Rail Renaissance: Transit Is On Track in America's Sun Belt CitiesBy Jane Holtz Kay What do you call it when wild west Dallas ropes in 20-plus miles of light rail? What does it mean when Phoenix and Houston, the largest trackless cities in America, vote in more of the same? And, when the number of urban suitors for federal funds for new streetcar systems doubles in a decade? "If it moves," as the saying went, "it's a movement." And, in this case, it's at least, it's a new wave to restore a mobility that doesn't get stuck in traffic and an urbanity that stops sprawl. The statistics are telling. In the last decade rail ridership has risen 44 percent. The 200 original applications for federal "rail starts" money have almost doubled and expansions of sunbelt, new sunbelt and traditional cities are multiplying. If nothing else, the expanding rail represents a new generation and landmark in the history of streetcar cities. If the 19th century marked the first mass of rail; the gas-poor seventies' fleet of heavy-duty BART and METRO systems, the second; the eighties and the early nineties' pioneering lines from San Diego and Portland, Oregon's don't "Californicate" growth, the third; then today's post-auto cities mark the fourth. Re-stitching their spreading, congested environs with rail is their way to stop sprawl and gridlocked landscapes.
The reasons for the surge are many. High among them is congestion. The old headlines bearing warnings of "The Subway That Ate Houston" are gone, replaced by the clamors on traffic glut. The National League of Cities newspaper, usually more angsty about rutted roads than deteriorating rail, recently noted that local officials considered traffic congestion the third most important issue in making city development decisions. Some 55 percent of these mayors concurred that development had been poorly planned and sprawling. Though hard-pressed, small and yet to adopt good land use planning, the fourth generation transit mobility-seekers are a sign. They demonstrate that more Americans are beginning to question not only the stasis of congestion but the problems of pollution, and the predicament of coming growth spurts. More positively, they evidence the conviction that rail can build livable communities and support a civic center instead of unplanned development. Car-fed bad air and EPA penalties have added to the willingness of such spread cities as Phoenix to pay out local dollars to boost the lagging federal ones. Inch by inch (or sales tax by sales tax vote), such cities have balloted to go beyond poor or no public transportation service. Whether the relatively small sums allotted to light rail transit plus continuing unplanned, free-market-first development can overcome the money pot for roads, the latest rail lines prompt hope. (Indeed, far more hope than many a New Urbanist village remote from them.) ----Expansion Across the Board---If the most improbable of these "trolley jollys" are emerging in the New West, the caravan of new lines rolling off the drawing boards into the Phoenix desert; expanding along the Dallas, Texas, plains; and breaking ground in Salt Lake City have their peers elsewhere. A five-stream train of heritage tourist trains chugs through Tacoma, Washington. The Park Service has plans for Grand Canyon. And the Silicon Valley/San Jose line for the acolytes of the "New Economy" shows the enthusiasm. Even the often-critical Los Angeles Times called that line's ridership impressive despite its 13-year-bumpy ride. The city's rails system has "hit a critical mass," says Dana Gebhard, executive secretary of the Southern California Transit Advocates. "Slowly, I think this will create pressure politically to expand the subway," he adds. Light rail is "a sign of urbanity," planner George Haikalis, president of the Institute for Rational Mobility, puts it citing the development of the Hudson-Bergen line in transit-heavy New Jersey. In addition to the improved New York subway system, he also envisions streetcars replacing bus lines on Manhattan's busier streets. The once-gritty city of Pittsburgh's LRT modernization is also underway with the upgrading of 12 miles and the purchase of 28 new vehicles plus an overhaul of the existing fleet. Though many older cities wobble along (Boston, my own city, is suffering from the Big Dig blues caused by transportation money feeding a 15 billion dollar highway tunnel project). Yet, the will and the way go are reflected in the several thousand people who attended the annual "Rail-Volution" conference in Dallas last year and Denver this month. "Transit-oriented Development is Hot Real Estate," boasted the cover of DART's publication for the 1999 Rail-Volution conference. --Dallas Does It--"Dallas is a new model," says Jeffrey Boothe, head of the Washington-based New Starts Working Group, "You look at what's happening there and the number of housing units within a mile or two of downtown and you see density in Mockingbird or the older parts of the city and you see the role the rail has followed," he observes. "They're mostly trying to create a market by cajoling the private sector to insure that development occurs in the (rail) corridor." Dallas approved and installed just such a 20-mile-line corridor in 1996 and hasn't stopped growing. Light rail ridership is up and though ten and 20-minute mid-day waits are off-putting to urbanites (or at least to this eastern streetcar rider submerged in the isolated Mockingbird station on a warm summer afternoon), the stylish cars, attractive stations, smooth rides -- and boost to the frontier city in the last decade-have made Dallas the mecca. "One of the few cities that's dealing with sprawl," says Sheila Holbrook-White of Texas Civic Action. "One of the things they things they did best after haggling with 13 cities with l.8 million people to join in, is that they started off in the south which is where the most riders are." After providing for this poor, minority population (or, to put it less altruistically, responding to employee demand as well as environmental justice and economic sense), DART's planners moved the line from the high-rise studded center city and spurred outward. While the downtown still struggles along, making rather frail plans to infuse its retail life, stops like the Cedars Station begin to come alive. The stop before the former Sears warehouse now advertises new lofts and a new police station built on its pleasant outskirts. Though Dallasites still burrow like "moles" in their underground tunnels and seldom pace along their well-designed Downtown pedestrian mall, the space is pleasant. Elsewhere there, the urbanization of uptown and the in-fill of old buildings is promising and Dallas citizens have managed to take the pedal off the metal enough to travel by rail to work…to the zoo…to shopping and plan for more of the same. Meanwhile, unfortunately, vast, highway-oriented spaces seem to swell apace, or at double-pace, in the influx of business. While planner Jack Wierzenski, charged with economic development, has managed to up the walkability and organize solid amounts of business, residential and cultural activities, around these often bleak environs, the spread outside the core seems thin, the highway draining. Still, if a visitor from the more urban, life-enhancing rail cores will take home few lessons, the Dallas model inspires its neighbors. Despite ever-widening highways and the opposition of their home-bred majority whip John Tom DeLay, Houston, Austin and other Texas communities have followed the Dallas model as well as Portland and San Diego's to launch rail initiatives, shooting DARTS of their own. --The Phoenix Formula--So, of course, has Phoenix. "Dallas has really embraced light rail," Wulf Grote, project director of Phoenix's LRT comments on his trip to learn light rail tricks from the Big D (along with Portland and San Diego.) "People have recognized that they don't have a lot of options," Grote describes the campaign that launched the new rail. After five grueling political campaigns (one lost by only 122 votes of 10,000 cast), the city voted in the 20-mile Valley Connections system, 34 percent of a $1.billion, 20-year program that also enhanced the bus system. Today, the car-only city is engaged in planning where the rail stations will go. "We've gone from not in my neighborhood to 'what's the station going to look like,'" says Wulf Grote. Planning, says Neal Manske, public transit director, is expanding. "We're coming in at the tail end of the sunbelt service but I think coming at the tail end is more a plus than a minus. Picking from the menu, we have a better chance to know the answers," he says. For all the take-offs, of course, more than the will and the way are needed to guarantee the efficacy of such projects. Most of these new west or sunbelt cities (or non-cities) parallel Phoenix with its parking lot-studded downtown, desolate sidewalks and malls, not to mention the proliferating suburban-- or more aptly, exurban subdivisions. On the fringes, all systems are go for gobbling land without plan. Dallas has had difficulty uniting the 13 cities in its transit system and only recently got word from their Council of Governments that transit-oriented development is essential. Phoenix has yet to deal with other regions spreading development away from any transit-oriented plan. Last summer, the Sierra Club there collected 160,000 signatures for a Citizen's Growth Management initiative to secure growth boundaries and impact fees from developers used to a free rein. "It's sort of a mindset," says planner Katherine Wisehart, surveying light rail in the eastern valley. "It's going to take some work. Rail isn't a panacea. You're talking about changing a culture." Wisehart remains optimistic, though. "It can't compete. It'll never be an eastern city but it will happen," she says. New Start's Boothe puts it in context. "Phoenix has its own challenges," he says. Unlike the Portland, Oregon urban model with its zoning, growth boundaries and inducements for transit-oriented-development or the nitty-gritty urban cities already built around rail, a boom economy and a laissez-faire mentality could undercut the emerging fleets of light rail. Will light rail fly? Will the new systems work? Will the post-auto cities go back…a bit…to their rail origins? A final reading of the times and the tryout systems is tough. No question: folks love rail. But will rail work as a tool more than a toy in these cities while four out of five dollars still goes to highways, where planning is in its nascent stages, where developers rule the roost in high times and transit-oriented development is a wheel and deal operation? --Doing It With Highway Dollars--The doing is in the dollars for as the auto-air age has us stuck in ground and air traffic, heavy rail Amtrak gets lectured for not weaning itself from a half billion dollar yearly budget (compared to a federal 50 billion one with four-fifths for roads). Can a new outlook help address the larger federal flaws? Roy Kienitz, executive director of the Surface Transportation Policy Project's reflects on the mixed prospects: the shrinking federal dollars for transit vs. the expanding systems in need of funds from Washington. The almost ten-year-old ISTEA (now TEA-2l), predicted to change the system, hasn't. Yet, though ISTEA's dictates-its planning through COGs and MPOs, its flexible funds and enhancements -- haven't quite lived up to expectations, one thing has: the order for a cost-test for alternatives to every road project. State transportation departments must really examine the numbers and this has slowed the highway pace, says Kienitz. Rising land costs and the neighbors' demands for beautifying roads drive up prices making roads less cost competitive. Meanwhile, new computer modeling gives technical proof to the axiom "if you build it, they will come" and cuts off some roads. Still, says Michael Beyard of the Urban Land Institute "we have this financing of highways; the dedicated tax, and it's always a struggle to provide any of that money through transit." And, to Beyard, the toe-dipping "smart growth" or "sustainable growth" policies of these light rail converts bear little kinship to policies like Maryland's "smart growth" policy: "not a cent for development that isn't in existing communities," he says insistently. "No money for roads, utilities, schools, fires." Nothing. In these terms, urban planning is still more a paper product than a real one and rail struggles. Phoenix's Marc Soronson is more sanguine. "There's been real leadership to take a look at growth and understanding growth. The word 'urban' planning is now a known word," the transit planner says. "It's our baby step," Wisehart puts it and those watching these infant lines struggle can only hope that they mature. America's centerless metropolises, its carbound, car-glutted landscapes have to run the wheel in reverse a doubletime. A new wave will truly happen when this post-auto world endorses transit-oriented planning as enthusiastically as it boards its cheerful choo-choos. From Urban Ecology, October, 2000.
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Strikingly, this latest generation of on-grade rail goes beyond the familiar nitty-gritty streetcar cities and suburbs. Its members haven't yet reached the Awareness of the green poster cities like Portland with its progressive land use practices. This wave comes from New West and New Sunbelt cities-from car-bred cities. Yet its source in the live-free-or-die take-no-golden handcuff cities makes it even more notable. (In Phoenix's case, that anti-government stance meant refusing its share of the Great American highway fund handout of the post-World War II boom). Count among the growing or launching lines are Salt Lake City, Denver, Las Vegas, Raleigh, North Virginia Beach and Tampa.