Incredibly, after the news yesterday that Fort Worth won $25 million from the Urban Circulator grant it applied for with the Federal Transit Administration, there are already forces at City Hall desiring to put the brakes on the enthusiasm and support for the project again, and possibly even tell the FTA “no thanks” on its grant award.
The Star-Telegram has a story that heavily quotes District 6 councilmember Jungus Jordan (in fact, last night when the story was published, Jordan was the only official referenced – it’s since been updated with quotes from District 9′s Joel Burns and State Senator Wendy Davis) saying that the streetcar simply isn’t a priority for the city, that there are still too many unanswered questions, that Tower 55 and I-35 are more important, etc. etc. etc.
“We have a multitude of priorities,” Jordan said. “Our top transportation priority is Tower 55, the crossroads of the rail movement throughout our city. The other top priority is [Interstate 35W].”
Tower 55 is important, no doubt. It’s also a problem that will take billions upon billions, and literally decades, to solve (not to mention a lot of debate about how to solve it). While there are some short-term improvements that can be made, it’s important to note that:
- Streetcar funding likely won’t come from the same places as Tower 55 money, and
- Things like the FTA grant CAN’T be used for Tower 55 anyway.
It’s a repeat of the same talk from when Jordan and Zim Zimmerman tried to stop the streetcar study from happening in the first place – efforts which a lot of you out there helped to derail thanks to your calls and e-mails to City Hall.
As for I-35 – in the year 2010, when we’re dealing with horrible air quality, sprawl consuming land on the outskirts of town and causing the city to spend obscene amounts of money on infrastructure on the fringe to support it, health concerns, concerns about car dependence, oil dependence, and more, an era when young professionals and creatives are looking for cities with vibrant central cores and progressive transit more and more than tract homes and strip malls, I find it pretty revealing that Jordan wants to go on record as saying I-35 is a top priority. It’s complete business-as-usual in an era when business-as-usual (which got us all the problems above) has pretty well died.
In fact, that sounds pretty familiar, doesn’t it? It’s almost as if Mayor Mike Moncrief said the exact same thing during his State of the City address:
Commuter Rail, street cars, and other alternative modes of transportation also remain a priority for me and this City Council. Unfortunately, Fort Worth and other major metropolitan areas are finding out the hard way what a mistake it was to design and build cities around automobiles years ago. Friends, we cannot continue to focus solely on building more roads for more vehicles. That’s counter productive at best.
Business as usual is dead!
North Texas requires a transportation overhaul. No more band-aides, no more patches—a complete overhaul!
Yet, here we are, five months later, and Jungus Jordan is saying business-as-usual is a higher priority than a modern transit system. Who exactly is calling the shots down at City Hall? It’s clear that remaking our transportation system into something more livable, sustainable, and beneficial for the city is a priority with Mayor Moncrief, so what’s with the flip-flopping from City Hall?
Now, it should be said, Councilmember Jordan has also stated before that commuter rail is a higher priority, because without it, the streetcar wouldn’t succeed. I agree that commuter rail is important for the city (it’d be a bit more meaningful if we weren’t also widening Interstates and building new sprawl, traffic, and pollution-generating toll roads to Southwest Fort Worth for crazy amounts of money, though).
However.
Commuter rail won’t be the determining success of the streetcar project. If anything, it’s the commuter rail that won’t be really successful without a modern, efficient, and attractive local neighborhood rail transit system. The flaw in Jordan’s thinking is looking at the streetcar project as solely a transportation project, when it has other benefits (some likely even greater than its transportation benefits) far beyond transportation. The streetcar isn’t only a transportation tool – it’s an economic development tool as well (in addition to more nebulous but still very real benefits like neighborhood pride, street life, community fabric, etc.).
The central city is Fort Worth’s economic engine. It may only be a small portion of the land in this sprawling city, but it is massively critical to Fort Worth’s livelihood and economy. It contains our two largest employment centers (Downtown and the Near Southside), our deeply meaningful cultural facilities of all sizes (everything from the Kimbell, Carter, Modern, and the like to Bass Hall to Arts Fifth Avenue to Stage West and beyond), and infrastructure designed to support a wide variety of transportation methods. It generates huge amounts of tax revenue that helps pay for parks, street maintenance, police, and more. The central city is how we compete economically with our peer cities across the country for new investment and, these days, new up-and-coming residents who are looking not only for work, but for dynamic and interesting cities apart from the usual tract-homes-and-chain-stores world.
Streetcars have proven time and again to be powerful catalysts for central city growth, able to attract, and shape, new development in central city areas. This isn’t just our love of Portland, Oregon talking (although Portland’s seen $2.8 billion in added value thanks to their streetcar system). For just a few examples – Tampa’s streetcar has generated $1.1 billion in new development. Little Rock has seen $700 million in new value brought to their city. Even Kenosha, Wisconsin has seen $174 million in new value.
And the development the streetcar attracts is a lot healthier for the city than the development a new toll road or a wider I-35 will attract. It’s development in compact central city locations that allow people to get around without adding to the road congestion or air quality problems of the city, as well as development that doesn’t cost the city an arm and a leg to pay for new infrastructure in far-flung areas to support it.
That’s the other key to the streetcar’s economic impact – it doesn’t just attract new stuff. It helps shape that new stuff into a more livable and sustainable form. Like most American cities, Fort Worth gutted much of its central city for parking, wide roads, and freeways. We’ve made better progress than some cities with our Downtown revitalization in the form of Sundance Square, but the Basses have still kept it pretty well solely dependent upon people driving in, parking, visiting, then leaving. We have a smaller Downtown residential population than many cities of comparable (or even smaller) size across the United States. Other districts have made a lot of progress, but the central city is still choked in its potential by its dependence on the car. It costs money to build that parking, and it takes up land we should be using instead for new development (bringing new jobs, new residents, and new economic benefits) and new public amenities like, oh, say, a Sundance Square public plaza.
Did you know that a single structured parking space (meaning a space in a garage) tends to cost at bare minimum $10,000? Usually in the central city, this figure is much higher – $20,000, $25,000, or more per parking space. A space to stick your car for the day is just stupidly expensive. That parking helps choke the potential of the central city. If you’re looking at living in the central city, developers are passing that parking cost on to you. Provide a parking space or two for every condo and apartment, and suddenly you’ve priced out a lot of people who would really love to live somewhere that would let them walk to a lot of stuff, ride their bike, and just generally get around without driving. You’ve also sucked up a lot of space to store cars, space that could instead be earning its developers money and providing new destinations for residents, workers, and visitors.
The T and City Hall have talked about our commuter rail projects a lot, and even show in the station renderings areas for “transit-oriented development.” I’m sorry, but if we’re really expecting much TOD from our commuter rail, we’re living in a fantasy world. A commuter train that runs by ever half-hour to hour (or worse) at limited times of the day isn’t going to do a damned thing except generate parking lots at the stations. Commuter rail is definitely needed, don’t get me wrong – but it’s still yet another way for us to simply shuttle people into and out of Downtown Fort Worth as quickly as possible. It’s the transit equivalent of a big fat Interstate or arterial street.
No, not everybody wants to live in the central city, and that’s fine – but a lot of people would like to, more than a lot of Fort Worth politicians probably realize. If we’re going to be competing on the national stage in the 21st century, simply building more ways to get people in and out of the central city isn’t enough. In some ways, it’s just more business as usual – which, Mayor Moncrief would like to remind you, is dead.
We have to get more serious about creating a healthy, livable series of neighborhoods in the central city, making it a cohesive place rather than just a set of tourist districts and office towers. That’s the sort of thing that is attracting the leaders and businesses of tomorrow in this day and age. We’re seeing it all across the country. The streetcar is a key component of doing just that. It helps shape development into forms that aren’t so car dependent, opening up central city living for new ranges of people, driving new jobs and residences, and more. It does so in ways that simply improving our bus system could never hope to do – while we need a better bus system, it’s not a substitute for the permanence and ease-of-use of a central city streetcar that would attract far more riders and attract development and investment along the route. Buses are never going to do that.
And for the people who don’t want to live in the central city, the streetcar’s development impacts will create more reasons for them to want to take those pretty new commuter trains into town to visit and spend money.
It needs to be said – we can’t keep up the same-old business as usual small-town Cowtown dog and pony show anymore. We’re a major city, and it’s time we put our big boy pants on and started behaving like it. If we’re actually serious about building a Fort Worth for the 21st century, one that competes in the economies of this new world, we can’t just simply concentrate on the Southwest Parkway, widening I-35, and building a new commuter train to shuffle people out of the central city. We’ve got to do better. The arrival of the railroads put Fort Worth on the map, and I truly believe the streetcar will be another legacy project far more monumental in the future than an I-35 widening could ever hope to be. It’s something that will generate huge benefits for us long term. It’ll be giving back when our grandkids are running things. All you’re hearing about these days is Fort Worth’s budget problem, but here we have the opportunity to make an investment that will give back to this city in incredible ways, and some people at City Hall are ready to just give up.
An opportunity, by the way, that the Feds are virtually screaming at us that we should take. Over 80 cities are planning modern streetcar systems, but do you know how many have actually had funding commitments from US DOT to help? It’s an extremely small list – you could count it on your hands, in fact. Fort Worth has been put on an extremely exclusive and deeply meaningful short list of places that can be leaders in remaking our nation with more livable neighborhoods and less dependence on oil (that’s kind of a big deal – there’s that thing going on in the Gulf, for example, that you might have heard about), a position that will mean Fort Worth is generating buzz across the country, but rather than take the lead we’ve got government officials ready to take a nap. We’ve waffled on this enough, and we’re going to be a national embarrassment at the US DOT if we keep it up.
(And I should add that based on what I understand about this FTA grant – which admittedly could be wrong – Fort Worth’s “accepting” the money is basically a formality, and the money is already committed.)
We need to let HDR finish their study, and we need to then let them do the third phase of their study (expect that to be the controversy later this year). To already be talking about stopping before they’ve even finished is just irresponsible. I’m convinced that that’s where Jordan is heading – he’s setting up excuses to kill the third phase of HDR’s study at the end of the year, things like “budget” and “Tower 55″ and the like.
Understand that this isn’t anything personal towards Jungus Jordan. I don’t know the guy. I’m sure if I met him at a bar he’d be fun to chat with. Hell, I disagreed with Chuck Silcox nearly every time he opened his mouth, but he was still a good guy.
I’m just floored by the staggering lack of leadership and lack of vision coming from City Hall. We’ve had opportunity knocking on our door for a while for something that will have tremendous benefits for our city’s future, we’ve had extensive work done for years and years on planning this thing, we’ve had support from the mayor, council members, and the public, and now we’ve got Uncle Sam himself virtually pounding on the door to help, yet we hem and haw and do nothing while we get happy about widening an Interstate that’ll just put more crap in our air and more cars on our roads. If we’re really this freaked by our budget problems, why are some people so eager to slam the door on an opportunity to invest in something that will let our city reap so much economic benefit? If you’ve got budget problems, you can either trim things to the bone, or you can earn more. Rather than closing our swimming pools and cutting back at our libraries then dumping so much onto business-as-usual transportation projects, how about we think forward and invest in something that’ll help us prosper our way out of this situation?
(II don’t believe we’ve ever turned down Federal transportation money before. Certainly not for road projects – even when the result is the disaster that is Rosedale in the Near Southside and East Side, for example, we took the money, knowing that we’d be undoing much of what it paid for in the future.)
I should say that it’s not a total lack of leadership and vision. District 9 councilmember Joel Burns certainly gets it:
“We can’t afford not to take advantage of this incredible return on investment,” he said. “Fort Worth needs a modern streetcar system. This potential investment from the federal government acknowledges our effort to create jobs, have a cleaner environment and have a more livable Fort Worth.”
As Burns points out later in the same article, it’s not likely that the streetcar project will take any money from the city’s general fund, since there are other sources like TIF districts and Public Improvement Districts and more.
Count State Senator Wendy Davis on board as well:
“Given the growth of this region and the limited funds for our transportation needs, we have to be smarter about how we develop and supplement our transportation infrastructures,” she said in a news release. “This is something I’ve supported for a long time — a way to connect walkable, sustainable communities with a transportation mode that does not add more vehicles to an already congested road system.”
As Mayor Moncrief said, business as usual is dead. Let’s see if we can’t do something about that, huh? This is Fort Worth – we’re supposed to be pioneers, right? That’s what the “Cowboys and Culture” thing is built upon.
Let’s also remember this survey, conducted by the ETC Institute for the City of Fort Worth last year:
The streetcar project is the third highest supported project in the survey, and has the most “very supportive” votes of any project. Had the project been listed as what it actually is – a central city streetcar rather than just a Downtown streetcar – I wager it might have even been more supported.
It’s just another piece of info that shows that this project isn’t just something being talked about by random doofus bloggers like me and urban planners – there’s a not insignificant amount of the citizenry who are really enthused about this, as well. This is becoming a movement. It’s the sort of thing that people who want to be mayor in the future might do well to not try and stamp out. The new Fort Worth is speaking.
I didn’t expect it to be necessary again so soon, but you know what? Why don’t you write to every single council member and the Mayor and tell them exactly what you think? I know the “Fort Worth Way” isn’t to stir the pot, but the Fort Worth Way is failing us. Tell them how much you support the streetcar project and what it means for Fort Worth’s future. Tell them you’re tired of more business-as-usual and the lack of vision from City Hall. There’s no vote coming up any time soon, but Fort Worth’s City Council needs to know that people are paying attention even when they’re not voting. Here’s that contact info again – don’t limit yourself to just your own councilmember. Let them all know. (And be ready to let them all know again later this year.) E-mail is cheap:
Mayor – Mike Moncrief – 817-392-6118 –mike.moncrief@fortworthgov.org
Mayor Pro Tem – District 4 – Danny Scarth – 817-392-6187 –District4@fortworthgov.org
District 2 – Sal Espino – 817-392-8802 –District2@fortworthgov.org
District 3 – Zim Zimmerman – 817-392-8803 -District3@fortworthgov.org
District 5 – Frank Moss – 817-392-8805 –District5@fortworthgov.org
District 6 – Jungus Jordan – 817-392-8806 –District6@fortworthgov.org
District 7 – Carter Burdette – 817-392-8807 –District7@fortworthgov.org
District 8 – Kathleen Hicks – 817-392-8808 –District8@fortworthgov.org
District 9 – Joel Burns – 817-392-8809 – District9@fortworthgov.org
And while you’re at it, how about you tell the Star-Telegram how you feel as well? They’re the big paper in town. Let them know the streetcar project is important. I hope a lot of you take the time to send things to the Star-Telegram:
Letter policy
Mail: Box 1870, Fort Worth, TX 76101
Fax: 817-390-7688
Verification: Letters must include printed full name, address and day and home phone numbers for author verification purposes only.
Frequency: Writers are limited to one letter every 30 days.
Content: Must be the author’s original words. Suggested length is 200 words or less. Letters may be edited for space, clarity, civility and accuracy.
Questions: Call 817-390-7599 or contact Jill “J.R.” Labbe, Editorial Page Director
Cheers & Jeers policy
Submit via e-mail: letters@star-telegram.com
Mail: Box 1870, Fort Worth, TX 76101
Fax: 817-390-7688
Please limit your Cheer or Jeer to about 50 words. Full name, address and daytime telephone number are required. There are some restrictions on subjects. Items may be edited.
Questions: Call 817-390-7599 or contact Jill “J.R.” Labbe, Editorial Page Director
Recent Comments