Sixty-five percent of Nashville, Tennessee, voters approved the $3.1 billion Choose How You Move transportation referendum on Tuesday, Nov. 5.
“With passage of Choose How You Move we are moving from talking and planning to doing,” Freddie O’Connell, mayor of the Metropolitan Government of Nashville and Davidson County, said in an announcement. “We built the program from ideas and plans generated by our community, for the benefit of the community, and implementation will include continued partnerships with our residents and elected officials. We’re ready to get to work. Let’s go.”
The program is funded by a half penny sales tax. A new chief program officer for Choose How You Move will lead the program’s implementation and report directly to the mayor.
That person will oversee implementation of the program and coordination with departments and private partners. This is now the largest collection of capital projects in Metro’s history, and great leadership from the Chief Program Officer will help ensure successful and timely implementation.
According to Nashville officials, the core tenets of the Choose How You Move plan include:
- 86 miles of new or upgraded sidewalks that don’t stop one block from a school or community center
- Doubles the hours of high-frequency daily service to 24/7/365, with crosstown and express routes that make sense if – or when – we want to use public transportation
- 12 neighborhood transit centers that break up the hub and spoke model for our public transportation
- Upgrades to smart signals at 2/3 of our intersections that don’t leave motorists sitting at red lights when no one is coming the other way
- Safety improvements across the system, including to 35 intersections where the majority of serious and fatal accidents occur
