Access Management
The City of Bowling Green uses the concept of access management to help alleviate traffic and safety concerns and ensure a viable future roadway network. Access Management is defined as the controlling of access and roadway geometrics for any connection to the City of Bowling Green’s transportation network. The primary goals of Access Management are to improve roadway safety, improve traffic operations, protect taxpayer’s investments in our roads, and create better conditions for pedestrians.
Access Management is often accomplished through techniques such as restricting driveways, medians, connectivity, and deceleration and acceleration lanes. By controlling access on roadways, conflict points between motorists and/or pedestrians are reduced. In addition, the capacity of the roadway can be maintained.
Access restrictions are based upon the functional classification of the roadway. For example, local neighborhood streets are designed to provide access to and from the property abutting them.
Less access restrictions would be placed on these types of streets. Major arterial streets are designed to carry higher volumes of traffic farther and at greater speeds in order to get them from one place to another. Access must be minimal along a roadway such as this in order to achieve this goal. Roadways falling in between these classifications have to provide an ideal balance between access and mobility in order to ensure desirable through traffic movement. The correlation between access, movement and functional classification of roadways is illustrated in the following figure. Roadways are classified according to the amount of traffic traveling on them. Bowling Green has incorporated a street classification system which is shown on the Bowling Green Access Management Guidelines have been adopted with these street classifications in mind. These guidelines can be found in the Traffic Management Manual. The must also approve access to any state maintained roadways within the city.