Memorandum

Lawrence-Douglas County

Metropolitan Planning Organization

 

TO:

FROM:

David L. Corliss, Lawrence City Manager

Todd Girdler, MPO Senior Transportation Planner

CC:

Craig Weinaug-Douglas County Administrator, MPO Policy Board , MPO Technical Advisory Committee , MPO Regional Transit Advisory Committee

Date:

May 14, 2013

RE:

MPO Approval of the new Metropolitan Transportation Plan (MTP) - Transportation 2040 (T2040)

 

Please place the following item on the June 11, 2013 City Commission meeting agenda

 

Background

For the past year and a half the MPO staff and committees have been working on an update to the Transportation 2030 Plan that was approved in early 2008. That update is called Transportation 2040, or T2040, and is the new Metropolitan Transportation Plan for the Lawrence-Douglas County Region. This new transportation plan like its predecessor is a regionally based policy plan for creating and maintaining a multimodal transportation system to serve the needs of our region’s citizens and businesses. Also, like the T2030 document, this new T2040 Plan has a five-year lifespan before it expires. The MPO Policy Board approved this new T2040 Plan on March 21, 2013. A new plan to replace T2040 will be developed in 2017 for approval in early 2018. The T2040 Plan is now on the MPO website and has been submitted to the Kansas Department of Transportation, Federal Highway Administration, and the Federal Transit Administration staffs for information purposes. Those agencies do not approve this document, but the MPO does need to provide them a copy of the approved plan since those agencies are planning partners with the MPO.

 

In years past the regional transportation plan produced and approved by the MPO has been used by Douglas County and Lawrence as their transportation plans and as part of their joint Comprehensive Plan. That was the case for the T2020, T2025 and T2030 documents over the last fifteen years. The Transportation Chapter of the Comprehensive Plan was most recently updated to reflect alignment with the T2030 Plan in early 2011 when the Lawrence City Commission and the Douglas County Board of County Commissioners approved an amendment to their Comprehensive Plan stating that the current version of the MTP is the Transportation Element of the Comprehensive Plan.

 

Now that he MTP update process is complete, it is appropriate for the City of Lawrence and Douglas County to update the Comprehensive to include the Goals, Objectives and Strategies in the T2040 Plan. In a similar fashion, the three smaller cities in the region (Baldwin city, Eudora and Lecompton) may act to approve this T2040 Plan as an amendment to their Comprehensive Plans.

 

The T2040 Plan acts as the Metropolitan Transportation Plan under federal regulations and in that role it takes a broad perspective that charts out a shared regional vision for the future of our transportation system. In doing that it fits well with the other parts of the Comprehensive Plan that layout general guidance for how the region is to develop in the future. However, the T2040 Plan does not dictate project level details like curb radiuses and street widths and the myriad of other engineering details for roads, bridges, transit operations, bikeways and sidewalks. Most of those details are decided at the project level and guided by local regulations and best practices for each type of project. The T2040 Plan does point the way to a more balanced multimodal transportation system in the future, but many details about how that will occur are left to local discretion.

 

The MPO staff and MPO committees work closely with and have members who are experts in the planning/design/engineering fields and project details are sometimes discussed at various MPO meetings. The MPO has two official advisory committees (the Technical Advisory Committee and the Regional Transit Advisory Committee). The MPO staff also works closely with the Lawrence-Douglas County Bicycle Advisory Committee. All of those groups had opportunities to provide input to the MPO staff as the T2040 document was being drafted. The T2040 update process also included a lengthy public participation program run over several months in 2012 in which hundreds of comments were received from the public about the transportation needs in our region. Those comments were reviewed and many of those ideas were incorporated into T2040.

 

Actions Requested:

Initiate Comprehensive Plan amendment to update Horizon 2020-Chapter 8 to incorporate the Goals, Objectives and Strategies approved in the new T2040 Metropolitan Transportation Plan and forward to the Lawrence-Douglas County Planning Commission for consideration.

 

Attachments:

T2040 Metropolitan Transportation Plan – MPO approved on March 21, 2013

Chapter 8 – Lawrence-Douglas County Comprehensive Plan – amended on February 7, 2011

Draft Update – Chapter 8 of the Lawrence-Douglas County Comprehensive Plan