How Do We Project How Much Will Be Spent On Transportation In The Next 20 Years?

I've been talking a lot lately about the work we've been doing on Horizon 2040, the Metropolitan Transportation Plan (MTP) that we're required to update every four years. This year is different though. We're not just updating the MTP, we're giving it a full overhaul and facelift. The old version was ridiculously long, not user friendly to members of the public (in other words, wasn't written in plain speak) and included a ton of transportation projects intended to be constructed or completed over the next 20 years (the timeline of the MTP).

While it's great we had big ambitions four years ago by including all those projects, the reality is that there isn't money to fund every transportation project we'd like to do. One requirement of the MTP by the federal government is that it must be financially constrained. In other words, we have to be able to prove that we can reasonably pay for all the projects included in it, based on current sources of income and proposed future sources.

With this in mind, we sat down last week with a group of representatives from our partner agencies and had a couple workshops to make sure we are all on the same page (as the projects in the list are all submitted by the agencies we work with that actually do construction (versus SRTC, which covers the planning end of things). So the workshops covered Project Cost Estimating and Revenue Forecasting.

Being a non-technical employee, I was dreading sitting through these workshops. But to my surprise, they were actually interesting and went by quickly! So, if you're interested in finding out how local jurisdictions set the price tags on the projects they do, you can read the summary from that workshop here.

And if you're interested in how much money is expected to come into the region, and be spent on transportation projects, over the next 20 years, and how we figure out these numbers, that workshop summary is here.

While you're on the page, you might as well take the survey of your transportation priorities as well. Click the "Horizon 2040 Survey" box at the top left to take it.