicycling conditions in more than 200 cities in the United States and abroad. He worked as a bicycle consultant in China for the United Nations in 1994. His photographs have been published in The New York Times, National Geographic, and Sierra Club calendars. He is currently part of a team that is videotaping and analyzing traffic calming and innovative pedestrian facilities throughout the United State.

After serving for 16 years as Florida Department of Transportation's State Bicycle and Pedestrian Coordinator, Mr. Burden formed Walkable Communities as a non-profit corporation to help people develop walkable communities.

Mr. Burden's vision is to assist business and community leaders in creating people-friendly streets, activity centers, business districts, and neighborhoods. His message is that we can create communities for people, not just cars. His information-rich workshops, with professional quality slides, showcase ways to plan and design walkable communities.

"Having attended many of Dan Burden's presentations, and having collaborated with him on several, I can vouch for his greatest talent: getting people with different viewpoints to agree on a vision for their community, by showing them the Untapped beauty and potential they have in their greatest commonly-owned asset: their public streets."

Michael Ronkin
Bicycle and Pedestrian Program Manager
Oregon Department of Transportation

About Amherst

The Town of Amherst was established in 1818 and celebrated its 200th Anniversary in 2018. The town has a geographical area of 53.6 square miles and a population of greater than 122,000.

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