Nora Kern

Guest columnist

It is time for our city leaders to make the safety and efficiency of our transportation system a more urgent priority.

As Metro budget season is upon us, Mayor David Briley and the Metro Council must work to appropriately resource the manpower needed to achieve our long-overdue mobility goals, including a reconsideration of a standalone Metro department of transportation. It is not enough to invest in capital projects and contractors if we are not also investing in the Metro staff capacity and structure that will ensure those projects are effective, innovative and as cost-efficient as possible.

Today, Metro Public Works, which is responsible for much of our transportation needs, has fewer staff than it did in 2008, yet its volume of road-maintenance and sidewalk projects has increased dramatically.

One Metro employee handles the entire workload for a $30 million annual sidewalk program. No single staff member is working to retrofit unsafe streets or help WeGo buses move faster through traffic. Staff reviewing traffic impacts of new developments are swamped, which leaves little time to think through how to capitalize on private investment.

Division and stagnation

The limited transportation staff we have in Nashville are also split between three different departments: Public Works, Planning and WeGo. This means there is often no one entity responsible for achieving goals like reducing traffic fatalities or addressing how to move 40,000 additional employees downtown in the coming years.

According to the Urban Land Institute of Nashville’s Gear-Up 2020 report, the absence of a centralized city transportation department, “contributes to stagnation in terms of innovation, commitment to complete streets, active transportation, and ultimately accountability to moving Nashville forward.”

Because of these deficiencies in both manpower and organizational structure, third-party contractors have been helping to fill the void. While contractors will always play a valuable role in providing expert services to our city, relying on them for routine work that could be done by Metro staff is costing our city money and reduces accountability. By staffing transportation appropriately, we build the continuity, expertise, camaraderie and institutional knowledge needed to innovate and ensure our streets our safe, while also moving more people, not just more cars, through the same amount of space.

Serious consequences

Our failure to adequately staff transportation and lack of a departmental structure conducive to strong leadership has serious consequences, particularly for our most vulnerable road users. In 2018 alone, 82 people were killed on our streets in traffic crashes, including 23 people on foot. Last year, Walk Bike Nashville released our Impossible Crossings report, which showed that only four of the top-50 most dangerous pedestrian crash locations had seen dramatic improvements since 2014.

We were glad to see that Metro Public Works Director Mark Sturtevant requested 54 new full-time employees at the Public Works budget hearing with Mayor Briley. These positions would increase in-house Metro capacity to ensure that it is easier and safer to get around our city, and that we are better able to respond to the city’s rapid pace of growth.

Walk Bike Nashville strongly urges our city leaders to honor this budget request, fund our transportation staff and establish a Department of Transportation so that we can make real progress on making our streets truly safe and efficient for all Nashvillians.

Nora Kern is executive director of Walk Bike Nashville.