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Years in transportation & land useTransportation · Land Use · Placemaking
Building communities through transportation, not transportation through communities.
Forty-seven years spent teaching roads to build the places they run through, from inside a state DOT to the Project for Public Spaces. Sustainable. Resilient. Equitable.
Streets as PlacesFor mayorsFor plannersFor state DOTs
1,200+
Staff & stakeholders trained12+
State DOTs advised40+
Communities reshapedMeet Gary
An engineer who put the engineering back into engineering.
Gary Toth34 years at NJDOT · 14 years at Project for Public Spaces · now Senior Advisor, Benesch EngineeringMy passion has always been creating positive change in our communities. Early on, I justified projects that let cars move faster and pulled communities away from the walkable places we cherish. My thirty-four years at the New Jersey Department of Transportation changed that.
Helping build NJDOT's intermediary between the public, environmental agencies, and design staff, I became an expert in flexible designrather than following the manual. As Director of Project Planning & Development, I helped turn NJDOT into a stakeholder-inclusive, Context Sensitive Solutions agency, finding the best fit between transportation goals and the needs of communities and the environment.
For fourteen years at the Project for Public Spaces, rising to Interim CEO, I honed placemaking as a craft: Streets as Places, Street Typology, Street Audits. And I expanded the work to reach the underrepresented and vulnerable communities that conventional engagement leaves out.
Today I carry that practice forward through Gary Toth Consulting and as Senior Advisor to Benesch Engineering. I also wrote A Citizen's Guide to Better Streets, so residents can engage their own transportation agency with confidence.
The Method
A place-led community process.
Gary starts with the place a community wants to become, then lets transportation serve that vision, never the reverse. Seven steps, repeated until the place is right.
1
Place Recipe
Define what the place wants to be first. Transit and transportation are integrated ingredients, not a side dish.
2
Place & Destination Mapping
The "Power of Ten": great places need many reasons to be there. Map the destinations that draw people in.
3
Connectivity & Routes
Trace how people actually move between destinations: on foot, by bike, by transit, and by car.
4
Audits & Dot Surveys
Get the community's read on the ground, paired with dot-preference surveys that surface what residents truly value.
5
Street Typologies
"A street for every purpose": match each street's design to the real role it plays in the network.
6
Place Vision
A shared, community-owned picture of the future that residents and private investors can both aim toward.
7
Lighter, Quicker, Cheaper
Low-cost test interventions that prove the idea and set off a snowball effect of confidence and investment.
"You are never finished."Placemaking is iterative. Each round earns the trust to take the next.
Consulting services
Five ways to reshape a place.
Between the technical world and the community perspective, Gary moves fluently, and brings them to the same table.
Reshape agency policies and practices
Help a transportation agency update its policies, design standards, and measures of effectiveness for the challenges of the 21st century, with a delicate touch that brings career staff along.
Street and network design
Move past the car-oriented functional-classification habit toward streets designed for the people and places they actually serve.
Integrate transportation, land use, and placemaking
Great places, reachable by foot, bike, and transit, put little strain on the transportation system. Transportation professionals can no longer pretend land use is not our business.
Town and neighborhood visioning
Place-led community visioning that restores confidence and lets residents and private investors hit the same target, instead of a top-down plan looking for buy-in after the fact.
Facilitation and training
Workshops and training for transportation professionals, communities, and advocates, from a certified instructor who has led national dialogues and trained thousands.
Selected work
What it looks like on the ground.
Decades of projects, from a single contested highway curve to statewide design guides. A few that show the range.
Sandpoint, Idaho · 2013
Canceling the Curve
Gary facilitated a tense dialogue between the city and the Idaho Transportation Department over a planned US-2 highway expansion, bringing both sides to the same table to weigh what the community actually wanted.
Outcome: On June 19, 2013, the Idaho Transportation Board voted unanimously to defund the expansion.
Fort Worth, Texas
Envision Hemphill
Led the community placemaking initiative for the Hemphill Street corridor, reconfiguring a dangerous, overlooked street into a safer, right-sized one that works for all users.
Outcome: A calmer corridor that set the stage for new investment in adjacent neighborhoods.
New Jersey · 2003–2007
NJFIT — Future In Transportation
Worked with more than fifty New Jersey communities to integrate land use and transportation, putting place at the center of the planning conversation.
Outcome: 50+ communities aligned around place-first transportation planning.
New Jersey & Pennsylvania
Smart Transportation Guide
As project manager, Gary produced the multi-state design guide that gave engineers a practical way to design streets for the places they serve.
Outcome: Changed how highways and streets are planned and designed across two states.
Trusted across the table
What colleagues say.
Gary's leadership on our Envision Hemphill initiative transformed a dangerous, overlooked corridor into a safer, right-sized street that works for all users, and set the stage for new investment in adjacent neighborhoods.
I have always been impressed by his combination of technical expertise and respectful community engagement. Gary listens, he collaborates, and he is respectful of all opinions while maintaining the highest level of engineering competence.
Gary understands that roads can do more than move people from place to place. Poor road design can destroy a community, but great road design, the kind that Gary leads, can build one.
I make the diagnosis: people in this place need more exercise, enjoyment, safety, and community. Gary is the interventionist, the surgeon, conceiving the specific therapy, what to cut out and what to add. And he is serious, funny, and great to work with.
Writing & talks
Putting the practice into words.
Decades of essays, a citizen's handbook, and talks from Sandpoint to Amsterdam.
- BookA Citizen's Guide to Better StreetsHow to engage your transportation agency. Published with the Project for Public Spaces and AARP.
- Essay · 2017From Mobility to Community Building: Rethinking the Future of State DOTsSix strategies for reforming how state departments of transportation work.
- GuideThe Smart Transportation GuideA multi-state design guide for planning and designing streets around the places they serve.
- WritingResilience.org · CNU Public Square · StreetsblogRegular essays on transportation reform, land use, and placemaking.
- TalksPlacemaking Week, Together North Jersey & moreAmsterdam (2017), Together North Jersey (2017), Boise (2016), Sandpoint (2013), and a Streetfilms interview.
Start a conversation
Let's build your community up.
Whether you are a transportation agency ready to reshape its practice, or a town ready to vision its future, the first step is a conversation.
Start a conversation
Serving mayors, city planners, town leaders, and state DOTs nationwide.