MODERN TIMES

Art Hobson

ahobson@uark.edu

NWA Times 30 Sep 2006

All Aboard!

Lindsley Smith, our excellent state representative, invited the Arkansas House and Senate Committees on Public Transportation to meet here last weekend. The central focus was Northwest Arkansas’ transportation dilemma.

Speakers from the NWA Council and the University of Arkansas Business College spoke about NWA’s rampant growth and the accompanying transportation problems. Marching to business interests’ pro-growth drumbeat, Washington and Benton counties have been growing at a headlong five percent per year, with population nearly doubling from 210,000 in 1990 to about 400,000 this year. Continued five percent growth will take it to 800,000 by 2020.

But will this be a good thing or a bad thing? Business interests don’t like to raise that question. Rapid population growth is unsustainable even in the short run and disastrous in the long run. It’s a boon to real estate interests, but a bust for the quality of life and pocketbook (think rising taxes and rising cost of living) of us average Joes. The foibles of growth are most glaring in our car-dependent transportation system. Proposed solutions such as eight lanes for I-540 and a proposed “western bypass” around I-540 (itself a bypass around U.S. 71) will cost many times more than the funding available to our region and is self defeating because new roadway attracts more cars and thus increases congestion. The much-ballyhooed Pinnacle Hills shoppers’ delight on the highway in Rogers only adds to the chaos. This citadel of consumerism will quickly boost traffic counts from an already crammed 56,000 to 90,000 cars per day--good news for the big box stores but bad news for drivers and for taxpayers who finance the highways.

One good idea from several speakers at the meeting was a proposed regional mobility authority. Subject to popular vote, it could levy regional gasoline taxes for transportation projects, including public transit. The central mistake of America’s transportation policy is our enormous subsidy to automobiles. Drivers pay for only a small fraction of the cost of roads, and a smaller fraction of the true cost of driving including car crashes, pollution, policing, etc. Serious studies (by the Victoria Transport Policy Institute, energy expert Charles Komanoff, the International Center for Technology Assessment, and others) estimate the true cost of driving at $15 to $25 per gallon.

One speaker delivered the bad news that a federal grant for a full-fledged regional rail study was not included in recent federal transportation legislation. A group of rail supporters from NWA traveled to Washington in January to talk with Rep. John Boozman and others about such legislation. Despite Boozman’s apparent backing, our congressional delegation couldn’t obtain even partial funding--$600,000--for a feasibility study. So rail supporters are now looking elsewhere for support.

Jerry Lipka of the A&M Railroad delivered the good news that his company is open to negotiations on sharing their NWA right of way with commuter rail.

Ron Goforth, President of the Beta-Rubicon technology assessment firm that did a small feasibility study of regional rail a few years ago, said that NWA is nearing a transportation crisis. He stressed that we will never solve our transportation problems if we remain addicted to cars.

Phil Pumphrey, director of Ozark Regional Transit, spoke about the growth of bus transit. ORT opened 6 new fixed routes in 2005, obtained greatly increased financial support from NWA cities, and increased its ridership by 20 percent so far this year. Bus systems are dearly needed by elderly, disabled, and low-income people, and desired by those of us who would like to divorce our cars. Pumphrey told us that NWA transit funding is not keeping up with population growth, that the transit budget should be at least four times larger than it is, and that transit in Arkansas should have but does not have state funding.

Steve Luoni of the university’s Community Design Center presented a visually and conceptually delightful case for commuter rail. To the objection that “you’ll never get Arkansans out of their cars,” he responds that Dallas got Texans out of their cars with the successful Dallas Area Rapid Transit system. Even car-crazed Los Angeles is moving toward public transit. Luoni stated that thirty percent of future U.S. housing demand is for denser, walkable, mixed-use development, and that there is a huge demand for urban housing in NWA, a demand rail could help meet but that is inconsistent with the automobile’s omnivorous street and parking requirements. Thus, rail could revitalize NWA’s downtowns. NWA’s linear north-south layout, with every major city on the railroad line, is perfect for public transit. A CDC study found that two-thirds of the region’s population lives within a mile of the railroad, and NWA has the population density needed to support commuter rail.

Commuter rail would: save many lives every year because trains are 30 times safer than cars; reduce air pollution and thus reduce respiratory and other ailments; reduce the carbon emissions that are melting glaciers and enhancing hurricanes; reduce America’s addiction to oil because trains are ten times more energy efficient than cars; save transportation dollars that are currently thrown into the highway black hole; be a boon to the old, the disabled, and the poor; be faster than cars; boost our local economy with healthy development around train stations; discourage sprawl; stimulate many new bus routes; encourage a pedestrian and bicycling orientation; save some people a barrel of money by freeing them from their cars; and enhance riders’ quality of life by making reading, writing, etc., possible while commuting. And it would be FUN.

I’m convinced that this project will happen. It’s only a question of how long it takes us to wake up.