It takes awhile to get the TE funds even after you’re awarded so in the big scheme of things, a two year wait (to even start the public input and design phase) is not that far out of line. However, waiting over a year plus for the Road Diet on W. Ponce AFTER Decatur has submitted every document GDOT has asked for IS out of line, but GDOT has allocated its Funds to other projects and doesn’t have the cash to cover our TE grant. Nice, that!

What’s sad is the federal TE program is about the ONLY transportation program that offers funding opportunities for these types of projects. It is pretty much the only source of funds to do bicycle and pedestrian projects – the TE program has funded most of Decatur’s Streetscape phases. So you can thank TE and Decatur’s grant success for all the nice sidewalks, trees, benches and trash cans you see around town.

(The solar trash cans come from sanitation fee funds, but that’s a comment for another blog post!)

If Decatur wanted to build a freeway, there would be lots of places we could apply for funding.

The GDOT delayed the first GDOT SRTS grant application cycle for years (they did not award the first grants until this past summer – thus making Georgia the LAST state in the USA – and behind the District of Columbia – to award any funding).(GDOT has had roughly 16 million dollars to spend on SRTS infrastructure projects in the state for – heck – 4 plus years).

And we lost. GDOT decided to award the grants based on congressional districting (I’m on the state SRTS Advisory Committee and we fought that hard). Meaning GDOT awarded one grant per the 13 Congressional Districts instead of ranking all the grants together and picking the top ten or whatever. I “heard” that Decatur didn’t get a grant because we were already doing so well and “they” needed to spread the money around……

Plus they capped the grants at $500,000.00 each and the Atlanta Ave crossing was going to be more than that and the GDOT was not too interested in Decatur trying to break it out into two phases and applying for two grants.

There are a lot more details to this and I’ve gone way too deep (probably) for a lot of readers. We actually backed off of going after Atl. Ave directly with GDOT SRTS and applied for smaller projects, but that intersection was our original target.

Go look at the concept drawing of the Atlanta Ave. intersection in the Community Transportation Plan, you’ll see a very nice overhead before/after concept drawing of it. I think we may apply for it in the next TE grant cycle, but I’m not sure exactly when that is – and the GDOT is out of funds now anyway.

We also have a TE grant to do a Road Diet on West Ponce from the Fernbank bridge to the Post Office – going from 4 travel lanes to 3 with bike lanes and some parking along the sides. We submitted the final documents long ago and have yet to receive the funds. I spoke with GDOT’s Chief Engineer/Interim Commissioner last June and he assured me the project would “happen soon”, but I’ve since found out that GDOT just doesn’t have the funds right now….that Road Diet should have been completed over a year ago!

I could go on about this for some time……