Imagine getting up his morning to start on your daily routine
and it is the year 2025. How would your commute to work be different?
Will the roads you use be more congested? Will you spend more
time traveling? Will the roads be in good shape? Will you be working
at home? Can you take a bus or train to work, or do you wish you
could? Will school children have safe places to walk or ride bikes?
When you buy your next house or get your next job, would you like
to live closer to work or farther out? And how will access to
safe, convenient transportation affect your property value?
Few aspects of community planning affect our quality of life as
directly as the transportation systems we rely on to get to work,
to school, to medical care, or recreation, and to bring us the
goods and services we need. When these systems work well, we give
them little thought. But if they bottleneck, break down, and start
to dominate too many hours of our days, we can discover their
importance the hard way. And we find that transportation solutions
are costly, they take time and may be controversial.
In Chittenden County, we are experiencing all of those things.
In 2001, the population of the county, at 147,591, was a 90 percent
increase over 68,000 in 1960. Between now and 2025 that population
will grow by another 66,000 people who will need almost 36, 000
homes and hold 66,000 more jobs. How will all of those people
get to all of those jobs and homes, those stores and businesses,
using our current systems? What do we need to do to provide for
our constantly growing transportation needs and provide good jobs
without sacrificing the quality of life we value so much in this
region, and with limited financial resources?
It is the job of the CCMPO to study those challenges, ask those
questions and develop a 25-year county-wide plan to meet our transportation
needs. This plan, the Metropolitan Transportation Plan (MTP),
is reviewed every five years, with the 2025 MTP now ready for
approval. This plan will guide the expenditure of $1.04 billion
of federal, state, and local funds over the 25 year span. The
plan is important not only because of the amount of money involved,
but because of how it will affect our quality of life, our environment
and our economy. Transportation expenditures are an investment
we all make in our collective and individual futures.
We want not only to address the growing traffic and congestion
problems, we want to provide transportation choices. There are
many approaches to solutions. For example, this MTP contains a
plan for using new technology to coordinate all of the traffic
signals in the county, helping to smooth and speed traffic from
town to town and make our expenditure of public funds more effective.
The plan provides for expanded use of bicycles and pedestrian
walkways, and significantly improved county-wide bus transit.
Most importantly, our first priority is to fix and maintain what
we have!
We want you come to our public meeting on Wednesday October 22
at 6 p.m. at South Burlington High School on the MTP. You can
view the results of an extensive effort to seek and respond to
citizen input. This has included ten meetings with interest groups,
ten public forums from initial outreach to alternatives presentations,
a region- wide statistically valid public opinion survey, 35 Steering
Committee meetings with representatives from diverse interests,
numerous CCMPO Board meetings, at least two meetings with each
selectboard/city council (36 total) and several meetings of the
Chittenden County Transportation Authority and Chittenden County
Regional Planning Commission.
We will have display tables set up with maps and information about
the various parts of the plan. Experts will staff the tables to
answer questions and hear your concerns and opportunities. After
the one hour open house segment of the meeting there will be a
30 minute presentation of the plan and a public comment period.
People who attend will have a clear idea of what will be happening
in our county in the years ahead and will be better prepared to
make their own best decisions about where they will invest in
their homes and businesses and what role transportation access
will make in those decisions.
The CCMPO board and the many public servants who have worked on
this plan look forward to hearing your comments and answering
questions.
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