Every five years the Corridor MPO updates their Long Range Plan for the area. This lays out goals and plans related to population growth and how that affects transportation for the next several decades. The MPO has started this process for the 2010 update and is pulling out new ways of connecting with the community to gather input.
The first open house was held on December 3rd and it included an interactive session after staff presented information about the changes expected in our area. Participants were asked to lay out different development sites to accommodate the expected population growth, and then choose transportation projects that would be funded to handle citizens’ travel. I think this is a great exercise to promote understanding of how growth development and transportation are directly related to the quality of services we receive. If we continue to sprawl, we will have to increase access to more streets, setting ourselves up for higher maintenance costs or more roads in need of repair. You can see a video and recap of the activity in this post from Adam Belz and replay the live blogging he did during the open house.
There will be more interactive sessions between now and June 2010, so stay tuned, but don’t keep your input bottled up! If you have something to say, let the Corridor MPO know now through the Connections 2040 survey or directly through the MPO’s comment form. Also, take a look at the Connections 2040 site to learn more about the process and, eventually, see the maps that each table created during the interactive session.
Finally, we’d like to hear if you attended the first Connections 2040 open house and your thoughts on the interactive portion. Was it interesting? Do you have a better understanding about how the Corridor MPO looks at projects? If you weren’t able to go, would future activities like this encourage you to attend?
