City to Make Transportation Plan Greener

By Hannah Guzik
Ashland Daily Tidings
August 24, 2010

The city will begin an 18-month process Tuesday to create a greener Transportation System Plan focused not just on cars but on pedestrians, bicycles and trains.

City officials hope the plan, which hasn't been updated since 1998, will make Ashland's streets safer and serve as a model to other communities nationwide.

The plan will focus on providing safe transportation routes for pedestrians, bicyclists, vehicles, trains and airplanes — instead of focusing primarily on vehicle traffic, as past plans did, said Jim Olson, project manager and the city's engineering services manager.

"It's going to deal with things that previous plans did not deal with," he said. "It's going to address more multimodal issues, transit issues and pedestrian issues."

City officials believe the plan should reflect Ashland residents' increasing interest in carbon-neutral transportation, Olson said.

"This change is happening not just in the city — it's happening statewide, if not nationwide. There's more of a concentration now on differing modes of transportation," he said.

The completed Transportation System Plan update, which must be approved by the City Council, will guide transportation projects in the city.

The city's transportation and planning commissions will discuss the goals and timetable of the plan at a 7 p.m. meeting at the Ashland Civic Center, 1175 E. Main St.

Kittelson & Associates Inc., a Portland planning firm hired by the city to oversee the project, will present an overview of the process at the meeting.

In January, the council voted 3-2 to pay Kittelson $416,000 to manage the project. The city will use $125,000 in grant funding to cover the cost of the project, and will pay for the remainder with transportation system development charges that the city assesses against new development.

After meeting earlier this year with commissioners and reviewing city documents, Kittelson created a list of four goals for the project. They include creating a "green" template for other communities to follow; making safety a priority for all modes of travel; maintaining small-town character, support economic prosperity and accommodate growth; and creating a system-wide balance for serving and facilitating pedestrian, bicycle, rail, air, transit and vehicular traffic in terms of mobility and access throughout the city.

Commissioners will have an opportunity to weigh in on the goals at the meeting and could elect to modify them, Olson said.

Kittelson has listed six to eight objectives for each of the goals, and the commissioners could also opt to alter those. Some objectives focus on sustainability and call for creating a list of green projects to reduce car traffic and carbon emissions. Other objectives focus on safety and include realigning potentially dangerous intersections and reducing the number of fatal and serious crashes in the city by 50 percent in the next 20 years.

As a result of the new plan, "the streets will be safer — for all modes of transportation," Olson said.

The Planning and Transportation commissions will work to fine tune the plan over the next 16 months or so, and will then present a recommended version to the council. The council is expected to address the final document in January 2012.

For more information on the plan, see ashlandtsp.com.

Contact reporter Hannah Guzik at 541-482-3456 ext. 226 or hguzik@dailytidings.com.