Three months without a blog post? We must have had a busy quarter! (ba-dum-ba, ching!)  Here’s a look at what your MPO staff have been up to since July:

Two projects, 251 pages Want to add a couple projects to our planning documents? That may require 251 pages worth of changes. The picture below shows the Long Range Transportation Plan (LRTP) on the right and on the left is a 251 page spiral bound book of just the changes to the LRTP required for the inclusion of two new projects added in August.

Sometimes people wonder what we do here. Among many other things, we keep up with federal requirements. That may not sound too hard. The feds want this done, then do it, right? Not so fast. We learned just how cumbersome federally required documents can be to maintain when we added two projects in the first week of August. Needless to say, we spent the bulk of the month of August dealing with these two projects’ 251 pages of changes. All that work paid off when the MPO approved the changes on August 27, 2015.

Complete Streets Continued During this busy quarter, the MPO Staff spent more time at The City of Huntsville Traffic Engineering office. We attended two additional webinars together with the Traffic Engineering staff that explained the implementation and safety benefits of complete street projects around the country. We also learned from our hosts about the signalization technology on Governors Drive and other traffic engineering projects throughout the City of Huntsville.

In October, we followed up on all this education by applying for an EPA program called Smart Growth America to bring a public workshop to our MPO that will teach us how to take Complete Streets from idea to implementation.

ADA Compliance Another buzz word for this quarter was Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) compliance. There is a new ADA Transition Plan (TP) requirement for all jurisdictions in the MPO. In September, the first deadline for ADA TP compliance required all MPO jurisdictions to submit information about their plans to ALDOT. This week, representatives from each jurisdiction will attend a statewide meeting in Birmingham to discuss the status of their plans and get answers to key questions. Completed ADA TPs are due to ALDOT by January 20, 2016, or an extension can be granted until no later than July 20, 2016, the final deadline.