NASHVILLE, Tennessee — Nashville Democratic Mayor John Cooper’s senior advisor for Transportation and Infrastructure appeared before a group of community members Thursday to gather their input about the region’s transportation needs.
That woman, Faye DiMassimo, spoke to community members at Nashville’s Adventure Science Center through what is known as the Moving Forward initiative.
Moving Forward organizers say Middle Tennessee is behind in addressing its mobility needs and want business and community leaders to help create a regional mobility plan through “a cohesive community effort.”
“The office is in the first step of planning a process to determine Nashville’s transportation priorities,” DiMassimo said.
“This is with the goal of initial recommendations in June and a full transportation plan by the end of September.”
DiMassimo said Cooper had committed to a new transportation plan for Nashville by the end of his first term.
One man in the audience asked how Cooper’s priorities will dovetail with those of the Tennessee Department of Transportation’s.
DiMassimo said Cooper’s plan will integrate a larger regional effort along with the Tennessee Department of Transportation’s work.
Another man in the audience said he worried how members of the public perceive these issues.
“Obviously the folks in the room are behind this conversation, but then there is the public at large that does not understand how transportation planning works, which leads into negative feelings we have had in previous referendums,” the man said.
According to its website, for almost a year “the Moving Forward Mobility Policy Task Force has studied models of regional coordination around the provision of transit. The Task Force considered the experience of seven peer and aspirational regions from across the country. The Task Force’s goal is to provide an understanding of how Middle Tennessee coordinates to create regional transit compared to how other regions have collaborated across jurisdictions to provide transit options.”
According to its website, the Task Force decided to focus on five points of coordination to create a regional transit system:
• Regional governance or coordination structures
• Planning for transit
• Securing and distributing funding for transit
• Implementing/constructing transit
• Operating transit
“When the Let’s Move Nashville transit plan failed at the polls in Nashville/Davidson County in 2018, one criticism of the plan was that it was not regional. This critique noted that the proposed light rail lines did not extend to the outer portions of Davidson County, much less to the outlying counties where commuters add vehicles to roads and interstates (over 50 percent of employees commute across county lines in Middle Tennessee every day),” according to its website.
“The plan to offer transit across Middle Tennessee can be constructed in a number of ways – with an emphasis on light rail or bus rapid transit, with varying cross-town or cross-region routes, etc. The Moving Forward Mobility Policy Task Force was interested, however, in stepping back to assess what structures and processes are currently in place in Middle Tennessee to ensure regional coordination to implement regional transit and then comparing those structures and processes to those in other regions.”
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Chris Butler is an investigative journalist at The Tennessee Star. Follow Chris on Facebook. Email tips to [email protected].
