By Benjamin Rothstein

DOVER — The Dover/Kent County Metropolitan Planning Organization has completed the initial input phase of Innovations 2050, an examination of the next 25 years of transportation infrastructure in the area.

The group revealed its findings at a public workshop Thursday at the Camden-Wyoming Fire Co.

The main form of data collection for this first section was dubbed the “money game,” in which participants received fictional money to allocate to various project categories. An online version of the game was available, as well.

The game had 967 players, most of whom participated in person, though some input came from a traditional online survey.

Forty-eight percent of the respondents were over age 55, likely because that age group was typically more willing to take time to play the game, said public outreach manager Helen Wiles.

The 36-to-55-year-old group was the second-highest demographic to participate, with 18-35 and below 18 tied for third. About 1% did not give an age.

Categories in which to spend the “money” included fixing roads, building roads, public transit, sidewalks and crosswalks, bike paths, passenger rail service, traffic-calming initiatives, new technology, driver’s education and air quality.

The most popular category was fixing roads, which initially bewildered staff, as they felt that Delaware’s streets, especially compared to neighboring states’, tend to be higher quality, executive director Marilyn Smith said.

But “what fixing roads means to me is not the same as what fixing roads means to someone else,” she noted.

Principal planner Michael Petit de Mange agreed.

"Some of our partners that we met with, the municipal and the county folks, they pointed out very specific roads that lack shoulders, that lack sidewalks, that lack, adequate bicycle (lanes), comfort, and to them, fixing the road means you're building shoulders, incorporating sidewalks that provide linkage from where I'm at to where I want to go," said Mr. Petit de Mange.

There were two other categories that placed near the top: driver’s education and air quality. They were first and second place, respectively, in the under-18 bracket, the only group besides “no age reported” that did not have fixing roads as No. 1.

Passenger rail services ranked highly, as well.

“What’s interesting is, under the age of 18, they still found driver’s ed to be important. ... I think that says something, ... that driver’s ed was not necessarily just for kids learning to drive,” Ms. Wiles said. “It was also for teaching people how to do things like navigate roundabouts because we are getting a lot of new roundabouts in the next few years.

“And there’s a lot of people who are very trepidatious when they’re approaching roundabouts, primarily because they aren’t really sure about what they’re supposed to do when they get up to one.”

Innovations 2050 is updated by the planning organization every four years and is meant to guide elected officials on decisions about transportation needs.

The next step is the plan development phase, where the MPO uses this research, along with other studies and models meant to predict the growth of Kent County over the next 25 years.

The organization will present that draft at a workshop in September, followed by other opportunities for public review, with final adoption in January 2025.