The Urban Blog

Public Transportation Ridership Up, A Perfect Time For Service Cuts

Reports abound lately about people ditching their cars for their daily commutes and hopping on the bus instead.  With the price of gas fast approaching 4 dollars a gallon in America, people are looking for lower-cost alternatives to driving.

This is true even in car-loving Reno, where despite a recent bus fare increase, ridership is up ranging from 5 to 10 percent on Truckee Meadows routes and a whopping 33 percent on the Intercity service between Reno and Carson City.

Sadly, because the bus relies on sales tax for most of its funding, and sales tax revenues are declining, RTC is looking to make service cuts of at least 10 percent.

Now is the time to be looking at new funding sources for transit service, not cutting transit service.  A region's economic viability is greatly impacted by mobility options available there.  In Reno's case traffic is still virtually nonexistant from a big-city perspective and parking is abundant.  Even with $4 gas the bus is still socially regarded as the province of the transit using underclass.  Consequently, the burden of proof is still on the transit service.

Transit services must prove that they are effective and well-run.  Service must be frequent and reliable and routes well connected with each other without requiring travel to a central transfer center to get across town.  By beginning to make these kinds of changes on their existing routes, effectively getting away from over-reliance on the hub-and-spoke system now employed, the RTC could demonstrate to the public that transit is worth riding.

RTC should be talking about alternative designs for the transit system currently in place.  It is critical at this juncture to increase the amount of farebox revenue that is applied to the service as a percentage of the service's overall funding.  The service it currently operates is not efficient by any stretch of the imagination and due to its over-reliance on subsidies is vulnerable to the availability of the subsidy funds and not taking enough advantage of the money it receives from the people who actually use the service.

It's a two-way street when it comes to both roads and transit.  Roads are currently oversubsidized.  Drivers get a great bargain in the end with the service they receive for owning and operating their own vehicle.  Roads are highly subsidized by public funding sources and are priced disproportionately to transit.  Consider the fees paid on vehicle licensing vs. the fees paid over a year's purchase of monthly bus passes.  Assuming a $300 excise tax and a $60 monthly bus pas, the amount of money paid in bus passes is more than double.  This is somewhat evened out by gas taxes, though a driver filling up twice a month for a year and paying 6 dollars per fill-up in gas tax, is laying out $120 a year. 

The driver of an automobile's user fees (discounting insurance and cost of fuel, whole other balls of wax) amount to several hundred dollars less per year than the transit rider's user fees, and yet transit service continues to suffer setbacks in funding from subsidies.  What gives?

Reno: Redevelopment Agency Board Meeting, 5/14/08 2:00 PM Reno City Hall

From the staff report attachment to the 5/14/2008 Reno Redevelopment Meeting:

Summary: At the April 23, 2008 Joint meeting, staff was directed to negotiate agreements with Northern Nevada Urban Development Co., LLC, Urban Development & Management, Inc. and other parties as necessary to develop a mixed-use project anchored by retail for the area between the Reno Events Center/Ballroom, the University of Nevada, North Virginia Street and Evans Avenue. Staff was also directed to work with the developer on possible uses and/or demolition of the old Dairy Queen, located at 606 North Virginia Street and report back on the progress at the next meeting.

This is a big project, seeming to come out of nowhere, but not to those who have had their ears to the ground.  This area of town has long been looked at.  Almost 10 years ago The Cordish Company looked at developing a megaproject similar to what they had done in Baltimore's Inner Harbor area.  Murmurs have been going around for a year that an entity was acquiring parcels in the area mentioned above.  It just probably never occurred to anyone that they could be looking to transform such a large area of town.

There is some interesting potential in this area.  This blog would recommend reclaiming I-80 air rights between Virginia and Evans and also for the block west of Virginia.  The entire area between downtown and the university is in need of new life.  The University Master Plan which was completed in 2004 under the previous administration, calls for the development of a gateway lawn at the south end of the university - this seems like a drastic move which would do more harm than good in this area. 

What is truly missing from UNR is an identifiable college business & residential district.  A good college town features such a thing:  it is a developed, well traveled area with coffee shops, bookstores, restaurants, and other types of specialty retail, usually plenty of residential development as well, that serves as an anchor point for the university's connection to the city in which it is located.

The area between the northern edge of downtown and the southern edge of UNR could well make a good location for a new college business district.  We'll be following this issue and reporting as it develops.

"The Americana at Brand"

NPR's Day to Day today reported on a new development in Southern California's Glendale - The Americana at Brand.  This luxury lifestyle development clusters a number of up-to-4 story buildings around a park green, with streets and curbs and a square and some clock towers - and a Cheesecake Factory and every single international chain boutique store you could imagine, with 100 condominiums and 238 apartments.

This project resembles but ain't Las Vegas' troubled Sullivan Square project, which would cluster a number of 20-something story mixed-use buildings around a park, with real streets and curbs and a square and clocks... on a superblock at the corner of the freeway and a suburban mega-avenue.

This project also resembles but ain't this blog's suggestion for Park Lane Mall's impending redevelopment.  They all have their similarities, of course - the primary similarity being their postmodern financing and construction scheme.  And it resembles but ain't The District at Victorian Square - the now canceled Sparks redevelopment project.

This is a very interesting report.  A key quote extracted from the broadcast, by project backer Rick Caruso:

"You can criticize it, and say, 'Based on the books, you shouldn't do this' — I don't know what book that would be"

- Rick Caruso, Developer, The Americana at Brand

What book would it be?  Well, anything by Jane Jacobs would be a great place to start - but happily, what Jacobs was arguing against is no longer common in the world of urban development.  Jacobs was a hard-scrabble community organizer in New York City's Greenwich Village fighting against Robert Moses' road compulsion - specifically, a project to demolish most of Greenwich Village and surrounding neighborhoods so they could build a freeway across Lower Manhattan - which would allow larger towers, presumably surrounded by parks and parking lots - to survive on the island.  The proposal was to replace the lost residential use with yet more towers surrounded by parks and parking lots - across town from the new commercial and retail uses.

Jacobs was a fierce critic of single-use zoning.  She was a fierce critic of projects which overwhelmingly rely on a single architectural metaphor.  She was a staunch proponent of a diverse building line with a diverse range of building heights and sidewalk setbacks - assuming they all had pedestrian fronting along the sidewalk.  Her little book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, is a modern classic treatise of urban planning - written by an amateur.

In the broadcast segment of this story, Caruso (I'm paraphrasing) said that the people who opposed this project based on what "the books" say are also people who only studied but never did any real urban planning - an excellent zinger and a point I would make about Jacobs' amateurism.  There is only one class of urban planning professional - those who are actually involved in the business of creating new urban spaces or redefining existing urban spaces - those who do the nitty-gritty, on the ground work, of building whole new complex places.

Yet I would contend here, that even Caruso is taking an amateur's advice:  The Americana is to feature a diverse mixture of building styles and heights and is not single use and is directly adjacent to other dense, urban development such as old downtown Glendale and the more recent Glendale Galleria.