ATLANTA — There's talk about trains again in Tampa. There's always talk about trains in Tampa. This time, the talk should get serious.
In the last decade, former County Commissioner Ed "Choo-Choo" Turanchik — a nice guy whose plan would have benefited wealthy landowners, developers and real estate lawyers — wanted to build what he claimed would be a $350 million light rail line that would use existing tracks.
The real cost was more than $2 billion. It went down in flames, as it should have, and I helped shoot down the plan.
During this period, Hillsborough County government appointed the "Committee of 99," citizens who studied all aspects of transportation and funding. I was a member. Again, I was skeptical — as were many on the committee — of the claims about trains. One report showed that mass transit overall in Tampa would have fewer riders if a rail line were built than if it weren't. The reason was that rail soaked up so much money, for so few riders, that other modes of transit — primarily buses — would be starved.
Critics such as myself opposed rail at that time because it was clearly driven by special interests who concealed themselves behind a faux grassroots group. The train would have served their financial interests — and only incidentally served the public. That was wrong.
But now another train proposal is on the table, unveiled a few weeks ago by Tampa Mayor Pam Iorio and featuring a rail line between Tampa and St. Petersburg. Here's what Tampa should consider: Look north to Atlanta.
In the 1970s, Atlanta built its MARTA system, a horribly expensive heavy rail project that could have been the backbone for a regional transit network. But some counties in the metro area didn't want to be part of MARTA, basically because of racism. MARTA today is the only rail system in the nation without state support. It struggles.
And Atlanta struggles. A recent study shows the metro area has the second worst congestion problem in the nation. Commute times are atrocious. Many businesses decline to relocate to Atlanta, citing the transportation problems. Air pollution has made Atlanta the asthma capital of the nation and a leader in many other ailments related to air quality.
The Reason Foundation, which takes a dim view of rail and supports innovative road solutions, recently proposed a "fix" for Atlanta. It was a combination of tunnels under the city, designated lanes and the like — and the estimated price tag was $25 billion.
Unfortunately, any plan to fix Atlanta's transportation system using additional rail would also cost about $25 billion.
Even those estimates are likely inadequate. A better guess is that any solution using roads, rail or some combination is going to cost as much as $100 billion. A just-completed study by a regional planning group put the immediate transportation needs at $67 billion.
What's the lesson for Tampa Bay? The area needs to plan now for what it wants to be 25, 50 and 100 years from now. When you hear constantly that "growth is necessary" and "growth is good," look at Atlanta, which has more than doubled its population — to about 5 million people — in the last quarter century. Do Hillsborough and Pinellas counties want the same fate?
Cars will likely remain major factors in transportation planning — but the end of cheap oil will foster many changes in living patterns. Look at the projects that Atlanta-based Novare is building in downtown Tampa, including Skypoint and Element. The same company has revitalized much of Atlanta's Midtown with its creative new urbanism. Other Atlanta neighborhoods are being built with denser live-work-play characteristics. The problem is that some form of transit should be guiding this urban transformation — and in Atlanta, that's not happening. The Georgia capital is likely to only exacerbate its problems by getting denser without suitable transit infrastructure.
The Bay area can avoid that. The region is about 25 years behind Atlanta in growth. Plan the train lines now — as Iorio and others are advocating. Let the community have a voice in where growth should go and build the infrastructure to support it. Watch out for manipulation of the process, as happened in the last attempt to bring rail to Tampa. Stop road-building that opens up vast new areas for development, where developers make a quick buck and then dump the cost and misery of senseless, unplanned growth on the community.
Atlanta's underlying problem is political balkanization. Too many petty bureaucracies compete for power. Although different in details, the Tampa Bay area has the same problem. There have been efforts to overcome that — the Committee of 99 and Bill McBride's Hillsborough Tomorrow visioning project a decade ago are examples. Broader versions of those efforts are needed, like the recent Reality Check Tampa Bay sessions that brought together 300 regional leaders who used Legos to "plan" Tampa Bay's future growth. That exercise has morphed into One Bay, an awareness campaign to take the lessons learned to the public.
Otherwise, come visit me in my "other" city. I'll drive you around and show you how bad a city can get when planning and commitment take the back seat to out-of-control development. But don't plan on a short trip — it takes forever to get anywhere in Atlanta nowadays.
This article appears in Oct 10-16, 2007.