SUBJECT/RECOMMENDATION:
Title
Update on the transportation planning work program conducted by the Planning and Development Department. (WSO)
Body
SUMMARY:
The provision of adequate transportation facilities infrastructure is one of the most important components needed to support future redevelopment and increase investors’ confidence in the City of Clearwater. Facilitating the movement of people and goods safely and efficiently is of utmost importance to ensure the success of the City, and a multi-modal choice approach will be necessary in order to accommodate future growth without sacrificing roadway mobility efficiency. In Fiscal Year 2016/17, the City created a new Transportation Planner position within the Planning and Development Department, recognizing the need for long-term transportation planning, plans integration and coordination activities with regional and local agencies. Planning and Development Department staff has created a roadmap for the City of Clearwater to achieve its objectives for a safe, efficient, and convenient transportation system.
The Planning and Development Department will provide City Council with an update on its transportation planning initiatives, including:
• Complete Streets Planning
• Bicycle Friendly Community (BFC) Certification
• Updates to Shifting Gears, the City’s Bicycle and Pedestrian Master Plan
• Other Transportation Planning Projects
One of the priorities is to develop a Complete Streets Implementation Plan. The objectives of this Plan are to:
• Adopt a Complete Streets Policy for the City of Clearwater
• Build stakeholders’ consensus (internally and externally) on the elements of Complete Streets
• Develop a framework for projects prioritization and delivery process
• Adopt Complete Streets design guidelines for the City of Clearwater
• Provide an implementation action plan
In March 2017, the City was awarded a grant from Forward Pinellas to develop a Complete Streets Concept Design for Drew Street. If the City Council chooses to accept this grant, the Drew Street project will serve as a pilot project supporting the development of the citywide Complete Streets plan. The unique characteristics of Drew Street offer a great opportunity to test and evaluate a wide range of Complete Street strategies.
The Planning and Development Department has already started preliminary work to update to the City’s 2006 Bicycle and Pedestrian Master Plan, Shifting Gears, which will be completed in-house, alongside the other transportation planning projects. This update will include an assessment of the effectiveness of plan implementation to date, as well the creation of an updated bicycle and pedestrian facilities inventory and projects status list. In conjunction with the other projects, it may be necessary to re-define the vision, goals and objectives within the plan.
In response to City Council’s desire to become a Bicycle Friendly City (BFC), a designation administered by The League of American Bicyclists (the League), staff has conducted an initial assessment using the League’s designation assessment chart “The Building Blocks of a Bicycle Friendly Community.” The BFC designation is based on how well a city is providing safe accommodations for bicycling and encouraging people to bike for transportation and recreation. A city’s award level is determined by evaluating a city’s facilities based on five overall attributes and three key outcomes.
Based on information from Shifting Gears, complemented by available current information, the initial assessment indicated that the City has a strong system of regional recreational trails, and there is great potential for rapidly increasing bicycle ridership by enhancing connectivity to the existing trails. However, overall the City scored poorly due to the limited bicycle facilities, low bicycle ridership, and other metrics factored in by the League. For example, under the Engineering attributes, the BFC designation takes into account the total bicycle network mileage to total road network mileage. The City’s biking facilities total mileage makes up only 9% of the total roadway network, where at least 26% is required to achieve the BFC-Bronze designation, or an additional 86 miles of biking facilities for this one measure.
The Complete Streets Implementation Plan project and the update to Shifting Gears will address several items necessary to achieve the BFC-Bronze designation, including:
• Assessing the effectiveness of the Shifting Gears implementation plan (i.e., policies, strategies, and actions)
• Establishing a Bicycle/Pedestrian Advisory Group
• Developing a biking facilities inventory system, a GIS-based system
• Developing an active projects status list to track all related projects (proposed, approved, under construction/ maintenance, and completed)
• Developing a framework for projects prioritizations with robust evaluation methodology and fair selection criteria that considers (cost, connectivity, safety, demand, and equity)
• Developing performance measure metrics
In addition to identifying what larger projects the City should consider undertaking to strengthen its network, the Planning and Development Department will provide a brief summary of other work being completed as part of this update on the transportation planning work program.
APPROPRIATION CODE AND AMOUNT: N/A
USE OF RESERVE FUNDS: N/A