Olympia 2045: Transportation

What’s happening?

Every 10 years, the City is required by State law to review and update its Comprehensive Plan. This update will look out to year 2045 to show, among other things, how the City will accommodate new population and employment growth. It is also an opportunity to make sure the Plan and Development Regulations meet current state requirements that may have changed since the last major update of the Plan.

Each chapter of the Comprehensive Plan will be updated individually, with its own public participation process and opportunities to provide feedback.

This page is for the Transportation chapter update. To learn more about the general update process or other chapters, visit our Comprehensive Plan Update home page.

What does the Transportation chapter address?

This chapter will address how we’ll keep people moving even as we experience population growth over the next 20 years. It will incorporate many of the changes and feedback we heard while creating the Transportation Master Plan, which was adopted in 2021. We anticipate that the current vision of “complete streets that move people, not just cars,” will continue to guide the overarching policy structure of the chapter.

What recent plans/work influence this update?

To help implement the 2014 Comprehensive Plan, Olympia created its first-ever Transportation Master Plan, which was adopted in 2021. Where the Comprehensive Plan outlines a vision and broad policies, the Transportation Master Plan shows:

• What we need to build to make the Comprehensive Plan’s vision real, and
• How much of that we can afford to build in the next 20 years, assuming our funding levels remain about the same as they have in recent years.

Olympia is also part of the larger Thurston region. The Thurston Regional Planning Council oversees the Regional Transportation Plan, What Moves You, which was last updated in 2020. This plan is consistent with Olympia’s current plans, and it will influence this update. We also review and share plans with neighboring jurisdictions to ensure that we are consistent with each other.

How to get involved

We anticipate beginning the public participation on the Transportation chapter in spring 2024. Details on how to get involved will be added here as they are available. We look forward to hearing from you!