Smart Growth America And The National Complete Streets Coalition Awarded Partnership Of Agencies

Smart Growth America and the National Complete Streets Coalition awarded a partnership of agencies in Knoxville, Chattanooga and Nashville as the first-ever winner for their Complete Streets Consortium technical assistance. 

The Chattanooga TPO, Knoxville Regional TPO, and Nashville Area MPO together received a set of three free technical assistance workshops. Each of the winning agencies will host one of the three workshops, which will be tailored to each region’s specific opportunities and challenges.

Last month, the first workshop was held in Chattanooga, TN. Read on to find out more.

Updates To TPO Traffic Counts

The Knoxville Regional Transportation Planning Organization (TPO) has embarked upon another annual traffic count update for the Knoxville region.

This area encompasses 11 counties: Anderson, Blount, Cocke, Grainger, Hamblen, Jefferson, Knox, Loudon, Roane, Sevier, and Union. The TPO compiles annual traffic counts from Tennessee Department of Transportation (TDOT) and a private contractor. While TDOT records counts from all 11 counties, the private contractor only counts in Blount, Knox, and Loudon counties.

This year there are some notable updates. TDOT added several new traffic count stations, and many are very close to count stations operated by the private contractor. This will free up resources for the contractor to place stations in new and previously discontinued locations. Many of the discontinued locations were abandoned in 2009 when the City of Knoxville decided to terminate its traffic count program.

With this change, TPO came up with a system to display the replaced and discontinued traffic count stations on TPO's traffic count page and KGIS Maps. There are now semi-transparent red X’s to show where the stations once were. Just like the active count stations, you can click on a discontinued station to view a chart of historical traffic count data. Files of all the count stations within the 11 county region are available for download.

Alcoa Highway Improvements

Governor Haslam made an announcement at a press conference on August 1 at Sevier Heights Baptist Church that two projects on Alcoa Highway would be expedited. He noted that the IMPROVE Act, which was signed into law in April, will allow the timelines for these projects to be cut in half.

The two projects combined will cost $75 million. One is located in Blount County and the other is in Knox County.

View the map (WBIR)

Blount County project: the half-mile stretch from Hall Road to a new Hunt Road interchange

Knox County project: the 2.5-mile stretch of Alcoa Highway from north of Topside Road to north of Maloney Road

 

For more information, check out the following articles: