Bozeman transportation board adopts 2026–27 work plan, greenlights safety projects

The Bozeman Transportation Advisory Board voted April 22 to adopt its 2026–27 work plan, endorsing a set of planning, capital and policy priorities that staff say will drive the city's transportation investments over the next two years. The motion to approve the plan passed by voice vote.

The work plan frames board tasks around governance, planning, capital projects and parking policy, and ties into two major initiatives staff highlighted: a federally funded Safe Streets for All Safety Action Plan and a series of near-term traffic-safety projects. Director of Transportation and Engineering Nick Ross told the board that the Oak & Ferguson signal improvement project has been bid and awarded and will appear on the City Commission consent agenda May 5 for final approval so the contractor can begin work this year. "That project has been bid and awarded," Ross said, adding the improvements will add missing left-turn lanes and protected left-turn phasing.

Ross said the Safe Streets for All grant has funded both the city's safety action plan and two demonstration projects. "Kittelson Associates will be our lead consultant," he said, and the city will use a platform supplied by a firm called Citian to aggregate crash data from the police department and state sources to help identify clusters and problem areas. Ross described a second demonstration that will install additional intersection detection software at eight signalized intersections to analyze red-light running, speeding and near-miss conflicts. He emphasized the work is for planning and analysis only: "It won't be used for warnings and certainly not citations," Ross said, noting state law bars enforcement cameras.

The board also heard details about the neighborhood traffic calming program. Ross said staff narrowed 16 eligible applications to eight projects that met all criteria for immediate implementation; the remaining eight applications will be addressed through other programs such as uncontrolled-intersection work or Safe Routes to School. He told the board the city plans roughly 18 installations by May—adding eight new projects to 10 legacy projects—and will begin post-installation data collection in June, followed by an end-of-year report.

On sign control, Ross said staff identified roughly "a little over 400, 450 or so" stop signs that could be needed citywide and proposed a programmatic approach to place two-way stop control by neighborhood, targeting a minimum of 50 sign installations per year subject to sign-and-signal division capacity. He described the approach as a way to move faster without doing a full engineering study at every intersection: "We took a programmatic or systemic approach so that we can justify where two-way stop control is valid and how to implement that without dragging this thing on for years."

Board members asked about timing and next steps. Ross said the Citian platform implementation will begin after contracts are approved next month, signal equipment will be installed soon after, and the safety plan itself will be completed in about a year to align with the city's Transportation Master Plan update. The board also approved minutes for January–March 2026 earlier in the meeting.

The plan now gives staff a framework for advancing TMP-related studies, capital design work and parking-policy items such as curb management and downtown parking improvements. Staff said they will return with project-level prioritization details and data collection as those efforts proceed.