Final sidewalk and bikeways update months away

The public comment period on the draft of the strategic plan for sidewalks and bikeways in Davidson County concluded Monday, with about 100 citizens submitting comments to Public Works.

The next step will be for Public Works to consider the public comments and make any potential alterations to the plan, which was submitted to the public earlier this month.

Public Works held a series of meetings on the sidewalks and bikeways plan earlier this year at the request of Mayor Karl Dean. What the department came away with was a new “matrix” to determine where sidewalks and bikeways should be added and improved throughout Davidson County.

Public Works anticipates it will take about three months to use the new matrix to update the plan and determine where new sidewalks and bikeways will go.

“The strategic plan is the document that states where the sidewalks will be, not the maps that show where the sidewalks and bikeways currently are,” said Public Works Capital Manager Jim Snyder.

Several neighborhood groups throughout Davidson County were mistakenly under the impression that the sidewalk plan update to the 2003 master plan would show explicitly where new sidewalks throughout Nashville would go.

“On the sidewalk plan, we went to the first meeting at Hillsboro High School earlier this year and it was worthless,” said the Woodlawn Area Neighborhood Association President Bell Newton. “There were no maps and we had no answers to our questions.”

Newton added that many of her neighborhood association’s concerns were answered, especially questions like where sidewalks would be extended on busier roads in her area. However, many like Newton expected the update would include a list of where new sidewalks would be installed and that ended up not being the case.

Snyder said the actual goal was to determine the new criteria Public Works would use to update the plan.

“What we did was develop a matrix to use to determine how to update the plan,” Snyder said.

The “matrix” consists of three factors — a key to figure out how frequently a sidewalk is used called the Pedestrian Generator Index (PGI), the condition of existing sidewalks and coordinating where sidewalks will go with future developments and civic-related uses like schools and parks.

“What we’re going to do now is go back and look at those comments, meet with the planning department and then we’ll sit down and finalize the update,” Snyder said.

Since the plan was initiated in 2003, Metro added 124 miles of sidewalk throughout Davidson County.

Councilman Sean McGuire said the issue is one that has gotten a considerable amount of attention from his constituents.

“I get about four or five comments per week on the sidewalk plan in the last month or so,” McGuire said. “People care because in my district, which has one of the worst, if not the worst, traffic issues in the city, it’s important to them to find out how the sidewalk plan will be updated.”