By Caleb O. Brown
Contributing Writer (Louisville Eccentric Observer)
Louisville will build a rapid transit line in the next 10 years. That's a given. Proponents say it will address the problems of air pollution and workforce development, as well as play a role in re-creating an urban landscape that mixes residences with local businesses and reduces dependence on automobiles.
But evidence from consultants hired by TARC and others who study the matter provides only the mildest indication that rapid transit will help reduce pollution and bolster the workforce. And further evidence from the widely touted light-rail experience in Portland, Ore., also provides little proof that Louisville can achieve the delicate mix of transit and land-use regulation, because, according to many observers, the jury is still out on whether Portland has achieved those goals.
To the people selling rapid transit in Louisville, though, all of those points are easily dismissed. Though TARC officials are vague about what will constitute "success" for rapid transit in Louisville, they are resolute in saying that a true conclusion likely can't be drawn for 10 or 15 years after the system is built. CALEB O. BROWN tries to take a look into the future.
Last July 15, moments before the executive board of TARC voted to institute a "rapid transit" system in Louisville, one board member raised concerns about how the proposed system would be oriented. The proposed system would be a single line running along a north-south corridor. However, the board member asserted, the most popular TARC line runs east-west. But his comments were quickly forgotten in the bevy of camera flashes that captured the eventual decision.
The questions now being debated in the second phase of TARC's $1.5 million Major Investment Study (MIS) are those of engineering and land-use planning - the hows of rapid transit. There will be rapid transit in Louisville: TARC Executive Director Barry Barker said if everything goes right, the system could be operational in 2007.
Questions about the expected benefits, however, remain.
Probably the most important decision facing TARC is whether its rapid transit system will consist of light rail or bus rapid transit (see definitions, opposite page). Phase I of TARC's MIS lays out what is likely to happen with either choice. Aligned with I-65, either would provide a new connection between many of the attractions along the line. TARC officials hope it also will serve as a backbone for future developments. At the southernmost end of the north-south line would be a park-and-ride lot for commuters, who would then take the rail line the rest of the way to their destination. There will be stops at UPS/Fern Valley Road, Louisville International Airport, the Southern Heights neighborhood, Papa John's Cardinal Stadium, the University of Louisville Student Activities Center, and on to downtown, where the line loops. Both would have exclusive right of way, though only light rail will be separate and distinct from automobile traffic.
Although no decision has been reached on the type of rapid transit to be built, there's a sense that light rail will prevail.
And proponents of that option don't seem to mind that it is expected to cost as much as $150 million more than bus rapid transit, or that it is projected to have fewer riders. People who are active in the debate say perception is very important to the issue.
"Perception is a very real thing, and it affects people's behaviors in a very significant way," said David Coyte of New Albany, who belongs to the Committee for the Advancement of Regional Transit (CART), a group that has long promoted light rail in Louisville. Coyte argues the public has a favorable perception of light rail, and he said that's why CART supports light rail over bus rapid transit. Ad-Additionally, Coyte said buses are perceived as being less safe than light rail vehicles, which look and act more like trains.
Aside from being more friendly to commuters, TARC Executive Director Barry Barker said, light rail is simply more romantic than buses. In an interview last year on "Community Roundup" on WHKW radio, Barker said of the community response: "Most of the reactions have been that light rail thrills people's souls, and buses they're not so sure about."
The public seems largely confused about the matter, thanks in part to local media and other high profile people who have discussed it publicly. Tom Owen, who made an unsuccessful bid to become mayor, made light rail a plank in his platform. A Courier-Journal Bluegrass State Poll indicated 76 percent of Jefferson County residents support the light rail option, although bus rapid transit was not mentioned. Even LEO Editor John Yarmuth, shortly after the July decision to build rapid transit, declared Louisville had committed itself to spending millions on light rail. Light rail in Portland, Ore. and St. Louis has provided examples for supporters to ogle. In this case, what many supporters treat as a foregone conclusion is a decision that is still many months away.
Though it's easy to forgive the public for not knowing what's at issue in the debate on transit in Louisville, the pursuit of good public policy might make it wise to insist on more direct evidence of the eventual benefits, especially for a capital project that may demand $450 million, the bulk from public funds. But that may or may not be forthcoming.
TARC officials said rapid transit will primarily address problems that include traffic congestion (particularly on Interstates 264, 65 and 64) and the resulting air quality problems. It also is meant to aid workforce development, and connect an increasingly diffused (low-density) metro population.
RAPID TRANSIT: POLLUTION SOLUTION?
Mary Lou Northern chairs the TARC board of directors. She said bottlenecks on freeways in Louisville reduce traffic speed and have increased air pollution in Louisville. Northern said rapid transit is the answer.
"This community struggles every year with meeting federal guidelines for air pollution control," said Northern. "It hurts our ability to get some business and some federal money. That's going to get worse unless something is done about it."
By federal money, Northern means highway improvements that could play a role in relieving congestion. She said she feels the pinch of traffic congestion every day when she drives into the city from the South End.
"I see the congestion at 264 and 65 every morning and every afternoon. You sit there and you sit there. Five years ago you didn't sit there."
Northern said she's confident the planned rapid transit line will alleviate air pollution, and therefore lighten the burden of controlling it.
"The major contributor to air pollution is the automobile, and the only solution to that is a rapid transit system," she said.
However, many others, even some who conducted research for TARC, have less enthusiasm for characterizing rapid transit as the "solution" to air quality problems. "If you're looking to transit to fix your air quality problems, you're going to be very disappointed," said Shawn Dikes, a transportation planner with Parsons Brinkerhoff in Louisville. Dikes, who was the lead consultant on the first phase of TARC's Major Investment Study, said transit should be part of the mix for improved air quality, but he said fixing air pollution problems can be tricky.
"It's not a silver bullet cure," he said. "There's a whole host of things you have to consider that are part of that big picture. To get people out of their car, there has to be an option. Transit has to be convenient. Travel time has got to be competitive. It's hard to compete with gas prices that are (adjusted for inflation) the lowest in recorded history."
Dikes said developing a rapid transit system is a step in the right direction because it creates an additional option. He argues getting people out of their cars can only begin to occur when there is an alternative, and he said rapid transit is a good one.
However, he said, the only way air pollution can be measurably reduced is to lower the number of "cold starts," or the times a vehicle's catalytic converter must warm up to catch pollutants before they are released. He said Louisvillians are making an ever-increasing number of inter-county trips, and that very few people merely go to work and then back home. And multiple trips cause more cold starts.
"People drop the kids off at daycare, they drop off dry cleaning, they run a lot of errands," Dikes said. "It's tough to develop transit service for those types of trips."
Some critics have said that despite the hefty price tag and touted benefits, rapid transit will do absolutely nothing to curb congestion or measurably impact air quality in the region.
"Violations of EPA air pollution standards are almost perfectly correlated with population density and congestion," said Randal O'Toole, head of Oregon's Thoreau Institute, a public policy research institution specializing in conservation and environmental issues.
O'Toole said cars pollute more in congested traffic, and that congestion increases with population density. The EPA currently rates Louisville as a moderate "ozone nonattainment" area in terms of air pollution, a problem O'Toole said would not be lessened by rapid transit.
"In 1990, only 3.2 percent of Louisville commuters rode transit to work, while 94 percent drove," O'Toole said. "Even doubling transit ridership, which rapid transit would not do, will have an insignificant effect, as more than 90 percent of commuters would still be driving."
And even driving may not pose the environmental problems light rail proponents would like to believe. The study commissioned by TARC, conducted by Parsons Brinckerhoff and other consulting firms, showed, "a steady improvement in air quality in the region during the 1980s and 1990s despite significant increases in travel.
"Improvement in mobile source emissions have been due primarily to cleaner engines," the report said, and "improved emission control systems, cleaner fuels, vehicle fleet turnover, and more rigorous vehicle inspection, testing and maintenance programs."
The study did say air pollution problems persist in Louisville despite the improved air quality, and that as of July 1998, the Louisville region already had one ozone violation for the year. The study noted, however, that occurrences of ozone violations were more frequent and severe in years before 1998.
GET ME TO WORK ON TIME!!
There's a clear relationship between air pollution and workforce development Northern asserted that being labeled an ozone nonattainment area hurts Louisville's job outlook. And, although it seems unclear how rapid transit would specifically address air pollution problems, Northern said industry leaders have focused their attention on how such a system would help them get workers to their jobs. She said about 40 percent of the region's jobs lie within an area serviceable by the proposed rapid transit.
"With the growth of UPS and the growth in the medical center, this community needs more workers," said Northern. "(Businesses are) going out into rural areas to bring those workers in. If you can make it easier for people who are coming into this county to work at their jobs, and they will be able to with this changed system, it's going to be a big boost to workforce development."
TARC's goal in conducting a Major Investment Study, focused on a single corridor of the city, was to connect a large share of the region's jobs. An important question raised by critics, however, is how far those jobs, or the workers, will be from transit stops.
"How many of those jobs or residents are going to be within a quarter-mile of a station?" asked Wendell Cox of the Cox Consultancy, which crunches numbers for every major public transit system in the country.
Cox said most research indicates people are willing to walk only a quarter-mile to reach a transit station, a figure confirmed by Dikes. Beyond that, Cox said, people would rather get in their cars. Based on that notion, Cox said a transit "corridor" cannot feasibly be wider than a half-mile (a quarter-mile strip on each side of the transit stop).
"They aren't corridors, they're nodes," said Cox. "I'm finishing up a report on the Dallas transit system where they're building a light rail system. When they're finished, they'll have about 53 miles of light rail. In fact, there will only be 41 stations. So the land area that will be within walking distance of those 41 stations will be 8 square miles.
"That's out of a 700-square-mile service area. You can't look at wide corridors. It's absolutely meaningless. It's a trick that people trying to sell overly expensive projects use."
Cox admitted his own experience has jaded him somewhat. It was an amendment he attached to a tax measure, two decades ago when he served on the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission, that provided the funds for light rail there. Cox said the Los Angeles light rail system is among the worst in the country, with huge cost overruns and pitiful ridership.
Cox said Louisville's rail system should expect lower-than-projected ridership because transportation planners have created unrealistic transit corridors. He said workers are concerned about saving time in getting to work, and are much less concerned with saving gas or money. Even the most fervent supporters of rapid transit agree that commuters are primarily concerned with time.
Cox said the phrase "rapid transit" is disingenuous.
"My view is rapid transit should be fast," he said. "As far as I'm concerned, anyone that tells you light rail is rapid transit is lying to you. Period." To support that assertion, Cox said the average speed of the fastest light rail system in the country is 18 miles per hour.
"According to the Texas Transportation Institute, which does this work for the Federal Highway Administration each year, the average freeway speed in Louisville during peak hours is 52 miles an hour," said Cox. "The average speed for an arterial street, that is a signalized street, is 28 miles an hour. So, light rail is a little bit more than half as fast as an arterial street."
Northern said that, although commute time is an obvious concern, it shouldn't be the only one, especially given the lengthy timetable of the project. Northern said commutes will become steadily more time-consuming over the next several years, and she contends Louisville cannot pave its way out of growing congestion problems.
"The thing I tell people is that they need to think differently about rapid transit than they think about buses or cars," she said. "You have to think 10 years or 20 years out. You can't think, `If this is built tomorrow, what does it mean to my drive time?' The main thing is that you can't think of traffic and you can't think of accessibility right now. Though some of the data comes from today's figures, you have to really think 10 or 20 years out."
Given the expected increases in commute times, Northern said she sees transit centers as potential mixtures of commercial and residential development. That, Northern said, will get people to go the extra distance to get to a transit stop.
"If I were a nurse at the medical center and I lived at the Bullitt County line, I could drive to the park and ride lot and get downtown," said Northern. "What if I needed some groceries or needed to drop off some dry cleaning, or I needed to stop at a drugstore to get some medicine before I went home? What happens around transit centers is that type of development. As the nurse going home, I could make that stop on foot, buy all the things I need, get on the rapid transit, go out to the park-and-ride lot and go home." Evidence is mixed on whether transit can yield the developments Northern has predicted. As Bill Sexton, director of TARC's Transportation Tomorrow (T2) has said, TARC simply can't control every aspect of this project.
COOPERATION AND THE CORNERSTONE
Very little can be confidently predicted about what TARC's rapid transit will bring to Louisville without considering the work of Cornerstone 2020. Although the controversial project has been dogged by media and government for being too expensive, too slow and poorly centered, it bears repeating that many of the numbers used by TARC to make its projections have come from Cornerstone.
Sexton said it's vital for the transit plan to be coordinated with Cornerstone 2020 if there is to be successful implementation of transit development. Moreover, if development along transit lines can take hold, Cornerstone must zone many areas in the county for mixed-used developments, which would allow residents and commerce to coexist - and hopefully thrive from one another. But Sexton said TARC ridership projections aren't dependent on Cornerstone data, so any eventual development along rapid transit lines would be a bonus if it increased ridership.
TARC officials take pains to point out that any benefits of rapid transit in Louisville will be seen 15 or 20 years from now. That makes some of the transit agency's predictions seem speculative, but Barker said any public investment that is implemented over many years requires that type of speculation. He is confident, however, that Louisville will ultimately be satisfied with the investment.
"I've joked with some friends that the opening of the system will be May 5, 2008, at noon," said Barker. "Following the ribbon-cutting will be a reception, and we're mailing out invitations next week. Of course, that's tongue in cheek, but we'll do the best we can to make it as exact as possible."
