The city of Warrenton is planning a traffic study and is releasing a survey for citizens to voice their opinions on where their concerns are. 

“There’s going to be a pretty large push for public engagement,” said city Director of Operations Jon Struckhoff. “The first thing we’re going to go for on that public engagement piece is going to be an online survey.”

The survey will be open from Feb. 11 to March 28 of this year. 

The survey asks questions like where residents would like to be able to travel without a car, along with ratings on traffic conditions in the city and their concerns about the impact of new housing on traffic. 

Struckhoff stressed further that without engagement from the public, the survey and resulting traffic study would be ineffective. 

“We want to get the public input on what they want to see, and what they’re experiencing, as far as traffic goes, every morning, every afternoon, during lunch time,” said Struckhoff. “We can’t be everywhere all the time, so we’re really looking for the public’s help in trying to identify problem areas.”

The survey will be available online at https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/NN8JT9K and citizens can also fill out a hard copy in person at Warrenton City Hall. 

Struckhoff said with the continued development in the city, traffic has been a growing concern. 

“Every time a development comes in, traffic always comes up as an issue or a concern from citizens,” said Struckhoff. “So we thought that doing a traffic study, … We can kind of see where we need to focus on street widening or street repairs or additional streets.”

Struckhoff said once they have compiled the results from the survey, they are going to examine them to decide which areas and intersections they need to focus on. 

“Number two is we’re going to identify strategic intersections, and we’re going to do traffic counts,” said Struckhoff. 

He said they are also going to look at which intersections have higher crash rates as another deciding factor for where changes need to be made.