Nashville Mayor Freddie O’Connell says a walk to school event he attended last month at Paragon Mills Elementary School in honor of civil rights activist Ruby Bridges really illustrates the city’s challenges getting around.
The school is situated adjacent to Harding Place, which is known for dangerous wrecks.
O’Connell says the Metro Nashville Police Department and Nashville Department of Transportation and Multimodal Infrastructure had to close off a lane in the road so that families were able to safely walk the route to school.
“Had we not had the support of two different Metro departments, those families would have been walking along the shoulder of treacherous stretches of roadway and they are easily walking distance to the campus where they’ll spend so many hours of learning opportunities,” said O’Connell.
O’Connell told that story to business leaders at the Rotary Club of Nashville on Monday to illustrate how his proposed transportation plan “Choose How You Move – An All-Access Pass to Sidewalks, Signals, Service, and Safety” will improve how residents get around.
If approved by voters in November, Choose How You Move will build on more than 70 plans and studies the city conducted over the last decade involving transportation along with input from more than 66 thousand Nashvillians.
The plan will focus on improving sidewalks along with the existing WeGo Public Transit and adding transit centers that connect bus routes to each other. Choose How You Move would also upgrade traffic lights to better respond to where the traffic is.
A poll conducted prior to last year’s Mayoral election found transportation was among the top three issues facing Nashville and O’Connell made improving it a key part of his campaign.
Two prior transportation plans, the AMP and Let’s Move Nashville, have failed to overcome concerns in the last decade, including criticism about the scale of one that would have involved light rail.
O’Connell told business leaders those past failures shouldn’t be a concern with his plan.
“Most cities that try this do not succeed on the first time. And when they don’t succeed on that first effort, they go back and apply lessons. That’s exactly what we’ve done here,” said O’Connell. “We are proposing simple, incremental proven approaches that work in city after city that does them and beyond that, these aren’t even all transit.”
O’Connell says he anticipates releasing more specific details, including transportation maps and costs soon.
