County Needs YOU to Talk About Your Traffic Woes

Across all sectors and municipalities in Williamson County, the consensus on traffic is that help is needed.

To that end the county government kicked off a traffic strategy study in August to help develop a plan for traffic in the context of the overall economic, social and developmental picture. Part of it involves hearing from the public.

In the first week of November, the county will hold several public meetings, hoping for some brainstorming and collaboration from the public in the process.

  • On Nov 2 at 6:30 p.m. at Hillsboro Elementary/Middle School in Leiper’s Fork;
  • On Nov 3 at 6:30 p.m at Trinity Elementary School off Hwy. 96 in east Williamson County;
  • Additionally, County Commissioners are invited to attend a 3:30 p.m. meeting on Nov. 3 at the County Administrative Complex Auditorium.

According to Doug Tennent of AECOM Technology Corporation, the new study, which the county hired consultants AECOM and McBride Dale Clarion to conduct, will take a comprehensive view and create a plan for addressing traffic for the county. It should be completed by early 2017.

Mike Matteson, planning director for Williamson County, introduced the team in August that will conduct the study: Tennant, his colleague Matt Meservy and Greg Dale of McBride Dale Clarion.

“The idea behind this study is to work with this consultant team to identify what our current situation is with respect to traffic, where the problems are, what is the degree of congestion, projected traffic in the future based on trends and our current development policies and, most importantly, develop a specific set of strategies that can help with dealing with these issues in the future,” Matteson said.

Some of the strategies will include finding funding sources, such as an adequate facilities tax on development, and the regulatory process, such as looking at how the county requires developers to undertake improvements, he said.

Also, the study will consider land use, and updating the now nine-year-old county Comprehensive Land Use Plan, in order to fit the changing realities of growth-driven traffic.

“There is a very strong link between traffic and land use, so we feel like there is an opportunity in this process to step back and look at our land use policies and decide as a community whether it is appropriate to revisit some of those as we look comprehensively at this issue,” Matteson said.

Meservy broke down the outline of the study.

The strategic plan elements, he said, include: traffic management, how to integrate the land use plan, a list of prioritized capital projects, funding sources, and legal and regulatory actions.

The plan also will create a schedule for implementing its recommendations, and it can be either adopted whole-cloth by the county or simply approved as guidelines for the future.

“It is not only about traffic and just about a land use plant, about creating a list of priority projects,” Meservy said. “We don’t have all the money we need, in the real world, so we have to prioritize. We want to create momentum with the schedule, but don’t want it to be so fast that we leave people behind.”

Currently in the data-collecting stage, Tennant said it will take six to eight months before they present anything finished to the county.

“This is not a small task,” Tennant, who along with Dale and Meservy are Williamson County residents, said. “Traffic in this county, in this region, is a pretty all encompassing thing to think about. So we are going to try to break it down bit by bit through this process and see where we end up.

“We have done this for a lot of years, and there is probably not going to be a silver bullet, a perfect answer that says this is how we are going to solve the traffic problems of Williamson County now and into the future. But what we want to do is create a path forward.”

The study will take a wide scope, but also seek feedback in order to remain feasible, through the upcoming meetings and by working with county leaders.

At the request of the consultants, Matteson and Williamson County Mayor Rogers Anderson created an advisory council of community leaders and business leaders in order to engage in workshop sessions.