Elizabethton Street Traffic is Looking Good

I had the opportunity to staff the City of Elizabethton booth at the Covered Bridge festival this past weekend. It was great to hear all of the ideas from everyone about ways to improve the city and to get back in touch with the direction that our citizens want this community to be moving in. A few of you made a comment about the amount of traffic that we have seen in Elizabethton and how it seems to becoming more congested in recent years. So, today, I want to talk a little about how a both your local government and our state government look at traffic congestion and determine when a road needs to be expanded.

Every so often, a Federal advisory committee called the Transportation Research Board produces a document called the Highway Capacity Manual. Transportation engineers and planners across the nation use this document in order to determine the capacities of certain highways and roads. Based on the capacities of the roads, a grading schedule called roadway level-of-service is calculated in order to determine how close to capacity a roadway is. Commonly all arterial and collector routes are then graded ‘A’ through ‘F’ as to how close to capacity they are with ‘F’ being the worst.

Believe it or not, Elizabethton’s road network is in pretty good shape! All of Elizabethton‘s minor arterial and collector networks (this would include roads like G Street, Parkway Boulevard, Southside Road, Bemberg Road, Siam Road, etc) with the exception of a portion of Milligan Highway from Okolona Road to Johnson City City Limits have either an A or B level-of-service. The section of Milligan Highway I previously referenced has a level-of-service of a C.

West Elk Avenue mostly has a B level-of-service with one D near the Milligan Highway intersection and a level-of-service of F between Pal’s and Summers-Taylor. This is the reasoning behind TDOT determining and making improvements in this section of the Elk Avenue corridor. The 19-E Bypass corridor is also good with a level-of-service of all Bs or Cs. As a planner, when a road changes to a D level-of-service we being to analyze the problem and look for long-term solutions to the problem. Once a roadway reaches a level-of-service of E, we begin to look at immediate solutions to prevent the level-of-service from deteriorating even more. When a road reaches an F level-of-service we bring in engineers to develop and construct solutions that can have immediate impact on the corridor. An F level-of-service means the roadway is close to capacity.

While roads in Elizabethton will continue to become busier as the city urbanizes, we must realize that Elizabethton is not as rural of a community as it once was and busy roads are a side effect. While it may seem busy at times, Elizabethton’s road network is far from needing major improvements such as by-pass roads. Let’s talk about it!