A plan aimed at facilitating more efficient transportation for Ames residents was presented before the Ames City Council at its biweekly meeting Tuesday night.

Dubbed “Ames Mobility 2040,” the new transportation plan is a project that was spearheaded by The Ames Area Metropolitan Planning Organization.

According to the plan’s executive summary, Ames Mobility 2040 is a 25-year plan aimed at developing an “integrated intermodal transportation system that facilitates the efficient movement of people and goods.”

Ames Mobility 2040 is to be a collection of policies, programs and projects that are reasonably spread out over the next several years. 

“There’s a lot of projects we went through. We looked through almost 100 projects,” said Jason Carbee, transportation planner for the city of Ames. 

The first planning stage of Ames Mobility 2040 included community vision, environmental screening, travel demand studies and cost estimates that all included some sort of vision and data collecting. AAMPO used several sets of data in this stage, including mobile phone location data. 

Damion Pregitzer, a traffic engineer, said the data analysis company AirSage provided high-level analysis from anonymous cell phone time stamp data to use along with actual traffic counts in the Ames area. This data helped the city analyze when people were commuting, where they were commuting to and how long their commute times were.

Pregitzer also said the time stamp data must be taken into consideration carefully since the established “home” area is often directly on campus for ISU students. 

The second phase of the plan included community input and technical analysis. The population within the AAMPO area is expected to grow by 35 percent during the next 25 years, and the area employment is expected to grow by 39 percent. Growth forecasts such as these were used to shape the extent of the plan.

The third phase, which was called the alternative assessment stage, included discussing the other options for each project, policy or program that may exist. The alternative assessment stage also included community feedback in the form of online workshops and committees.

The fourth and final stage is the actual planning of the individual projects, policies or programs.

The Long Range Transportation Plan will be due for an update every three years to make sure that any changes in the community are taken into account before further plans are made for transportation projects and policies.