This section provides an overview of CSS. What it is and how it can help to shape transportation projects around the country. Feel free to browse through the topics below or search for a particular page by entering a keyword in the search box below or clicking on "Advanced Search."
"Context sensitive solutions (CSS) is a collaborative, interdisciplinary approach that involves all stakeholders to develop a transportation facility that fits its physical setting and preserves scenic, aesthetic, historic and environmental resources, while maintaining safety and mobility. CSS is an approach that considers the total context within which a transportation improvement project will exist."
-Federal Highway Administration
CSS deals with "context" both as a constraint and an opportunity. Better understanding of a context can help a project be in harmony with the community and preserve resources that otherwise might be lost or harmed. Better understanding the issues facing any context -- whether a small town main street or a scenic rural road -- will also help frame the role that a transportation project can play in enhancing that place. Transportation investments, if properly conceived, can be catalysts to create lasting value in a community or countryside.
Scenic, aesthetic, historic and environmental resources do not exist just as isolated elements. They exist in part, because a community values these features (i.e. a historic landmark in the center of Main Street or trees that line a rural road), or because they are linked to intangible qualities (i.e. pride in a town's cultural history and reputation.). The process of understanding people's value is an important part of CSS.
By definition and practice, therefore, CSS requires sensitivity to the total context within which a transportation project will exist. Federal executive orders, statutes, and regulations also mandate the protection of many contextual resource elements that a transportation project may impact.
CSS is about "open, honest, early and continuous" communication and sharing of information and knowledge - not just professional knowledge, but the knowledge that communities and stakeholders bring to a project from their personal experience. CSS involves structuring a planning, design, and implementation process that is collaborative and creates consensus among stakeholders and the transportation agency.
Design is both a process and a product. This section focuses on the product of CSS - visible results on streets and roads. That is what people and communities see and experience, whether it is a Main Street or a scenic rural road. CSS is creating new approaches to the flexible application of design controls and standards and more attention to pedestrians, bicyclists, and transit. Explore this section to also view case studies and examples of "flexible" design elements in practice around the U.S. and internationally.
