Local transportation officials voted on Monday in favor of developing a new plan for managing school time traffic.

“It’s no secret, especially if you took part in Power Monday this morning taking your children to school, that obviously we do have a traffic problem here in Spring Hill,” said Alderman Chad Whittenburg, chairman of the Transportation Advisory Committee. “And it’s situated around school areas.”

“I think it was myself and (Alderman) Jonathan (Duda) were having a discussion about traffic. I think Jonathan made the analogy that the Titans and Predators move traffic quickly when they dump 40,000-60,000 people out. So why can’t we come up with a plan around each one of these schools that deals with traffic circulation patters, flipping red lights on and off, whatever it may be.”

Whittenburg said the city of Spring Hill will partner with the schools and with local law enforcement to have a discussion on how to move traffic in and out of the schools in a quicker fashion.

The initial scope of work included Summit High School and Longview Elementary School, but Whittenburg said that Thompson’s Station is open to working with Spring Hill, so both of the Heritage schools may be added as well.

“So what we’re going to do initially, because each site has own challenges, it’s not going to be one size fits all for all three sites,” said Brad Thompson, of Volkert Inc. “The initial scope will be to go observe what’s going on. Before we do anything at all we’ve got to figure out what the issues are and then start to brainstorm and strategize about what the solutions could be. Like you said, that’s going to involve several people from the school board, Thompson’s Station, the City of Spring Hill.”

Thompson said it will all begin with doing observations to see what the big issues are at each school site. Then Volkert will need to come back to the city with information on the issues and figure out how to fix them.

“There are any of number of ways you can go about doing it,” he said. “You mentioned a lot of times it may be a matter of – and I know we’ve used this in the past at Buckner Lane and Thompson’s Station Road – putting an officer out there and helping people get through the intersection. There could be a need for additional traffic signals out here, there could be a need of rerouting some things, there could be a need for any number of things for potential solutions. But before we can get to that point obviously we have to go out and figure out what the real issue is.”

One possible solution Whittenburg suggested, that the school board also recommends, is called “the yellow limousine.” Buses in Williamson County, he said, run at only about 70 percent capacity. Officials would like more parents to use the buses to increase capacity and decrease the number of cars on the road.

Spring Hill’s Transportation Advisory Committee voted unanimously to recommend developing a school traffic management strategy with consultant firm Volkert Inc. to the Board of Mayor and Alderman.

Quint Qualls covers Spring Hill for Home Page Media Group. Reach him at quint@springhillhomepage.com.