Light rail: visionary or too soon?
Posted on Sunday, May 4, 2008
Getting light rail on track in Northwest Arkansas to solve daily bumper-to-bumper commutes and rising gas prices is either visionary planning or putting the cart before the horse.
"At $ 4 per gallon, probably people are going to be thinking about it (light rail ) a little more carefully," Ron Goforth, president of Beta-Rubicon Inc., a firm that specializes in independent technology assessment services.
Some area residents, including Goforth, argue that planning for light rail now only makes sense as Interstate 540 is consumed by increasing traffic and commercial development.
"If you have an opportunity to anticipate future problems and pre-empt them or reduce their negative impact by taking early action, it seems prudent to think ahead," he said. "It's fast, it's cheap, it's comfortable. It's where the future needs to be."
Others say Northwest Arkansas doesn't have enough population density to support light rail and it is far too expensive.
"I think everybody would be in favor of light transit if need could be demonstrated and if it was feasible and practical and cost effective," Jeff Hawkins, director of the Northwest Arkansas Regional Planning Commission, said. "But we haven't got to that point yet."
"The main problem is everybody thinks light rail is the solution to the traffic problem. It's very sexy," Phil Pumphrey, executive director of Ozark Regional Transit, said.
He said by "sexy"he meant that people will turn out for meetings about light rail and that people who won't ride a bus will ride a train.
"But, if you can't get people to ride the buses, why would you want to spend more money on a rail system when you haven't demonstrated usage ? "he asked.
In the meantime, residents of Fayetteville and other Northwest Arkansas communities commute daily from Washington County to Benton County and back again, squeezing into a hole in the traffic from the on-ramps and often at a standstill on the off-ramps as traffic backs up onto the interstate. How big is big enough ?
Cities that have light rail tend to be easily recognizable because they are among the country's largest: Dallas, Kansas City, Phoenix, Minneapolis, Boston, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Philadelphia.
The United States Census Bureau in March estimated the population of the Fayetteville-Springdale-Rogers Metropolitan Statistical Area at 435, 714.
Steve Luoni, director of the University of Arkansas Community Design Center, said in the past - 20 or 30 years ago - calculations about the feasibility of light rail said only major metro- politan areas could support it. That was when the technology was expensive and gas was cheap, he said.
Of the approximately 60 regions that have light rail, about half are brand new, Luoni said, and many have a similar population density to Northwest Arkansas. "Our density is not conducive in terms of transit," Pumphrey said. The national standard to even consider a fixed bus route is seven residential units per acre, he said. "You see arguments up here, I'm talking in the urban area, about whether they ought to allow four units to the area," Hawkins said.
Luoni maintains rail lines influence land use. He said, as it has in other cities, rail would become a catalyst for creating denser, urban land uses around the train stations.
"If we wait another five or 10 or 15 years, our current trends are to spread out, to create low density, and that's going to make mass transit really unfeasible. We can use mass transit now to get to the kind of land use we want to see," he said.
"Does transportation create land use or does the land use necessitate a certain level of transportation ? "Hawkins asked.
He said most people in transportation feel land use needs to warrant the transportation "That build-it-and-they'llcome notion is not what the government is into funding," he said. "A lot of communities now are using transportation to get to the kind of city they want to see. We have it backwards. We can't wait for that to happen or we miss our opportunity," Luoni said.
Costs / benefits No one knows what the cost for light rail would be except that it would be hefty. In 2005, Goforth estimated that a light rail system on the Arkansas-Missouri Railroad right of way with 10 stops between Greenland and the Northwest Arkansas Regional Airport in Highfill would cost as much as $ 1. 24 billion, not including operating costs. Hawkins estimated it could cost $ 1 million just to find out if light rail is or isn't needed in the area.
Goforth argued light rail is feasible and that the sooner the project gets started, the less expensive it will be.
"It could be done. But people have a tendency to instantly glom onto, ' How much is it going to cost when it's fully built ?'"Goforth said. "In 20 years, we could have invested $ 1 billion or $ 1. 2 billion dollars on this, but that's less than what we're going to be spending on fixes to highway problems."
"I'm for light rail; I'm not against it. But there's a train wreck ahead," Pumphrey said.
"Once you get there (to the rail station ), how are you going to get to where you're going ? "he asked, explaining that rail systems need viable bus systems for support.
Pumphrey said if the area doesn't find a way to fund the existing transit system it will be shutting down when the area is growing.
"You can't build light rail then expect to fix the bus system afterwards. You've got to have a bus system that's vibrant and meeting the community's needs," he said.
Another issue, he said, is "You can't really expect the feds to put up $. 5 million or $ 1 million to fund a light rail when nobody's using mass transit in the corridor to begin with.
Besides design and engineering costs and the physical costs of putting in rails and rail stations and finding cars, there are right-of-way costs, utility relocation and the ongoing costs of operations and maintenance.
Adding to the cost would be improving the bus system to get people to and from the light rail stations, wherever they may be.
Luoni countered that light rail is not just a cost, it is also a benefit because it encourages economic development. He said rail transportation offers peoples a choice in transit, the opportunity to reduce the environmental footprint, helps neighborhood-based merchants and is a way to revitalize communities by encouraging a denser urbanism rather than sprawl.
Dallas Area Rapid Transit (DART ) is a good example, Goforth said.
"Where they have put in hub stations, it has been an enormous economic development driver and revitalization of weak areas. So, there is a big upside," he said.
Goforth said the cost is not either build light rail or improve the highways.
"We're going to have to have both," he said, adding that a feeder system, such as a bus system, is also necessary.
Goforth said the short term solution for immediate demand would be working on getting bus rapid transit (BRT ), but there are very, very different economics in the two concepts.
"They are cheaper and faster on the front end, but much more expensive and less contributors to economic development on the back end," he said.
Because BRT is not a fixed asset like rail would be, developers of commercial complexes don't cluster around a bus station, Goforth said.
Pumphrey said that's its advantage.
"One of the advantages buses have over rail is that if the demographics change and you have to move a rail it's very expensive. But a bus is just a short planning session," he said.
The social impact also needs to be considered, Goforth said.
"The people who bitch and moan and roll on the floor (about the cost of light rail ) are typically wealthy - driving Escalades or something. You're never going to get them out of their Escalades. Bless them; let them drive it. But we all need to think about another segment of our population that is underserved and not as vocal, too," he said.
Yet another factor in cost analysis is looking at what happens if light rail isn't studied and planned for now and becomes necessary in the future.
"In Northwest Arkansas, my personal belief is, we are ideally positioned if we have vision and foresight to capture an opportunity to show how things can be done right, rather than being another one, who 20 years from now, is going to have a catastrophe that we have to solve at 10 times or 20 times the cost," Goforth said.
Next steps Hawkins, as director of the Northwest Arkansas Regional Planning Commission, sent a request to U. S. Rep. John Boozman, U. S. Sen. Blanche Lincoln and U. S. Sen. Mark Pryor earlier this year asking that a northsouth corridor analysis for Northwest Arkansas be considered as an earmark for 2009 funding in the amount of $ 500, 000. That study of travel corridors would include the feasibility of light rail, as well as bus rapid transit and possible solutions to alleviate traffic congestion now and in the future.
"You can't enter into something like this where you have a preconceived conclusion about a particular mode of transportation. You've got to have a problem. You've got to identify the problem. You've got to evaluate the possible solutions to that problem, and then, and only then, is anybody going to listen to any kind of funding request," Hawkins said.
"I don't know," Goforth said when asked what steps need to be taken to advance light rail. "I've often joked with people that the best way to try to move this forward is for us to get together and go out in a field somewhere and slaughter a goat and have a burnt offering or something because rationality doesn't seem to play a whole lot. There are strong vested interests in maintaining the status quo and continuing with highways and opening up more land for conventional real estate development and sprawl."
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