A Place of Sense

Public investment in transportation infrastructure is what Indianapolis is all about, and is still known as the “Crossroads of America” because of it.  The investment in transportation infrastructure started early with the canals, picked up speed with rail (including the first ever Union Station), and continued when Indy became a key part of the National Road, our first federal highway.  More recently the best new airport terminal in the US was opened.

We have our intercity transportation and freight pretty well figured out, but now it’s time to get our local transit in order.  Multi-modal solutions give people options about where and how to live, and make cities more resilient to the challenges of the future.  But we seem to have prioritized low density auto-oriented growth for so long that we have lost our urban identity.  We’re not seen as the crossroads of America anymore, we’re just another decaying donut.

For those of us who were expecting big things from IndyConnect, the unveiled plan has been met with strong debate.  A program that was sold to the community as a vision for the future is really just a mirror showing us as we already exist – a capital city afraid of its collaborative, urban origins and rapidly trying to reinvent itself as the sprawling, low-cost leader of the midwest.

Where will Indy rank on this list in 30 years?

IndyConnect is a chance to come together as a regional community and decide our destiny.  Unfortunately, the plan currently up for review is not very inspiring.  The controversial decision to switch out LRT for buses appears to be political rather than economic, as previous studies and case studies have shown the regional benefits would easily justify the costs.  I question the decision to use BRT, because the sponsors threw away the support of the biggest pool of users to get… well let’s just say I don’t see any Tea Partiers jumping on board with this plan because of its lower cost.

But even if the LRT option had survived, would that have been enough to call this plan a “vision”?  Not at all.  When you look at the mass transit portion, the plan only recommends purchase of some new vehicles, polishing up some old train hardware, and striping some roads.  It’s a superficial marketing brochure that won’t significantly address livability in Indianapolis.  We can’t solve this problem by throwing money at it, we’re gonna have to dig deeper.  Policy reform has to be front and center, and that debate is much more important than whether or not we use light rail, commuter rail, or bus rapid transit.

It's not the bus or LRT that appeals to people, its the urban attitude

If IndyConnect really wants to lay the groundwork for a city that can use transit, then we need to decide to stop exclusively designing our cities for cars.  Buses are not the building block of a transit system, the pedestrian is.  A transformative vision of Indianapolis is needed now, so here is a twelve step plan to make Indianapolis a haven for transit before a single track is ever laid:

1. Pedestrianize – Begin and end ALL planning from the perspective of a pedestrian (ALL planning! – transportation, land use, urban design, civic assets)
2. Don’t fool yourself – buses will never capture mode share from cars, and rail doesn’t help much either unless there is an incentive to use it
3. Induced demand is real – accept vehicular congestion, because you can’t build your way out of it
4. Laser, not shotgun – don’t try to accommodate the entire region with transit, because transit is expensive and should only serve areas designed for it like streetcar suburbs, old rail stops, and centralized corridors
5. No Robert Moses needed – accept that communities are more important than the transportation solutions running through them
6. Be unselfish – design the transportation system for the next generation and the problems they will face
7. Create value – don’t be afraid to use rail based transit to create special areas in the city, but beware of doing the same in suburbs because that will empty the city (population follows public investment) into areas that don’t want and can’t accommodate the extra load on their limited services
8. Be inclusive – integrate pedestrians and bicyclists into the traffic system rather than forcing them onto recreational pathways
9. Respect the car – well behaved cars and drivers deserve a place in the city, car-free zones are a bad idea and represent a failure of integration
10. Reward density - land use and transit should support “density done right” because a walkable urban environment produces happy, socially wealthy individuals
11. Slow it down – convert urban highways to slower streets, because if the traffic is too fast for sidewalk cafes, merging bicycle traffic, and people crossing the street then you are doing it wrong
12. Restore the Cityscape – accept that our city was better before the interstates arrived, and it will be better when they are removed

Indianapolis as a city was never perfect, but it was never more imperfect than the day we decided that cars could solve all of our problems.  We purposefully excluded anyone who can’t drive or afford a car from participating in civic life, killed off small businesses, and enslaved future generations to volatile energy costs.

Now we are about to sell off our ability to control parking supply and pricing, our most important urban development tool, and yet our leaders still fail to realize how that is related to transportation in the city.  There are a hundred other issues that we hammer all the time on this website but haven’t been addressed yet, including: curb radii, tree canopies, excess lane widths, unnecessary one-way streets, missing sidewalks, urban design regulatory problems, and privatization of the public realm.

How will BRT, LRT, or Commuter Rail solve these issues?  They can’t.  In reality, a lot of people have problems walking to the bus stop because the city is so impermeable to pedestrians.  The number of new pedestrian bridges going in downtown is a great indicator that we still haven’t solved the walkability issue in our most important places.

The debate over IndyConnect should be a debate over walkability and the role of the pedestrian.  Policy reform must be at the top of the agenda.  Think education and consensus building rather than bus routes and transit maps.  I support IndyConnect.  This is what progress looks like.  But IndyConnect must explicitly address walkability or it will fail.

I’m not always happy with Cost/Benefit Analyses to justify infrastructure investments.  Induced economic activity has especially frustrated me because I don’t believe that an extra highway exchange can be justified just because it spawns a Wal-Mart.  Too often we see these studies that proclaim a net benefit when in reality the private sector gains a new source of profit while shifting cost and risk to the public (similar to the privatization of Parking Programs).

An interesting case study comes to us from the nation of Iraq.  After losing much of their infrastructure in the war and aftermath the people are now struggling to restore basic services.  One key issue is electrical power reliability.  Here in Indianapolis it is major news when we lose the power grid for any length of time, so I hope nobody ignores the suffering of Iraqis who spend the majority of each day with none or intermittent power.

A side effect of this has been a huge market for small-scale electrical power generators.  Communities are chipping in together to purchase their own power infrastructure.  So, the destruction of Iraqi power infrastructure has induced demand for generators, but is this a good thing?

Energy security in its most basic form

Well, diesel generators don’t come cheap, and neither does their fuel. It seems fairly obvious the people aren’t investing in generators because they want to become more independent of public infrastructure.  No, they are purchasing them because they want a reliable electrical supply and their government can’t provide it.

This is a similar condition to 20th century US transportation system.  As cities and towns began dismantling their public transit systems, Americans began purchasing cars in like nowhere else in the world.  In this case, a lot of people were forced to invest in transportation because the government failed to provide it. And auto sales thrived on the uncertain future of public transit.

Very few people benefit when public infrastructure is allowed to fail.  After all, you can only add so many cars to the system before the high costs of maintaining all those vehicles, roads, and bridges begins to outweigh any benefits we once got from them.

Simply stated, collectively owned public transit is a great solution to our transportation needs. In fact, the service cuts in Chicago and NYC transit have shown how declining investment in transit can be a disaster.  If we want to see the right kind of economic growth taking place in our cities, then its time to fight for heavy investment in public transit.

Cars can never provide the right density to make cities livable or infrastructure affordable

A good framework for this problem is the Parable of the Broken Window.  Basically, you don’t create value by destroying something, even if new economic activity is generated.  In this case, Americans did gain a highway system and millions upon millions of new cars and new jobs (manufacturing and road repair), but losing our public transit systems means we lost our urban way of life.  A proper accounting of the situation should include all costs, especially the hidden and social ones.

For more information on Indianapolis’ proposed transit system, see Indy Connect.  If you want to know what transit can do for our cities, Human Transit has a great discussion.  If we want economic growth in our cities without endless sprawl, transit is the best answer.