Kern COG (California) Receives Prestigious USDOT Best Practices Certification

The USDOT (specifically the FTA and FHWA) recently reviewed and evaluated Kern COG’s transportation planning process. The intent of the certification review was to focus on the agency’s compliance with certain aspects of MAP-21 and strategic FTA and FHWA initiatives.

As a result of the review, the FTA and FHWA jointly certified that the metropolitan planning process performed by Kern COG substantially meets requirements. The review resulted in no corrective actions being taken or recommended.

Among the positive comments made by the regulators, Kern COG’s planning process:

• Provides outstanding public involvement for LRTP development

• Provides excellent use of visualization tools in the planning process

• Provides extensive, detailed, well-written documentation in the scope of their metropolitan transportation planning process

• Provides a comprehensive traffic counting program used in their CMP

Kern COG’s largest city is Bakersfield. The region has a population of 839,000. Kern COG is an MS2 client. They use MS2’s traffic count database system to map, manage and analyze traffic count data from more than 2500 collection stations in the region.