01043963

Component

This paper outlines the Ada County Highway District’s (ACHD's) project prioritization process for its annual Five-Year Work Program. ACHD is a unique transportation agency with full jurisdiction over all city and county roadways within Ada County, Idaho. With this role, ACHD is tasked with planning, constructing and managing the transportation needs of one medium-sized community (Boise, pop. 200,000), five small communities (Meridian, pop. 48,000; Garden City, pop. 12,000; Eagle, pop. 16,000; Kuna, pop. 10,000; and Star, pop. 3,000) and the unincorporated areas of Ada County (pop. 58,000). Total population served by ACHD is 347,000. This unique responsibility requires daily coordination with the six city governments, county government, the development community, Metropolitan Planning Organization, three city urban renewal development corporations and regional public transportation authority. It also requires that each entity’s elected officials, their staff, citizens and private interests easily understand how ACHD prioritizes capital projects. The Boise metropolitan area ranked as one of the fastest growing urbanized areas from 1990 to 2000 according to the U.S. Census and is the largest metropolitan area in Idaho. That growth created increased strain on ACHD’s highway system and its limited revenue sources. These factors helped ACHD develop a prioritization method that takes into account numerous factors that impact how and why ACHD programs a specific project for funding. Prior to 2002, ACHD’s system of prioritizing Major Roadway Projects was primarily a “technical” system, using data such as traffic volumes, accident rates, and pavement condition, with some consideration given to growth and other community programming factors. Programming these projects into a Five-Year Work Program was initially based on these technical rankings but not strictly adhered to since other factors impacted final project selection. In 2002, ACHD extended these technical factors by introducing prioritization categories that quantified the community planning and political factors that impact roadway projects and reflected how and why projects were selected and programmed. These “programming” factors include categories such as geographic equity, public and outside agency support, leveraging of non-ACHD funds and prior ACHD commitments. This method was presented to the six cities, the county and other civic and professional groups. It was well received. The input provided valuable information that ACHD has used to evaluate how prioritization processes reflect the changing goals and values of the citizens of Ada County. Currently, ACHD is expanding this process into other types of capital programs including community projects, intersections and roadway drainage projects. In addition, ACHD has been contacted by other agencies in the region regarding implementation of a similar prioritization process for their capital projects.

01043941

English

12p

2004

9th National Conference on Transportation Planning for Small and Medium-Sized Communities

CD-ROM

Maintenance management; Medium sized cities; Political factors; Programming (Planning); Small towns; Strategic planning; Transportation planning

Capital projects

Ada County (Idaho)

Highways; Planning and Forecasting; I72: Traffic and Transport Planning

TRIS, TRB

Mar 9 2007 1:23PM

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