Cookeville’s Pedestrian And Bike Circulation Plan Nearly Complete

An update to Cookeville’s pedestrian and bicycle circulation plan will be completed soon.

The city has posted a draft of the recommendations to its website, allowing citizens to review and make comments.

Cookeville hired Nashville-based Gresham Smith and Partners to develop the plan. Company representative John Houghton said the next step will be creating a priority framework based on responses from the community.

“If there’s an area you think is a priority, we would love for you to identify it as such. What we’ll be doing, is taking the network plan and then running the different improvements through this prioritization criteria,” Houghton said. “Right now, it would include things like safety, demand, equity, and cost efficiency.”

Some of the requested improvements from a recent survey included greenways, side paths, buffered bike lanes, and open streets.

Houghton said final steps would involve creating a schedule of improvements.

“Phase one are the ones that are in the pipeline today, and then we will break it out into quartiles for future improvements,” Houghton said. “Of course, project selection is the ultimate challenge because balances on the availability of funding, physical constraints, stakeholder support, and geographic equity.”

Gresham Smith plans to release a final draft of the update towards the end of this month.