Transportation Commissioner Carol Murray says the department could do a better job collaborating with towns to plan major road projects and should look more broadly at the impacts of their designs.

Murray is bringing in a consultant to help state and regional planners shift their thinking. Tom Warne, Utah's former transportation director, will lead a series of two- to three-day training sessions on developing "context-sensitive solutions" to traffic problems.

Murray said the concept isn't necessarily new to New Hampshire.

"We've been moving towards that way of doing business," she said. "Now its time to really formalize it, internalize it and do some training," she said.

Murray said the department needs to find ways to accommodate growth aside from simply expanding roads. "There's a way to do it that's not wrecking the landscape and the character of our state," she said.

Warne talks about using non-standard approaches. He cited the example of Springdale, Utah, the southwest entrance to Zion National Park. The town's Main Street was congested, so the state increased transit options and outlying parking areas. Then it narrowed the road and widened the sidewalk, a tactic engineers would have balked at 10 years ago, Warne said.

The result: Traffic slowed and congestion eased, the town became more walkable and the people who lived there enjoyed a change in atmosphere, he said.

"We need to provide solutions that are not just good from an engineering standpoint - safe and efficient and effective - but we need to be thinking about community values and the nature of a community," Warne said.

Today, when a town has a traffic problem, the state presents a solution to the problem. For example, as traffic on Interstate 93 increases, the stretch between Concord and Bow will become more congested and its poorly designed interchanges more dangerous. So the state has proposed expanding the highway by one lane in each direction and reconfiguring the exits, as if that were the only option, Murray said.

Instead, she and Warne agreed, the state should work with towns to brainstorm other alternatives. More collaborative planning could cut costs in a department that already has more roads that need fixing than money to fix them, she said. The cost of the projects laid out in the department's 10-year plan total about $2 billion. But officials have budgeted only $1.6 billion to pay for those projects.

In Concord, the new approach "could mean that that ultimate, very expensive widening is put off or altered because other alternatives provide mobility without it being on just 93," she said.

The expansion of I-93 between Salem and Manchester is the most expensive project on the list, with a price tag of $480 million. Opponents of that project, which is in its final planning stages, have argued that it would accelerate growth in surrounding communities and that the state should instead be thinking about alternative transportation systems, such as rail.

Murray said growth will happen regardless of whether the highway is expanded and that people who move to New Hampshire will want to use their cars. "It's hard to change people's habits," she said.

Congestion is compounded by the fact that development patterns, such as regulations that require two or four acres per house lot, limit pedestrian-friendly communities and foster driving, Murray said. She said the state will be successful in meeting transportation demands only if it collaborates with towns to address the broader issues of development.

"If we don't get the connection made between land use and transportation, they are both going to fail," she said. "New Hampshire is not going to look like New Hampshire anymore."

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