Metro Nashville officials have released their preliminary Metro Nashville Transportation plan, and it proposes, among other things, upgrading the city’s bus system and creating a Nashville Department of Transportation.
The plan that Metro officials sent to The Tennessee Star Monday did not specify total expenses, but The Tennessean assesses it will cost more than $1.5 billion.
Mayor John Cooper’s Senior Advisor for Transportation and Infrastructure Faye Q. DiMassimo said Monday that the mayor also wants to modernize the city’s traffic management system and invest in more sidewalks, bikeways, and greenways.
“Prior to COVID limitations on in person meetings, we held Council Member conversations and 11 Community listening sessions along with numerous in-person and virtual stakeholder group meetings,” DiMassimo said in an email to The Star.
“The results from 2,608 participants are attached with the highest priorities being transit, sidewalks, state of good repair, and from a technical analysis perspective the traffic management modernization foundational to all.”
The plan also proposes transit centers in North Nashville and Green Hills.
As reported two years ago, Davidson County voters defeated a $9.2 billion transit plan by a margin of 64 percent to 36 percent. Former Mayor Megan Barry proposed that plan. Then-acting Mayor David Briley also supported it.
Also as reported in 2018, Ryman Hospitality Properties CEO Colin Reed said he was never on board for that plan.
“I had some of the same concerns that the ‘antis’ had,” the Nashville Business Journal quoted him as saying at the time.
“The notion of tearing up the middle of Broadway for an extended period of time, building a tunnel underneath and bringing it up somewhere on Broadway, concerned the living daylights out of me. Building rail lines in the middle of highways concerns the life out of me. This was a huge amount of money. What we have to fix is morning-time rush hour and evening-time rush hour. That’s where our problems reside here. I felt like this whole evolution we’re seeing with self-driving cars, self-driving busses, that sort of seemed to me to be silent in the plan.”
The transit system’s downtown tunnels would have run under Fifth Avenue North and partially under the historic Ryman Auditorium.
– – –
Chris Butler is an investigative journalist at The Tennessee Star. Follow Chris on Facebook. Email tips to [email protected].
Why not some easy changes in the meantime? One way downtown streets would help the flow of traffic (like it use to be), sidewalks where pedestrians have gotten hit, having to walk in the streets, better crosswalks with signage, smaller more maneuverable buses and I hate to say it, bus service to the suburbs. I love having a car, but we should give it a go.
Sounds like most of those queried are the ones who literally want a free ride. What does it cost per passenger to transport one of the freeloaders on a bus? Most of them drive around virtually empty 90% of the time.
And the timing is unbelievable. How many of the workers that are now working from home going to continue to work from home in the future? That in addition to the unbelievable tax hike that will drive companies and workers out of Davidson County as has been the case in the other Democrat run cities all over the country.
The bureaucrats work overtime dreaming up unrealistic projects to justify their jobs and unearned salaries.
I could go an but it is useless to discuss such things with the current Nashville administration.
Metro Nashville, and the rest of Tennessee for that matter, DOES need a major land-passenger transportation system to relieve our already overworked freeways of excess freight and passenger traffic that causes gridlock that chocks our transport arteries, increases greenouse gas, increases accidents, road-rage, and other anti-social ills. While nobody advocates abolition of the private automobile, we DO need a balanced transport system that places people over vehicles in getting from one place to another. Nashville as a major metropolitan city, needs an improvised city bus service supplemented by light rail where density requires. Although I have a car, I still prefer to use mass transit where possible (in my current residence of Albuquerque, NM, with its own gridlock issues) because of our city’s bad drivers, traffic congestion, and the like.
I would confine interstate highways to travel OUTSIDE our cities with exit and entrance ramps at the edge of town and remove the portion of the interstates that go into downtown where they simply aggravate traffic gridlock and ruin the tax bases of neighborhoods they penetrate. The original Interstate Highway system as envisioned by Eisenhower in 1956 did not call for these superhighways entering into our cities but to bypass them instead at the periferies.
Tennessee needs a balanced transport system that, while still allowing for automobiles, would also provide for different modes of transit like walking, bike-riding, and bus/rail mass transit.
William, an honest question of you.
if you live in Albuquerque why on earth do you make such comments concerning Nashville?
Obviously it is your privilege to do so, but why?
DO NOT TRUST COOPER – he is a LIAR and a Democrat , that’s one in the same. I thought Nashville was broke. Where is the crook coming up with the cash , our taxes he said he would not raise. LIAR!!
Hey, dreaming’s free. If wishes were horses, and all that…
The tunnel was a bad idea. The reason we can get away with the skyscrapers downtown is the deep bedrock just under the surface. I’m sure the art gallery owners would love the noise and mess of explosives near their beloved shops. If Nashville is to have a “rail” system, it needs to be built above the streets. There’s plenty of space twelve feet above the median of the highways leading into town.
This bozo mayor has got to go, he will destroy a city already sinking deep in debt thanks to all our previous mayors, all libtards with failed policies.
he’ll just be replaced with another democrat, nothing will ever change.