West Sacramento Sidewalk and Transportation Equity Program

STEP is the City’s springboard to rectify challenges in its pedestrian network.

Sidewalks are a foundational component of a city’s transportation system, providing safe, connected, and accessible passage to everyday destinations—home, school, employment, recreation, entertainment, healthcare, shopping. Nelson\Nygaard supported West Sacramento’s development of their Sidewalk & Transportation Equity Program (STEP). STEP builds on innovative paradigm shifts in asset management through the development of a program that centers a database of objectively measured sidewalk and equity data and complements that data with the human data of community experience that is critical to shape the STEP’s goals, objectives, prioritization, and plan for funding, investment, and implementation.

Nelson\Nygaard established a comprehensive, citywide database of sidewalk data focused not just on presence but also on quality and compliance. To complement this data, the project team partnered with locally trusted engagement teams to ground-truth the analysis with lived experience. Community walk audits, focus group interviews, and community pop-up events sought to engage communities that have been systematically excluded from planning processes to gather meaningful and accurate feedback. This community feedback, alongside feedback from key internal and external stakeholders, helped inform the development of the prioritization criteria and the final STEP plan for implementation. Nelson\Nygaard provided the City with a clear understanding of the current state of its pedestrian network, a prioritized list of sidewalk gap closure/improvement projects that has been co-created with the community and stakeholders, and an investment strategy to immediately initiate the design and implementation of top priority projects. STEP is the City’s springboard to rectify challenges in its pedestrian network.