MODERN TIMES
Art Hobson
ahobson@uark.edu
NWA Times 28 Mar 2009
Mass transit
should lead the Regional Mobility Authority's agenda
Phil
Pumphrey had bad news for the 50 people gathered a few weeks ago at Springdale
City Hall. They had turned
out to discuss future plans for route 43, Ozark Regional Transit's least-used
route in Springdale. Phil directs
ORT. Last January, the Springdale
City Council approved $160,000 for ORT's 2009 Springdale operations,
considerably short of the $247,000 needed. Declaring it "a shame," and observing that
"many of our passengers depend upon us for their sole source of
transportation to get to work, school, and medical care," Pumphrey had to
announce that route 43 would shut down.
Many
attendees came from Mill Creek Apartments, a senior citizens' complex on route
42--another route that some folks thought would be cut. Alice Hale, Mill Creek Apartment
manager, said she was "thinking of the over-55 crowd. Don't take away their
independence. That's the last
thing they have left."
An
ORT pass costs $30 per month, $360 per year, half that if you're over 65. If Northwest Arkansas had a dense mass
transit system moving rapidly up and down the two-county region, with numerous
routes extending throughout our regional cities, a transit pass would be many
people's ticket to the grocery store, drugstore, bank, malls, doctor, and so
forth. People who can't afford a
car, or who are too old or young or infirm to drive, would have hugely expanded
horizons. All of us could save a
fortune. Compare $360 per year
with the $8,000 that the American Automobile Association informs us is the
annual cost of owning one car.
With a dense transit system, we all would have the option of living
without a car, or perhaps of reducing from two cars to one. This would be like getting an $8000
raise.
Washington
and Benton counties recently organized a Regional Mobility Authority, a public
entity that should, if its name means anything, pay attention to ORT's funding
shortages and to the need for a dense regional transit network. Yet the only RMA projects so far
mentioned are a Bella Vista bypass, a Springdale bypass, widening I-540 to
eight lanes, and a "western beltway" paralleling I-540 several miles
to the west, a sprawl magnet that seems primarily geared toward creating
profitable highway frontage for real estate fat cats and that will change
Northwest Arkansas massively and forever.
These projects will average several hundred million dollars each. Our man in Washington, Rep. John
Boozman, has already secured a $605,000 federal earmark for a western beltway
feasibility study. Yet a few years
ago Boozman was unable to find roughly this same amount for a feasibility study
for light rail through Northwest Arkansas, a system that could form the
backbone of a real transit network.
We should forget the beltway study, and replace it with the rail
study.
The
RMA needs to drop its "all roads all the time" pre-occupation and pay
attention to mass transit. If the
RMA is really interested in regional mobility then buses and trains should be
at the top of its list. Instead of
a feasibility study for yet another highway, the RMA needs to focus on the
needs of non-drivers, it needs to ask how working people can get to their jobs
without the budget-breaking expense of commuting by car, and it needs to use
transit, trails, and smart planning to provide alternatives to expensive
clogged highways.
A
continuing annual appropriation of $10 million would establish a real bus
network. This is only four-tenths
of one percent of the $2.5 billion that the region spends every year on its
cars. The RMA can raise money only
through road tolls and sales taxes, so the money would need to come from sales
taxes. I'm not a fan of sales
taxes because they hit the poor unfairly, but a sales tax for transit would be
a good deal for the poor and everybody else. I estimate that one-sixth of a cent of regional sales tax
would bring in the needed $10 million per year.
Besides
a bus network, the other project that should top the RMA's priorities is
commuter rail. Passenger rail is
coming back to America. President
Obama's stimulus package includes $8 billion for fast passenger trains. I'm hoping this will go into a single
high-performance route, such as Washington D.C. to Boston or San Diego to San
Francisco, that will furnish the kind of brilliant example to the nation that
the high-speed Paris-to-Lyon route furnished for France nearly three decades
ago. It's likely that, as happened
in France, the rest of the nation will quickly follow this example. A high-speed corridor from San Antonio
to Little Rock to Memphis has been discussed. In January, Fayetteville requested federal funds for a
feasibility study for Amtrak service from Little Rock to Fayetteville. Light rail for Northwest Arkansas is
blowin' in the wind, and it's eminently practical.
What's
needed is the better part of a million dollars for a feasibility study of light
rail on the existing Arkansas-Missouri Railroad right of way from Greenland to
Bentonville. We need this study
soon, to head off more of the mind-numbing sprawl already seen along I-540 and
to pull the region into a more focused whole. A western beltway, on the other hand, is the opposite of
what's needed. Rep. Boozman and
members of the RMA: Are you
listening?
Forward Fayetteville, the city's economic summit to plan for a sustainable future, happens this coming week and all day next Saturday. I'll be out of town and must miss it. I hope you'll go, and I hope people discuss regional mass transit.