The Urban Blog

More on Washoe RTC Cuts

RGJ today has more on the service cuts RTC is considering. 

From RTC’s web page about the cuts:

• Reduce peak hour frequency:
  Weekdays:  RT 1, 13, 16
  Saturday:  RT 1, 5, 13
• Reduce midday frequency:
  Weekdays:  RT 1, 6, 9, 13, 16
  Saturday:  RT 1, 5, 11, 15, 21
• Drop midday service:
  Weekdays:  RT 2s, 3CC, 57
  Saturday:  RT 25, 57
  Sunday:  RT 4, 13, 57
• Discontinue service:
  Weekdays:  RT 14A, 19
  Saturday:  RT 2s, 3CC, 14A, 19
  Sunday:  RT 2s
• Additional reductions:
  RT 3CC – drop last trip, weekdays
  RT 5 – drop last trip, Saturday
  RT 18 – drop 1 peak trip, cut evening, but run late night, weekdays
• RTC ACCESS possible service reduction and fee increases
• Would more than double the RTC ACCESS fare from $1.75 to $4.00

There will be a public hearing on Thursday, February 12 at RTC Administrative Offices, at 2050 Villanova Drive (under the US 395 Freeway next to Wooster High) at no earlier than 9:05 am (whatever that means.)

For what it’s worth, RTC’s new 4th Street Station project is a $37Mil project.  There is clearly some work they can do around efficiency of service – definitely eliminate the useless #19 for example.  But the RTC is looking at a funding shortfall of $6.7Mil, at the same time they are about to undertake a $37Mil capital project.  They should delay 4th Street Station until sales tax revenues begin to improve, and borrow from 4th Street Station funds to minimize the service cuts.

V&T Railroad May Run This Summer

Via Around Carson via Nevada Appeal, comes a report that the V&T Railroad Commission may ask the V&T Railroad Company in Virginia City to operate a train from Virginia City to Mound House beginning this summer.

The story has a bit of history.  Originally the V&T Commission had selected a now defunct out of state operator to run the completed project.  But the V&T project funding has stalled out a bit.  The track through to Mound House is very likely to be ready for trains this summer, and a new bridge over Highway 50 is well along.

Meanwhile, Tom Gray has operated a train from Virginia City to Silver City for quite a while now.  It’s possibly not a terrific business but he has certainly been doing it for awhile.  He has a diesel train for when his steam engine is in the shop, and has managed to run every year since he opened.  The Commission apparently is investigating taking over the V&T Company to run the train.  The Commission would handle maintenance costs and take 5% of ticket revenues under the proposed agreement.

There is concern on the part of some that the V&T Company doesn’t have the money or people to run the 11 mile run.  It currently runs 2.5 miles.

The agreement should use part of V&T Commission’s money to invest in V&T Company to get it capable of operating the train to Mound House this season.  A large parking lot should be built in Mound House.  Mound House can start thinking about the construction of a western themed village adjacent to the rail depot.  There are already antique shops, a candy store, and bars in Mound House, not to mention the brothels.  A little work to create a pedestrian mall, maybe even with a dirt road and boardwalks, would be a good investment.

VC has a treacherous (Geiger Grade) or overly long (through Mound House) drive to get up there for tourists visiting Reno.  And parking is tight during the busy season.  Silver City, the current endpoint of the V&T, doesn’t have much going on.  So it only makes sense that the V&T could actually take up the job of operating transportation to get people up the hill and into town from their cars, and back down the hill to their cars.  Mound House’s little Old West mall would be something to do while folks wait for the train.

If the Commission wants to look at taking over the operations of the V&T Company eventually anyway, it will need to invest at some point to expand the operations suitably.  Since the funding is stalled for the project, it makes sense to get the project operating now.  It is well and good to plan on running the train the eventual proposed distance of 18 miles to Carson City.  Getting the 11 mile route to Mound House operating this season will allow the Commission and Company to get some experience running a longer route down the hill, raise much needed revenue, and help develop a model for operating in the future.

Reno New Year’s Eve Fireworks Canceled

Via RGJ today, Downtown Reno’s New Year’s Eve fireworks display has been canceled this year.  The display is funded by a combination of city funds and money from the downtown casinos.  With tax revenues declining in Reno, the city decided not to spend its part of the $20 – 30K, and according to Glenn Carano of Silver Legacy, “[…] the quality is not what we would want.”

This blog has spoken before about the room for growth in tourism to Reno and the need to have solid special events on holidays in non-summer months.  If the hotels are booked solid for NYE in Reno as some of the RGJ’s commenters suggest, then cutting the fireworks seems like a strange way to reward those who decided to celebrate their NYE in Reno.  The show should go on, and those in a position to do something about the level of quality of the fireworks show should plan ahead to make next year’s display something worth writing home about.

Reno: Spring Mountain Vote Tonight

Via RGJ this morning, the Reno City Council is slated to vote on the issue of approving the zoning required for the developers of Spring Mountain to move forward with their plan to add 25,000+ new residents 20 miles from North McCarran Blvd, in a non-contiguous annexed area that geographically challenged Reno is responsible for due to the regional plan, regardless of annexation status or approved development.

Here at The Urban Blog, despite our generally optimistic viewpoint, we can’t stave off the visions in our head of what this development will eventually look like. 

We are quite certain that this project will be a mess of CC&R enforced, bland, characterless cookie-cutter housing lining cul-de-sacs, its “Sidewalk Activity Zones” more resembling Summerlin Town Centre than any actual downtown.  We envision residents whizzing by on golf carts inside their neighborhood to go to the grocery store in the strip mall for milk, because we’re pretty sure there will be no corner stores, and we envision these same folks placing themselves one-at-a-time into their SUVs to travel 60 and more miles each way to work.

Our primary concerns are actually traffic in and out of the development, and sustainable availability of water resources.  For the developers’ part, their plans refer to specific water resources, and vigilantly address the traffic concern with a unique formula which would stop development of residential if commercial/industrial development does not also keep pace.  This stuff all looks and sounds great.  It’s just that the history of greenfield development is littered with such promises.

To help you make up your own mind, here are some links to elements of the plan from the developer’s own website:

Map packet detailing the three villages, open space corridors, and wildlife corridors - 3.8 MB PDF File

Public Services Plan covering schools, roads, water, police and fire – small PDF

Traffic Reduction and Mitigation Program – an admittedly innovative approach to keeping the traffic impact low – small PDF

We’ve been unable to find the Spring Mountain PUD Handbook referenced in the minutes in the City Council meeting staff report on this item, which will be heard at 6 PM today at Reno City Hall, 1 E. First Street.

"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.

Sparks: District @ Victorian Square Cancelled

Bad news coming out of Sparks, NV.  RGJ reports today that The District at Victorian Square, a two phase, human-scale mini neighborhood slated to replace some parking lots downtown, has been canceled.  The reason?  Predictably, the current housing market and credit crisis.

Goodbye, The District.

This space glowed about the project a while back, and it's a shame to see this project put on hold.  But this project would also not have been a very large project, with buildings 5 stories tall, which were slated to become luxury condominiums.  Clearly this was intended as a huge short term profit-maker for the principals, and it would have to be, being a post modern style urban infill project covering 4 blocks.  Since we have seen how much damage can be caused by people trying to make a quick buck in real estate, now might be a good time to start assembling an alternate vision for how to do this infill right.

The suggestion we would make is to divide the 4 blocks worth of real estate up into 8 parcels and then take bids to fill in the 8 parcels.  Each bidder would only be able to build 2 contiguous parcels per bid.  This would allow for things like 8 on Center, Thoma Street Lofts, Cedar Dwellings, the Redfield Row project, and more.  Smaller projects independently designed and built as neighbors by a variety of interests means smaller budgets drawing on primarily local money, shorter timelines, and the ability to better serve a broader mix of price points.  All great hedges during times of uncertainty, and setting the erstwhile investor up for a win in the next housing boom.