Before buying a
house in East Arlington, Rod Morrill made a checklist to minimize
the hassle of his daily commute. He made sure the house was less
than five miles from his workplace. The home is east of his job,
meaning he never drives into the sun's glare in the morning or
evening.
For a while, it worked.
The rush-hour commute took 15 minutes. But three years later,
heavy traffic has turned it into a 28-minute drive. Morrill said he
expected his commute would get longer because East Arlington is a
fast-growing part of the city.
What he can't understand is why government doesn't react to the
growth by getting people to take carpools and buses, which would
reduce the number of cars on the road.
"The mathematical answer would be mass transit, but our culture
won't buy into it," he said.
Morrill's complaint is Jacksonville's long-term transportation
dilemma.
According to recently released data from the 2000 Census, the
typical commute for the Jacksonville metropolitan area -- Duval, St.
Johns, Clay and Nassau counties -- took 26.6 minutes. Of the
nation's 49 largest metropolitan areas, the Jacksonville area posted
the 14th-longest commute.
Time spent behind the wheel was 18 percent higher than the
22.6-minute commute in the 1990 Census.
The increase translates to 34 more hours of driving a year,
almost the equivalent of another week at the office.
At the same time, commuters are abandoning buses and carpools.
The 2000 Census found 80 percent of workers in the Jacksonville
metropolitan area commute by themselves, compared to 76 percent in
1990.
Yet the surge in traffic is causing Sunbelt cities to reconsider
mass transit. They are building, or at least studying, rail lines to
suburban stations and busways that provide lanes exclusively for
buses. Highways are getting high-occupancy vehicle lanes to
encourage carpools.
But in Jacksonville, there is no consensus among Jacksonville's
leaders on when such a system should be up and running. Jacksonville
Transportation Authority Executive Director Michael Blaylock said he
envisions it by 2015, but it will work only if officials start
laying the groundwork now by shaping development so it meshes with
transit. If people keep moving farther out, he said, that will
increase the strain on the highway system and make it impossible for
transit to provide an alternative to reliance on the automobile.
"I think it's highly likely, highly possible that we'll become
another Atlanta unless we're smart in how we grow the city," he
said. "If we keep doing the same things, we're going to end up in
the same boat as the other cities."
Convenience wanted
There was a time when riding in carpools and buses was far more
popular. In the 1980 Census, just 66 percent of people drove alone
to work in the Jacksonville metropolitan area.
The wider use reflecting the impact of soaring gas prices in the
1970s. In addition, downtown reigned as the dominant employment
center at that time, so people had a second pocketbook reason to
leave their cars at home -- they saved by not paying parking fees.
Since then, the cost of gasoline actually has fallen when
adjusted for inflation, and suburban office parks provide free
parking in huge lots. Shawn Page of Jacksonville summed up in a
single word what it would take to convince more people to ride the
bus -- "desperation."
"You're glad to know it's there if you ever need it, but you hope
you never have to use it," he said.
Commuters might look at bus schedules and ask how they can manage
to use transit while also running errands. Driving to and from work
conveniently allows for the stop at day care, picking up groceries
or dropping off clothes at the cleaners along the way.
"That's a big factor, especially to people like myself who have a
small business and small children," said Sue Marin of Jacksonville.
"There are a lot of things besides just getting from Point A to
Point B. It's 'how do I get my child to baseball practice?'"
To overcome such views, Sunbelt cities such as Jacksonville are
looking for ways to improve transit by saving time for riders. The
$2.2 billion Better Jacksonville Plan, which voters approved with a
half-cent sales tax hike in 2000, contains $100 million to buy
rights of way for a rapid transit system that moves passengers
faster than regular buses.
An ongoing JTA study has ruled out starting with light rail,
which would use electric-powered trains. Light rail is similar to
the $184 million Skyway in downtown, but the Skyway runs on elevated
tracks, whereas light rail would stay at ground-level and extended
much longer distances.
| The First Coast
Metropolitan Planning Organization helps people who want to
take carpools by matching them with others who live and work
in the same area, with similar work schedules. For
information, call 633-RIDE. |
The JTA study
instead has zeroed in on "bus rapid transit." If approved, it would
build lanes dedicated for buses only along Interstate 95 or Philips
Highway in the Southside, and next to I-95 or Lem Turner Road in
northwest Jacksonville. T
he busways would run through downtown. Like a light rail line,
there would be a chain of stations along the busways. The goal would
be to attract multi-story residential and commercial development
within walking distance of the stations.
The biggest advantage of the busways is the dedicated lanes,
allowing buses to run at express speeds all the time.
"If you see a bus driving past you while you're sitting in
traffic, that's heck of an incentive to ride," said Ed Castellani,
the JTA's rapid transit project manager. Timetable for
transit
The JTA staff is proceeding on a timetable forng the first
busways by 2010, assuming the Federal Transit Administration agrees
to help fund the construction.
But the date isn't chiseled in stone. The Better Jacksonville
Plan set 2010 as the timeline for buying the rights of way, not
necessarily building the system. Blaylock, the JTA executive
director, said he wants tobusways sometime between 2010 and
2015.
Mayor John Delaney said he thinks the metropolitan area's
population must double in size before rapid transit will work. He
said he thinks it will take until 2020 for the JTA to secure funding
and build the busways.
Aage Schroder, secretary of the state Department of
Transportation's Northeast Florida district, said if the buswayd in 2010, he's not sure it will attract enough riders to
justify the cost.
"The trend has been going on for a long time, and it's scary," he
said. "We've sprawled so much with relatively low-density
development, so we don't have the ability to pick somebody up with
transit. You've got cul de sacs and subdivisions that wind around
and you've got to go a mile to get to the back of them."
And he said that while rapid transit will provide a service by
giving people a choice besides driving, it won't unsnarl traffic
jams.
"It's not going to have a dramatic effect where you get transit
and all of a sudden traffic on the highway drops by 20 percent," he
said. "It might drop 5 percent and you don't even notice it."
Atlanta-like traffic?
It would take another dramatic decade of commuting increases for
Jacksonville to experience Atlanta-length commutes.
The typical Atlanta commute took 26 minutes in 1990 -- the same
time Jacksonville residents now spend. By 2000, the census showed,
commuting in Atlanta had worsened to 31.2 minutes. Only two other
cities -- New York and Washington -- required workers to spend more
time getting to their jobs.
If Jacksonville experiences a repeat of the 1990s, then by 2010
the typical commute here would top 31 minutes.
The Atlanta area's mounting traffic jams and air pollution led to
the creation in 1999 of the Georgia Regional Transportation
Authority, a state agency that funds road construction and transit.
The authority also can veto large-scale development that doesn't
mesh with the transportation plan and withhold transportation
funding if local governments allow development that goes against the
transportation plan.
Blaylock said he would support creating a regional transportation
authority for Northeast Florida, an approach endorsed in 2000 by a
Jacksonville Community Council Inc. study. The JCCI said each county
should identify a local tax source to fund regional transportation
projects, a recommendation that fell flat.
But Blaylock said it would be even harder to give such an
authority the power to veto development because local governments
would be reluctant to give up that control. He said the Jacksonville
area needs to change zoning and land use regulations so development
is denser. He said higher parking rates downtown would encourage
people to ride buses.
"The reality is there has to be some teeth, but what I'd like to
see first as a region is to decide collectively what the problem is,
and then decide how we're going to deal with it," he said.
In the meantime, the Better Jacksonville Plan and the state
Department of Transportation will deliver the most expensive dose of
road construction in city history this decade.
Many of the projects will seek to bust traffic jams at outdated
intersections and highway junctions by building new overpasses and
interchanges.
In some respects, the emphasis on road construction has worked in
Jacksonville, according to the Texas Transportation Institute, a
research organization affiliated with Texas A&M University.
The institute's annual assessment of traffic congestion, which is
widely watched by transportation officials, found in 1990 that
Jacksonville's traffic congestion was the 29th worst out of 71 of
the nation's largest cities. Traffic congestion worsened in the
1990s, but at a slower rate than most other cities. In 2000,
Jacksonville's traffic congestion was just 41st worst in the
institute's ranking.
But when the dust settles on the blitz of roadwork, the long-term
trend still shows worsening traffic by 2025, according to a report
by the First Coast Metropolitan Planning Organization, which
coordinates transportation projects in Duval and northern Clay and
St. Johns counties.
"The challenge we have is that we're not a big transit
community," said Denise Bunnewith, staff director of the First Coast
MPO. "If we don't change, we're going to have more congestion
because we're getting to the point that we can't widen roads any
further."
Suburban problems
On a regional basis, the dilemma for promoting transit is that
the fastest population growth is taking place in suburban counties,
far beyond the reach of any busway planned for at least the next 25
years.
And as Clay County demonstrates, long commutes don't necessarily
deter people from buying homes farther from the workplace. The
typical commute for Clay County workers takes 33 minutes, the
fourth-highest of any county in Florida. They drive mainly to jobs
in Jacksonville, heading up U.S. 17 and Blanding Boulevard, two
roads that can't be widened any more in northern Clay County.
More commuters drive alone in Clay County -- 84 percent -- than
any other county in the state.
John White of Orange Park is one of the few who uses transit. He
began riding for health reasons because he is an adult diabetic.
"I just didn't want to have an insulin reaction on the Buckman
Bridge," he said with a laugh, referring to the notorious rush-hour
backups.
To catch a bus to his job on the Southside, he must drive to
Argyle in Duval County, where he boards a twice-daily service that
typically serves just him and one other passenger, he said.
Some analysts suggest that before others decide to board the bus,
they will live closer to work.
"The one thing that runs across all demographic groups is time,"
said Steve Polzin, research director at the Center for Urban
Transportation Research in Tampa. "Everybody is running out of time,
so there really is some pressure on people to rethink their home
location and their job location."
For people who work downtown, that could mean moving into the
apartments or townhomes being built within walking distance of
office towers.
In the suburbs, housing developments such as Nocatee, a
town-sized project in northwest St. Johns County, include a "town
center" with retail and jobs. It would mean living a few miles
closer to an office park.
Polzin said he expects "moderate increases" in commute time in
this decade, "but not the dramatic amount we saw in the 1990s. It
won't be two decades like that back to back."
But at the Northeast Florida Regional Planning Council, officials
say they see no slowdown in the movement of people into suburban
counties. The jobs eventually will spread into those counties, too,
but until then, the biggest factor for commutes will be the longer
distances between home and work, said Ed Lehman, director of growth
management for the Northeast Florida Regional Planning Council.
"Possibly we'll have Atlanta-length commutes," he said. "I can't
imagine having Atlanta-like congestion."
Staff writer David Bauerlein can be reached at (904)
359-4581 or via e-mail at dbauerlein
jacksonville.com.
