Choose How You Move with Nashville’s New Transportation Plan

Nashville / iStock Photo/SeanPavonePhoto

Getting around Nashville is about to get a whole lot easier for residents.

Choose How You Move, Nashville’s transportation improvement program, is accelerating changes to transportation infrastructure to:

• Create neighborhoods where it’s safer to cross the street
• Make it more affordable for people to get around
• Make improvements so people riding a bus can get places faster than driving a car

The $3.1 billion plan is funded by a half-cent sales tax that was approved by 66% of the city’s voters in a November 2024 referendum.

“It’s hard to get 66% of people to agree on where to go to lunch,” says Michael Briggs, deputy chief program officer for Choose How You Move. “Our residents have experienced so much growth from about 2015 on, but not a lot of solutions for getting around the city. It became evident that we needed to do something now.”

Courtesy of Metropolitan Government of Nashville & Davidson County

Plenty of planning has gone into the changes now funded through Choose How You Move, with more than 70 planning processes and 66,000 inputs from tens of thousands of residents over the last decade. The challenge wasn’t identifying the needs. It was funding and executing the changes. Now, the funding mechanism exists to make a modern, multimodal transportation infrastructure a reality.

“Some of this is implementing plans that were already in place, but we also look at factors including safety concerns and proximity to schools,” says Sabrina Sussman, chief program officer for the program.

Safer Streets: Investing in Sidewalks and Walkability

About 86 miles of new sidewalks are already being installed, Sussman says, and the changes will eventually affect every resident.

“They did a really great job in the referendum, saying transportation affects every single person’s day-to-day life, and you have access to a future funded by this referendum,” says Sussman. “Whether you’re walking on a sidewalk, biking or taking transit, the entire community deserves these investments.”

Protecting Quality of Life for a Growing Region

With almost 3 million residents expected to call the Nashville Region home in the next 20 years, the Choose How You Move strategy helps Middle Tennesseans enjoy the benefits of growth while protecting and advancing the quality of life for longtime residents and newcomers.

According to the community-led planning process, Imagine Nashville, 90% of residents agree that investing in citywide public transportation is an important priority for the future, and 84% supported holding the transportation referendum.

Sussman, who has worked on transportation initiatives in places like Washington, D.C., and New York City, sees momentum growing for initiatives that prioritize quality of life for people getting around their communities every day, particularly as growth brings new challenges along with big benefits.

“I think it’s exciting that Nashville is voting with their feet and saying, ‘These are investments we want to make,'” she says. “It feels like the stars have aligned.”