Get on the bus. Ride your bike. Walk, already.

(Some notes written in response to Sito Negron’s Newspapertree article, The Billion-Dollar Status Quo.)

A couple of years ago, the Mayor and City Council mapped out our strategic goals for the community. One of the five strategic goals is to make El Paso one of the least car dependent cities in the Southwest. For El Paso that is no mean feat. We’re the Ford 150 capital of the world. We love big gas guzzling man trucks. This City Council inherited a broken down bus system that was built and funded to accommodate only those who have no other choice but to get on the bus. All of our land use regulation, infrastructure requirements and public financing favored neighborhood development that practically imposes two-car ownership on every family if they think it is necessary to get to work or go grocery shopping or if they want to hang out at a public park. At the city and regional planning level, most of the thinking and planning and understanding and staffing and political will was about moving 1.1 persons per car on miles and miles of asphalt.

Run away gas prices, the uncertainty about gasoline always being an affordable and accessible commodity, a shallow tax base that demands that we have to get a lot more out of very few dollars, many families who cannot afford car transportation, poor air quality and the awful degradation that car dependence has imposed on the way that we build our city are some of the many reasons that we need to build for other alternative modes of transportation besides just the car.

In his article, Sito Negron asks City Council the billion dollar question. If our strategic goal is to make El Paso less car dependent, how come transit only got 2.5% of a billion dollars in the Comprehensive Mobility Plan approved two weeks ago by City Council and by the Metropolitan Planning Organization? Big giant goal. Seems like approving only $27 million of a billion dollar budget for transit is a status quo response to the big giant goal. Transit got scraps. Asphalt and concrete and the Ford 150 got the mother lode.

Sito assigns this to politics as usual. Big fat cats sitting behind closed doors scheming the future of El Paso. Fact is our transportation priorities weren’t decided last week by the City Council or the Metropolitan Planning Organization. They’ve been years in the making. Southern relief route. The completion of the loop. The Spur. These projects weren’t hatched yesterday, and since they weren’t hatched yesterday no one is going to give them up without a fight. Communities small and large have held endless public meeting and have been jockeying to get their projects in the near term funding plan for ages.

The last go round, El Paso didn’t have any projects lined up at the trough so TXDOT gave our money to communities that were ready to go. Texas Department of Transportation (TXDOT) Commissioner Ted Houghton was determined that this wouldn’t happen again and so hurried TXDOT staff to shake loose some projects so he could shake loose some money for El Paso. It seems to me like the list of transportation projects was fashioned from a realistic view of the politics of regional decision making and what projects were ready to go in a hurry. The unanimous vote at City Council and the unanimous vote at the Metropolitan Planning Organization coming on the heels of an rancorous year-long debate about whether transportation funding should include tolls and regional mobility authorities seem to affirm the rationale behind the projects that were selected.

With the Mayor at the lead, we’ve been pushing the idea of Rapid Transit for about two years now. Some folks think that Rapid Transit is just a prettier bus and there isn’t much chance of inducing more transit ridership with just a prettier bus. The thinking is that those folks that can afford single car occupancy just won’t take the bait. They aren’t switching over until light rail hits the ground. Depending on how you build it out though, Rapid Transit can be much more like light rail, only with wheels. Here’s where I think we need to go with it: dedicated transit lanes, pre-emption of traffic lights, loading bays that allow transit riders to board at grade, a pre-payment system that cuts out the hassles and the time of pitching nickels into a fare box, a high frequency system that doesn’t keep people waiting long and yes, a system designed and marketed as a different kind of transit. Every detail of the system (the way you pay, the way you get on and off, the way that it moves through the road system,) is about building speed and reliability that competes with your commute to work in a car all by yourself.

While Rapid Transit didn’t get much in the scheme of a billion dollars, it got much more than people understand that it got. Rapid Transit has been conceived as five fingers emanating from the connection between Juarez and Downtown El Paso. Mesa, Dyer, Montana, Alameda and North Loop would be the best candidates for moving lots of people where they want to go on rapid transit. Problem is they are all state roads. If we want to use them, if we want rapid transit to have dedicated lanes on these roads, TXDOT has to be on board. TXDOT, like transportation agencies throughout the nation, is making a slow, strained, tense transition from “all asphalt, all the time” to looking at other alternatives for moving people. Two months ago, we were asking them to commit to dedicating transit lanes on these key transit corridors. TXDOT made it clear that we were going to have to do a lot of work to convince them that people would transition from sitting in a car all by themselves to getting on rapid transit. Rapid transit has the capacity to carry many more people than road lanes. A typical freeway lane can carry about 2,300 cars per hour. Typical auto occupancy is 1.1 persons per car. So a freeway lane can move about 2,520 people in an hour. Rapid transit systems that have been built out with designated lanes have shown capacity performance between 7,300 to as many as 19,500 passengers per hour. Even so, transportation agencies like TXDOT aren’t willing to bank on the fact that people actually will transition from car usage to transit usage. The catch being that the only way to really make rapid transit competitive with the car is if you get the lanes dedicated.

So in committing $27 million to Rapid Transit along Mesa and Montana, TXDOT is committing two lanes to transit. That’s miles and miles of roadway that we would have had to acquire and build out if we didn’t get TXDOT on board. Their willingness to work with us on transforming these roadways for transit use is invaluable and historic.

In the history of the agency, TXDOT has never committed their funding to transit in El Paso. It’s mostly been about asphalt and concrete and traffic signalization. The way I see it is “One small step for rapid transit, one giant step for building a city that is less car dependent.”

The other significant change in TXDOT’s and the City's thinking about moving people is that they are beginning to understand that roads shouldn’t just be about moving people in cars occupied by 1.1 persons. All new road projects have to be designed to better accommodate all forms of transportation including transit, bicyclists and pedestrians.

I am committed as ever to our goal of getting El Paso become less car dependent, but I’m telling you right now it is a long and perilous road with not as many allies as one would like. On Monday night, I sat through a 2 ½ hour meeting about bike lanes on Hondo Pass. Except for a few strong individuals who spoke out at their peril, the proposal for bike lanes on Hondo Pass was met with screaming hostility. One of the proposed designs for the roadway did not take out any existing car lanes, added protected parking lanes, slowed down traffic AND added two bike lanes. No matter, it was viewed as an all out assault on the average Joe who was just trying to get by in the world. How dare we suggest that bike riders have as much right to the road as someone in a car?

So in the end, I didn’t ask for more dollars for transit. My assessment was and still is that it was better to move quickly with what transit got and prove up to the public and the policy makers and the funding agencies that if you build it right, people will begin to make fundamental changes in the way that they get from here to there.