Tuesday, October 20, 2015

Tell Us How You Would Spend Local Transportation $$

You've got a couple more weeks to let us know how you would spend $50 million on local transportation if it was your choice. SRTC webtool let's you weight in about your transportation priorities by basically voting with your (imaginary) dollars.

New federal and state regulations require Metropolitan Planning Organizations like SRTC to create and track performance measures and targets to ensure the transportation system is developing as planned. This is being done through a project called the Horizon 2040 Implementation Toolkit.

Horizon 2040 is the region’s long-term transportation plan that guides how our transportation system will grow between today and the year 2040. The Horizon 2040 Implementation Toolkit will identify measures and targets that can be measured using available data that relate to Horizon 2040’s Guiding Principles.

The web tool will help you understand how investments and outcomes are related and also allows you to identify priorities of the region that will help develop those targets. The tool allows users to choose an estimated level at which they would like to fund categories such as roadway preservation and management, congestion management, bicycle and pedestrian improvements, transit improvements and transportation safety.

As you allocate money to each category, graphics show just how far that amount would go. For instance, for roadway preservation, the amount of lane miles repaired changes as you change the funding for that category. For bicycle and pedestrian improvements, the percentage of people commuting by bike or walking increases or decreases as you add or subtract money. Screen shots on the following page give an idea what you will see when using the web tool.

Just like in real life, the hard part is not blowing your budget. The $50 million available for distribution on the web tool is based on the approximate amount of money projected to be invested in the local transportation system by SRTC over the next five years.  Once you have made your budgeting decisions, you can compare your results to others who have used the web tool and learn about the next steps in the performance measurements development process.

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About SRTC

SRTC is the federally designated Metropolitan Planning Organization (MPO) for Spokane County. Urbanized areas with populations exceeding 50,000 people are required to have an MPO. SRTC was formed to address the county's transportation planning needs. It provides coordination in planning between the public, cities, small towns, the county, the state, transit providers, and tribes.

SRTC offers services including transportation monitoring, transportation modeling, census information analysis, travel demand forecasting, historical traffic count analysis, geographic information systems, and trip generation rates.