Editor’s note: This is post number three of Imagine KC’s 13-part blog series on strategies for regional sustainability. Learn more about Imagine KC at www.onekcvoice.org/imaginekc.
Guest writer: Daniel Serda, Kansas City Design Center; KU School of Architecture and Urban Planning
Until recently, transit has proven a hard sell in Greater Kansas City, which prides itself as being among America’s least congested cities. But alleviating traffic congestion is not the only, nor is it necessarily the primary, rationale for investments in public transit. Effective public transit enables choice in how we travel. To create a robust regional transit system, we need to recognize the many ways that transit supports other community goals, such as stimulating economic development, managing growth and ensuring community livability.
Living in a sprawled-out city also means spending an inordinate amount of your family’s money on transportation. A recent study by the Brookings Institution showed that, even before the recent spike in gasoline prices, the median household in Kansas City spends more each year on transportation than on housing. We also spend an inordinate amount of our day behind the wheel, wasting time that could be used for relaxation, reading, recreation or visiting with friends and family.
The primary reason for skepticism about transit in Kansas City is also the primary consequence of our car culture: sprawl. No reasonable person would opt to use transit in a region that has spent the past 50 years helping define the drive-through society. Our choices about shopping destinations are usually determined by convenient parking. Most people work in office buildings surrounded by a sea of asphalt. Kids don’t walk to school; on average, children in Kansas City spend more time in the backseat of a car every day than they spend exercising. We have made walking impractical if not impossible.
The key question for Kansas City is how we can retrofit our post-war, 20th century suburban neighborhoods to meet the realities of 21st century life. We need to think about more, not less, transit. But we also need to think strategically about how to leverage transit investments to help reconfigure the development patterns of our cities, towns and neighborhoods. The answer should be to use transit to connect existing destinations.
A recent visit to Washington, D.C., is instructive. Since the mid-1980s, when the Washington Metro’s red line was extended to suburban Chevy Chase, Md., the local town center, Friendship Heights, has become a model for what urban planners call transit-oriented development (TOD). The idea behind TOD is simple: use transit to connect existing destinations while concentrating development at transit stations to help strengthen neighborhood vitality and create new destinations for work, living and shopping.
TOD puts development pressure where it belongs — in the center of a multimodal transportation system that can handle the competing demands of cars, pedestrians and cyclists in a way that is safe, attractive and convenient. TOD does not force traffic through neighborhoods, nor does it demand that everyone give up their cars. Instead, transit gives people choice and flexibility in how they travel.
Communities across the metropolitan area are beginning to recognize that transit needs to become a central focus of the transportation equation, especially as it relates to economic development and environmental sustainability. In the past few years, several major community planning processes, most notably the Vision Metcalf strategy, have taken a hard look at the potential for using transit to reconfigure existing development patterns.
This does not mean that transit forces redevelopment or requires massive new subsidies for development. What it means is that for transit to meet its potential in helping accomplish other community goals, public priorities need to shift toward supporting transit and transit-oriented development.
There are many reasons to think that the days when drive-up convenience was the primary concern for a retail visitor are over. Inundated by choices, shoppers are becoming more discriminating in where they spend their dollars. Over the next three decades, economic choices will draw people to places that are accessible and convenient not because of the drive-up lane, but because the place is walkable and close to transit, especially on the commute home.
April 3, 2009 at 11:28 pm |
The theme that I hear running through Dr. Serda’s message is one that has been told throughout the ages and is still heard today: no man is an island; ask not for whom the bells tolls, it tolls for thee; ask not what you want but what you can give; am I my brother’s keeper, etc.
The threshold question is always are we individuals or are we a community? The answer remains the same: we are both. Yes, there are fudge answers like “it depends…” or “….but….”.
We are all connected and if one is not given to the ephemeral or angelic realm one need only look to questions of transit. What are we gonna do and how are we gonna do it….together? We are connected….by bus, rail, street, highway, interstate, etc.
And that begs the most difficult of questions, “What am I willing to give up so that all of us can have more?” Are WE willing to look at how we can all travel down the road together (literally) or insist we go it alone? Historically, that has never worked out too well…. Let’s hope we all chose wisely this time.
April 19, 2009 at 2:58 pm |
Making transit a significant factor in the region’s development pattern will require that we prepare forward-looking corridor plans (such as Vision Metcalf), and that local jurisdictions then commit to implementing those plans. It’ll involve careful review of developers’ plans to assure that buildings relate to the street, and it’ll also require that city engineers design and operate the “public realm” of our streets to be more like places, and less like arteries for motorized traffic. The latter may be the greater challenge.