CLARKSVILLE, TN – Five years ago this Spring, the City of Clarksville’s master plan for transportation improvements was adopted.
Entitled, “Transportation 2020+”, it has since been a front-of-mind strategic document, guiding decisions about more, and better City streets, intersections, traffic signalizations and sidewalks, for distribution across all City Wards, and within the fiscal reality of the City’s budget.
As Clarksville grows, safe and efficient travel for motorists and pedestrians within the community is a vital concern. Now, there are numerous successes to report because of Transportation 2020+, and more are planned.
Mayor Joe Pitts, the City Council, and leaders of the Clarksville Street Department, Clarksville Transit System, Clarksville Parks & Recreation, Clarksville Finance & Revenue, the City Communications office, the Regional Planning Commission, and the Clarksville Area Urbanized Metropolitan Planning Organization, originally spent several months studying Clarksville’s leading transportation needs, and then created this strategy for action.
At the time, Mayor Pitts said of the effort, “The Transportation 2020+ strategy was prepared to set our street and road priorities for the near future. We need a roadmap that we commit to follow, in broad terms, even as we move through elections and personnel changes. Otherwise, we’ll never get where we need to go.”
And the rest is history. Significant progress has been made, and more is to come.
“The success of our plan is attributed to, one, the leadership and people at the Street Department, and, two, keeping the ‘main thing the main thing.’ We are laser-focused on making the transportation experience work as our city continues to grow,” Mayor Pitts said.
One Clarksville City Councilman, Stacey Streetman, representing Ward 10, placed a heavy emphasis on preserving full funding of Transportation 2020+ in the most-recent City budget cycles. Mayor Pitts said her leadership was critical in keeping Citywide road improvements on schedule.
“She was the Council member who sponsored the property tax rate amendment of an additional 20 cents, that funded the plan in a critical moment. Without her stepping up, it would have been just another plan on a shelf,” Mayor Pitts said.
“One of the greatest responsibilities we have as members of the Clarksville City Council is to represent our constituents’ safest, and best interests in the management of our city’s inevitable population growth,” Councilman Streetman said.
“I have felt from the beginning that public safety and transportation are two key priorities to that end, and the well-planned agenda of Transportation 2020+, addressing needs for motorists and pedestrians in every City Ward, has to be kept intact. Any delays in funding it will only cost us all more money on the back-end,” she said.
Since many of Clarksville’s major thoroughfares are state highways, the Transportation 2020+ planning group has worked closely with Tennessee Department of Transportation (TDOT) officials to understand where, how, and when State Routes will be improved.
From inception to now, the strategy has prioritized, and divided transportation projects into three tiers, at a combined, estimated cost of $462 million.
These projects have been tiered based on need, their ability to solve the City’s most pressing traffic and mobility problems, and the best allocation of City resources to equitably implement transportation priorities throughout the city.
Tier 1 projects are prioritized by their ability to adhere to the City’s transportation core values. A key example here is one of the signature projects of the entire Transportation 2020+ agenda – Spring Creek Parkway, which is an entirely-new City street intersecting two, major State highways, Trenton Road and Wilma Rudolph Boulevard.
The purpose of Spring Creek Parkway is to help relieve traffic pressures on the State thoroughfares, and even to some extent, Interstate 24 in Montgomery County. Construction of Spring Creek Parkway is now in the latter stages of a critical second phase.
This, and other Transportation 2020+ Tier 1 projects are generally larger in scope, and ranked as urgently needed to address traffic congestion, promote motorist and pedestrian safety, connect the community and expand transit service.
Tier 2 and Tier 3 projects and programs focus on the community’s identifiable and expected future mobility needs.
In the days and weeks ahead, the City of Clarksville will continue reviewing progress on some of the other leading components of the Transportation 2020+ strategy. This progress will be shared publicly.
To read more about Transportation 2020+, visit the City’s website at https://www.clarksvilletn.gov/1043/Transportation-2020 . This portion of the website features transportation project overviews and descriptions, project mapping, and more.