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(External link), 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 (External link)oversees the Regional Transportation Plan, What Moves You(External link), 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.
Where we’re at
In September, staff shared a second draft that reflected the feedback we heard on the first draft from May through July. In general, there is a broad support for the policy direction of this plan.
The Planning Commission has requested some additional changes, which staff are working on and will post here by mid-December. You can comment on that draft either by sending staff an email(External link) or during the Planning Commission's public hearing. The hearing is scheduled for February 3, 2025 at 6:30 pm. You can either attend in person at City Hall or online via Zoom. For details, please see the City's website(External link).
The second draft
If you’d like to review the second draft, it’s below in two versions: one that shows tracked changes and one that does not. We have also included a summary of the significant changes between this and the previous draft. If you’d like to learn more about what people told us about the first draft, please scroll down to the next section.
The second draft reflects the feedback we heard on the first draft from May - July. This version was available for the public to comment on in a short survey during September. In general, most people were supportive of the policy direction of this draft.
What we heard about the first draft
From May - July 2024, we shared the first draft with some City advisory committees and the public. Thanks to everyone who took the time to share their thoughts. We’ve compiled what we heard below:
We used this feedback to help shape the second draft of the chapter, above.