Loudon City Council invited the public to a pop-in workshop held Tuesday, Sept. 3, at the Loudon Municipal Building to give feedback in an on-going transportation study.
The workshop is one of the beginning steps in working through the city’s transportation issues.
Loudon’s City Engineer Michael Hogan has been spearheading the operation recently and coordinating with WSP, an engineering consulting firm out of Knoxville.
According to Hogan, this is the first study of its kind in Loudon that he knows of.
IDENTIFYING AND PRIORITIZING
While a way for the community to be involved, Hogan said this study will not only identify but will also help prioritize future traffic enhancements.
For the next month or so, community members — specifically those who missed the Sept. 3 workshop — will be able to give feedback via an online survey on Loudon City’s website.
“What we’re trying to do is get some information from the public about some of the early levels of where the challenges that you face transportation-wise are and help us find some (improvement) opportunities,” WSP project coordinator Fred Frank said.
He said once the analysis and study is completed, the goal is for the city to have a plan — backed by public input, traffic data, conditions and trends — to move forward with.
“When they start to prioritize how they want to fix our transportation system, they already have that from the public,” Frank said.
RECTIFYING TRANSPORTATION ISSUES
WSP specializes in assisting cities and towns, finding issues within their communities and rectifying them.
WSP Civil Engineer Kinzee Clark said so far the firm has done a crash analysis, zone analysis and congestion analysis — all prior to the Sept. 3 workshop.
Before moving forward with solutions, they are seeking public input on different intersections and problem areas in Loudon.
Loudon received a grant from the Tennessee Department of Transportation and Transportation Planning Organization out of Knoxville to conduct this research.
“I just think it’s important to get the public feedback because we don’t drive every road, and some of these people travel these roads daily,” said Loudon City Mayor Jeff Harris, who has worked as interim city manager for the last 11 months.
“(The community) input’s valuable because I’m sure there’s a lot of information we don’t know about. WSP has done a good job of making it easy for people, whether it’s virtual or they can just drop in and interact with them personally, or they can just do something online if they can’t make it in.”
Those willing to engage in this study can find the online form on the city’s website: www.cityofloudontn.org/alert_detail.php.
