and transportation enhancement projects that have point or segment locations and are more subject to local government and KDOT decisions about which facilities are improved each year. More information about how the MPO is addressing Title VI Civil Rights and Environmental Justice Non-Discrimination issues can be found in the following documents both of which were approved by the MPO Policy Board in 2009 and are available on the MPO web site.
- Title VI Program Manual http://www.lawrenceks.org/mpo/title6
- Public Participation Plan http://www.lawrenceks.org/mpo/public_participation
VIII. REGIONAL SIGNIFICANCE OF TIP PROJECTS
Regionally Significant – What Are We Talking About?
As the Metropolitan Planning Organization (MPO) we often talk about regionally significant transportation facilities and services. Generally, things that are part of our area’s mobility system and have impacts outside of the part of town they are located in are thought to be “regionally significant.” People throughout the metropolitan area use these regionally significant facilities, and people living in various parts of the region are impacted by these facilities. For example, a freeway interchange is “regionally significant” because it helps bring people and business to our area and it impacts our region as a whole, not just the people living within a mile of the interchange. In the case of roadways it seems simple enough to say that all roads that have mobility rather than property access as their primary function are “regionally significant.” If this definition is used then all arterial and higher classification roads are “regionally significant” and everything below that in the roadway classification system is not “regionally significant.” However, collector streets are supposed to do both of these functions equally well, and it may be unclear as to which collectors do a little more mobility duty and which ones do more property access work. There may also be some cases where major activity centers are connected to collectors and even though those collectors seem to provide mostly property access, the volume of traffic using the road to access a major activity center encourages residents to think of those roadways as “regionally significant.” At first glance it may appear to be intuitively simple to discern what roads are and are not “regionally significant.” However, actually coming up with a definition of what “regionally significant” means for our regional multimodal transportation system is not so easy.
The graphic on the following page depicts the relationship of mobility and land access as the function for each major roadway classification. It is clear looking at this graph that arterials have a primary mobility purpose, and because of that they are regionally significant. On the other hand, it is clear that local streets have a primary service of providing access to
adjacent land. These streets often connect to house lot driveways and alleys in
predominantly residential areas. They are not regionally significant. The difficult thing for a region to decide is exactly where in the collector category the line between being and not being regionally significant is drawn.
The purpose of this section of the TIP is to state the Lawrence - Douglas County MPO’s definition of “regionally significant” that works for our Metropolitan Planning Area (MPA) and our MPO's activities. This definition will be used by the public, the MPO Policy Board, MPO advisory committees (Technical Advisory Committee and others), MPO staff, and the various
organizations that submit projects for inclusion in the TIP.Page 33 of 57
