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SUMMIT ON TRANSPORTATION AND TRANSIT

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October 12, 2003

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Power Point Presentation

The Summit on Transportation and Transit was presented at the Monticello Event and Conference Center, 201 Monticello Avenue, Charlottesville, Virginia, on 12 October 2003.

The following is an edited transcript of the presentation made at the Transit and Transportation Forum on October 12, 2003. Following the transcript are the power point presentations of the speaker.

Mayor Cox opened the meeting by introducing the speaker.

MAYOR COX. About a year ago -- actually, more than a year ago, a work group was trying to envision a different way of bringing this community to look objectively at our transportation needs and have the benefit of national and international experts to help plot a vision for transportation in the future. We were looking for models, very efficient, cost efficient ways of bringing that kind of talent to Charlottesville. And I think we found it. We found it in a couple of models that are used nationally.

One is by the Urban Land Institute, that brings a resource team together for a concentrated period of time, They come in; they interview people for an intense period. This group, in a two-day period, interviewed about 40 different decision makers, appointed and elected, who can and who will be a part of a transportation solution for Charlottesville in the future. They try to then discern what they're hearing and bring their expertise to bear in the form of recommendations that we might take.

The other is the Mayors' Institute, which was created at the University of Virginia, that brings mayors to a retreat for four days, and they're surrounded by design experts. They bring a particularly difficult or challenging urban problem with them. And in the course of those four days, the problem is re-defined for them.

The expert term assembled for Charlottesville includes.

Robert Cervero. He's written many books, is very well renowned in his field. He's a Distinguished Fellow at the Urban Land Institute and a professor at the University of California at Berkeley. Some of his reports have titles such as "Reverse Commuting and Job Access"; "Car Sharing in San Francisco"; "Improving Transit Connections for Enhanced Suburban Mobility."

Next is Ignacio Bunster-Ossa, who is a principal with Wallace, Roberts, and Todd, a national planning and design firm in Philadelphia. He's worked on a number of projects throughout the country, including Jose Marti Park in Miami; Santa Monica's Palisade Park; he's currently leading the design of the open space for the Anacostia Waterfront Initiative; Georgetown's Waterfront Park in Washington. Currently, he's also working on open space plan for downtown Charlottesville.

Next is Robert Dunphy, who is a senior research fellow at the Urban Land Institute, where he evaluates key trends in transportation and development, assists in outreach to business and government on development and transportation issues, and conducts studies on traffic congestion, transportation solutions, transit and parking, and their relationship to land use. He's the principal author of "Moving Beyond Gridlock" and he's contributed to transforming suburban business districts and making smart growth work. He served on the Maryland Transportation Solutions Group, which was a national panel organized by Governor Paris Glendenning to advise on a controversial highway proposal. And he also worked on the Transit-Oriented Development Task Force created by Washington mayor Anthony Williams.

Next is G. B. Arrington, with Parsons Brinkerhoff where he is their most senior practitioner in the field of linking transit and land use. He played a key role in the Portland region's innovative experiment in bringing that to fruition, using transit and land use to create a community that is truly mobile. G. B. worked with the White House to organize and moderate Vice President Gore's first Livable Communities Roundtable, and he has served as an advisor to the Federal Transit Administration and communities from San Juan, Puerto Rico to Perth, Western Australia.

Following are edited transcripts of their thoughts.

MR. ARINGTON: You obviously have some very mature plans, mature thoughts, and you've invested a lot of time in them. Your quality of life is just a really spectacular asset, but we feel that it is being threatened by traffic. That's something that's around the corner. There's a lack of regional cooperation here. You all politely talk to each other, but I'm not sure that you politely fight enough with each other. And maybe a little bit more of that than politely talking to each other would be helpful, so that you can take action and that you can take action collectively, as opposed to individually, because this is one place. It's one airshed; it's one transportation pattern; it's one economic development place. You have, obviously, a world-class

University here, a really spectacular place. You have a transit -- you have a pedestrian mall on the downtown, which is a success story that you can build on. And you have very many dedicated citizens.

As building blocks we think that you need to re-invest back into West Main, that in the short term, you need to improve the shuttle between the University and City Hall. In the intermediate term, you need to pursue a streetcar -- and intermediate may be starting tomorrow. And ultimately, as a piece of that, you need to develop a regional Bus Rapid Transit System.

I would argue that what you need are more streets and less roads. What we need are lots of little streets so there's more connectivity, more choices and alternatives to always ending up in traffic jams on 29.

You need to move beyond modes. You're having a, I think, a somewhat dysfunctional conversation about "Should I have light rail?

Should I have streetcars? Should I have BRTs? Should I invest more in roads?" And the real question to ask there is: "How do I fit the technology to the problem?" as opposed to "How do I find the problem that will work with the technology?"

I'm known around the United States as a light rail advocate, and I'm going to tell you, as a light rail advocate, that light rail doesn't make sense in this community. And I think you should leave that behind you. And continuing a conversation about light rail in Charlottesville today is a distraction. It will keep you from being successful. So, I would just suggest that we dispose of that idea right now. That doesn't mean that you can't have high quality, wonderful transit and that you can't use transit as a tool to help reinforce your vision for where you want to go. An urban streetcar -- very similar to light rail – can help you do that.

You could work it in mixed traffic or in exclusive lanes. We think that you need to pull the University into the town. It's the economic engine that drives this place. Pulling them into West Main Street is a way to do that. We see the streetcar as a way to help pull that back and forth.

There's an opportunity to ride the University horse in terms of the transit system. I'm not sure merger is the right question. The question is, "How do we end up with a seamless system that works as well for the University students as it works for the people in the town, in terms of how it performs" -- that when you get on the system, you don't know the difference between one or the other, whether they're city-paid employees driving it or whether there are students driving other parts of it, so that it has one identity, one network.

Getting to a streetcar system isn't something that you can do quickly. And so one of the things that you want to do as an intermediate strategy is build up the trolley: make it more frequent, maybe more lines extended a little bit further in other places, so that you have the confidence to build on and that you've built up your core system so that as you're looking for a rail improvement, that you have a way to be able to do that, to build on.

On land use, you've taken some important steps to raise your densities, but you didn't raise the minimums that go along with that. And so you're allowing the market to under-perform if it wants to. I'd suggest looking at minimum densities. You probably have too much retail.

MR. BUNSTER-OSSA: What we learned amongst ourselves is that there isn't a single grand idea that can provide this vision in the future, but rather a number of small and very well calibrated and calculated smart moves. Take the existing shopping centers that you have -- and make them into walkable destinations by mixing uses, by providing circulators, by improved connectivity to the neighborhoods.

You also probably need a coherent and proactive parking policy that is designed, essentially, to encourage people to arrive at certain destinations, get off their cars; get on transit, get on foot. And that means probably thinking long-term about some parking lots in strategic locations where the main access roads can lead you to a place where you can do this.

I think that using a flex-car system, meaning that there would be almost like a shared vehicle park. This is happening already in many cities in the country -- so that people that do live in high-density areas, that do need a car and cannot, for whatever reason, take the bus, if they're going shopping for big items, then they can use these vehicles to do that. Another kind of smart move would be really to improve the attractiveness of some of the bus systems and rolling stock.

And then finally -- really thinking of downtown, UVa, West Main, and a few other areas as truly pedestrian-oriented enclaves, where you can absolutely draw the attention of the public space to being in a public space. This requires careful attention to sidewalk environments.

We're not thinking about simply putting sidewalks where none exist, but really making walking environments. Walking environment addresses views, context, shade -- all kinds of amenities that you would want to have to want to be outdoors, not just to get from Point A to Point B.

MR. DUNPHY: The beginning of the success of a transit improvement starts with development and building the market through growth. The best transportation solution is being there – because you have all of these opportunities. You have walking, you have transit -- bikes.

To an urban developer, congestion is your friend. It makes in-town much more attractive. It creates a greater incentive for easier and cheaper transit solutions.

You have a happy convergence, here, the housing side, of demographics with new and newly urbanite people and suburban dropouts who are folks that are -- whose kids have moved away and are just as happy to give up the crab grass and mowing the lawn. There is a growing appeal of urban life. And these are folks that are willing to come in and park the car and kind of cope, to a little bit more extent, and take advantage of really some of these transits -- some of these non-driving options.

To a developer, in many respects you're talking about an untested market. You have the challenge of parking, and you still have, I think to some extent, the uncertainty of finance. To residents, you have affordability issues. There's kind of an attitude of the folks that are going to come in here – of pioneers. And there's kind of a small market share, a niche market of pioneers; what you really want are the settlers who will kind of follow up, build a community.

The retailing you have -- it looks kind of like you probably have enough retail for fun, with restaurants, bars, and so forth. You need more retail for life.

Groceries, pharmacies the kinds of stuff that people need, hardware they need on a day-to-day basis. But this is something important to think about, maybe not necessarily on the street but close enough by to make this an attractive place for your settlers.

Jobs on the street. Some of the targets are obviously the University-related services, some of the health services, possibly some technology spin-offs, incubator kind of space, folks that might want to stay close in town for while they're small. Parking as a resource. In my opinion but you can’t say too much about parking. You need what I call the "Goldilocks Principle" -- parking needs to be not too big, not too small; just right. Parking is gold to developers, and you can see that. It's going to be what makes some of these projects work.

Financing is a special concern, a special issue. And this is maybe something where the city can begin to help make these projects succeed, at least in the beginning. Improving the pedestrian realm. This is very critical here. Make development easier, one of the problems with developing in cities in general is that you make -- this is why people who encourage smart growth -- developers find that it's still -- that they make it so difficult to develop in the cities and so easier to develop in the suburbs that people, developers, go where it's easy to develop.

MR. CERVERO: What I was really asked to speak to, in our division of labor among the group, was thinking beyond the immediate core city, itself. A lot of our attention and focus, indeed, has gone to West Main Street, the land use vision should, indeed, shape what one does in transportation. We have many examples around the country where regions have fairly good transportation visions -- it might be Bus Rapid Transit or it might be light rail. But land use visions many times are very fuzzy, and oftentimes there's a mismatch between a point-to-point rail vision and the actual land use patterns that are unfolding which are very car-oriented; they turn their backs on the transportation corridor.

We don't travel for travel's sake. We're really traveling to get to places. What we value is neighborhood, quality of place. And our land use visions, should guide our transport. Transportation is one of the most powerful mechanisms to shape that.

"As Charlottesville goes, so does Albemarle." This is a big river; it's why people come to this region. It's the University and the quality of the City. But we also heard something like, "As Albemarle goes, so does Charlottesville goes." Much of the traffic in the city is beyond the control of the City. It's what's happening in the employment centers, the business parks outlying the city. You're all part of the same travel shed. You're all part of the same commuter shed. Travelers know no boundaries. This is fundamentally a regional problem that you're facing. Increasingly, it's going to be more of a regional problem. The only way to get your arms around this will be to have some kind of multi-jurisdictional, regional form to articulate the land use vision and the transportation vision.

Balance sub-regional self-contained growth. Certainly transportation, as connecting Point A and Point B, has got to be a big part of the problem, but land use, smart growth planning -- a lot of it is we can minimize the need to travel so much, either the distance or actually the need to make a motorized trip, by putting folks closer to their job sites or retail housing. A lot of -- affordable housing, many times, is a transportation problem. There's a lack of housing suited to the earnings and taste preference of the work force, like the University or the Medical Center, and they're displaced and they're forced to get in cars and go those distances.

Later steps, would be doing some kind of substantial investment as a transit-first policy that not only delivers those good quality attributes but also begins to shape the growth, that really begins to create the kind of land use vision. And small first steps might be transit center time transfer points, Bus Rapid Transit-like services that really begin to provide significant time savings advantages to the private car.

As you become increasingly a multi-centered place, as origin-destination patterns become less radial and more cross town and suburb to suburb, we think it makes a lot of sense to think about some substantial reconfiguration of your network. The other inhibitors, beyond a lack of frequent and reliable service, is cheap, ample parking.

The notion of Phase I, of going up Emmet Road and North 29, but you've got a downtown core here, with plausibly a major backbone, streetcar-type of network and a transit center here, and maybe another transit center.

In the near term, more intensive backbone services where the buses are coming by on a more of an 8- to 10- to 12- to 15-minute headway, instead of half an hour or so, which for most choice, middle-class riders who have a car at easy access, is not a respectable alternative; and then re-arraigning [sic] a lot of the services as perpendicular feeders.

Phase II would be really something more substantial, where it's not only running buses, but these really become major centers where you have full passenger information, potentially temperature controlled, maybe off-fare payment.

The third phase -- would be much more along the lines of a Bus Rapid Transit, where these centers are not only intermodal points but where you really start stacking up the densities and the mixed uses to create viable nodes which would support a much more intensive, high-end type of bus-based transit.

And, next Inter-TOD circulators -- for instance, you have several shopping centers where one could conceivably think about connecting them with some kind of small vehicle interconnector with grade separation which would allow Fashion Center to the Albemarle.

The beauty of Bus Rapid Transit it's either got physical segregation or you can take your choke points and strategically have queue jumper lanes, but basically you're providing time advantages of the bus users relative to the motorists. Seamless transfer. Making that as effortless as possible, really, through design and good integration. Advanced technology. Low floor buses, docking systems. And supportive armature – signal prioritization, in particular. And expeditious fare collection.

I'm going to end with just four basic measures. There has to be some inter-jurisdictional forum to begin to articulate a regional vision and to begin to move forward with a much more substantial transit investment. Next. You reward smart development; you incentivize it through different mechanisms. You need to do land use and transit integration if you want federal money. And then lastly, green connectors. Think about bikes and walking and for physical activity and shared cars and so forth.