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| | Issue #19.48 :: 06/25/2008 - 07/01/2008 | Study the trolley
| BY TOM GRANT
| AUGUSTA, GA - In the late ’70s, when I lived in Oregon, the economy was in shambles. The logging industry had collapsed. Jobs were scarce. Interest rates were through the roof.
That’s the very time when Portland took two critical steps toward the future. One, it adopted strict land-use planning laws designed to focus growth in urban areas. Two, it began pushing mass-transit systems that now include extensive light rail and trolley routes.
Light rail was controversial and expensive. Sprawl continued. Yet after 30 years of rail development, it has done what developers expected.
Growth has focused around nodes in the rail system. Thousands of condominiums grew in a warehouse district, now served by a trolley. My friends who remain in Oregon say it took time for people’s habits and urban growth patterns to change, but they did.
That’s why developers favor rail systems. A bus route could move tomorrow. A rail system is imbedded in the earth. Developers can depend on it, just as they can a freeway or an arterial street, to bring traffic their way for years to come. Based on that, developers make long- term investments along the route.
When the Downtown Development Authority set aside $40,000 to study creating a trolley system in downtown Augusta, one that would link the medical community with Broad Street, some community leaders immediately complained. Commissioner Jerry Brigham suggested that the $40,000 would be better spent on sidewalks. Commissioner Joe Bowles joked that “rickshaws” could replace the trolleys.
We expect Bowles and Brigham, as the leading fiscal conservatives on the commission, to be critical of unnecessary spending. However, we also think Bowles and Brigham should recognize the potential for fixed-rail transportation, a trolley in this case, to help focus development in Augusta.
Bowles and Brigham supported a measure to give $10 million in local tax money to support expansion of the Medical College of Georgia onto the Gilbert Manor property. They say they see the potential economic payoff of subsidizing growth of the medical community.
Both supported the TEE center and the condominium development on the depot site. They believed that that public involvement in those projects could spur public returns in the future.
We would hope that they would look the same way at the DDA’s exploration of public transportation. DDA member Paul King, an advocate of the trolley system, says that if the study fails to show that it’s feasible, he’ll back away from his support.
Brigham knows this isn’t about sidewalks. If he wanted sidewalks, he’d ask Augusta National to build sidewalks to serve the throngs who visit that site.
In a time of energy problems, we need to reconsider public transportation in Augusta. The DDA is doing that. Give them a chance. | |
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