Sprawled Out: The Search for Community in the American Suburb

The Project Begins

Welcome to SPRAWLED OUT, a blog which will accompany my work on a book designed to use my city of Franklin, Wisconsin as an example of the community planning process in modern American cities and towns around the country. As the title implies, there will be a certain bias against the sort of unchecked, freeway-fed expansion that the United States has seen since the end of World War II.

Ultimately, our built environment is a reflection of who we are and who we aspire to be. It should not be taken lightly, nor left solely in the hands of carpetbaggers and opportunists.

Trails Committee widens its focus to include Franklin High School

Though Victory Creek subdivision can be seen from the Pleasant View Elementary playground, there is no way to walk from here to there - yet.

Last night's Trail Committee meeting was fruitful. While our focus remains on improving accessibility to Pleasant View Elementary School through the Safe Routes to School program, alderman and committee member Kristen Wilhelm located a Wisconsin DOT Pedestrian Roadshow/Walking Workshop grant that will bring a facilitator to Franklin for a series of presentations to community stakeholders. This will provide a introduction to the Safe Routes process as well as a focus on Franklin High School access issues - - effectively widening our initial area of influence to cover two Franklin schools.

Anyone who's observed the corner of Drexel and 51st before and after a school day -- and certainly before and after sporting events -- knows that something must be done to decrease the amount of vehicles on the road. As long as students from even adjacent subdivisions (see above) need a vehicle to get to school, that congestion will continue.

While Safe Routes to School deals with engineering and trail-building issues, the program also works to educate the community, making a safer environment for non-vehicular traffic. Once we add some connectivity, drivers will learn to treat these residential streets with a great deal more respect than they do currently.

Building on good bones vs. making room for a drive-thru

The Former Herda's True Value Hardware Store in St. Martins

With last week's Economic Development Commission meeting canceled due to lack of a quorum (mass illness), I was able to attend and listen in on an organizational meeting of a group called Franklin Citizens for Community Development (formerly known as "Franklin First"), a project organized by blogger Greg Kowalski and James Mullarkey (a Franklin Community Development Authority Commissioner). I wanted to get a sense of their intent.

I listened as they discussed possible mission statements. At first, I heard a lot of "we need a water park," "we need a performing arts center," "why aren't we Mequon?" "high-end amenities!" etc.

I brought with me a picture of the empty hardware store down in St. Martins, which is a beautiful building, and reminded them that the city has some good "bones" to build on; their organization would do well, in other words, to exploit current assets before crying out for more new construction. This seemed to be enthusiastically received.

I also introduced the term "sustainable" to their discussion. One look at the city's budget will tell you that the current way of doing things is not going to work for much longer. Perhaps Citizens for Community Development could use their energy and voices to promote the small steps that are needed in order to create a more economically vibrant city. For instance, promoting small businesses in town is an excellent way to enrich the local economy: For every dollar spent at a local business, 45% is reinvested locally. Spent a dollar at a corporate chain and a mere 15% is reinvested locally.

(We will hopefully be talking more, by the way, about the building above on this blog in the near future.)

Meanwhile, Kowalski's Franklin Today blog reports a rumor that the now-vacant Sentry store on 76th and Rawson may be purchased by neighboring Walgreens, and - amazingly - razed to make room for a drive-thru window.

That's right: Torn down for a drive-thru window.

The bar is once again lowered.

Baby steps toward a walkable community

 

Two pieces of good news: 

Monday's meeting with Franklin Public Schools Superintendent Dr. Steve Patz went very well, and we can expect collaboration with the school district when applying for Safe Routes to School grant funds.

On Tuesday night, "Request from Trail Committee for approval to proceed with the grant writing and application process for community planning related to trails and pedestrian routes" was passed unanimously by the Common Council.

The Franklin Trail Committee meets tonight to keep the ball rolling.

"Walking buses" and veggies: Town residents come together to make healthy lifestyle changes

Judy Dilling (left) and Jen Chalmers (in red) help walk Lakeview Elementary School students home as part of the Vitality Project's "walking buses" last week in Albert Lea, Minn. The project has added an average 3.1 years to the lives of residents through improved diet, exercise and living habits.

With organizers' help, the city crammed five years of sidewalk and bike trail construction into a year to make exercise easier for its 18,000 residents. Restaurants added healthier menu options and grocery stores showcased wholesome foods. People snacked on fruits and veggies more and ate less fast food.

Schools stopped celebrating birthdays with sugary treats and started setting up "walking buses" that allowed kids to walk to and from school together with adult supervision. Employers gave workers time to exercise.

Organizers say the first-of-its kind experiment added an average 3.1 years to the longevity of about 2,300 residents who calculated their life spans by answering 36 lifestyle questions dubbed the "vitality compass."

Read the rest at: Town residents come together to make healthy lifestyle changes - JSOnline

Save Franklin's historic water tower

Just kidding. Good riddance.

Trading one towering element for another - FranklinNOW.

Sustainable Design: all in the details

From Master Plan to Specs: Sustainable Design in Detail | Congress for the New Urbanism:

As planners, and advocates for healthier place making and urbanism, we often talk about the importance of scale. We recognize that city planning must be comprehensive in that the various scales of planning including the region, city, block, street, and building all must be addressed. Sustainable planning can be mapped on a spectrum of needs from the “big picture” of design all the way down to the specifications of individual buildings. It’s the attention to details the matter.

In a short article from copenhagenize.com, a small effort to improve bicyclist’s commute is demonstrated through the convenient placement of trash bins along bicycle paths. This may seem like an insignificant detail within the large realm of sustainable planning, but such efforts, catering to environmentally friendly methods of travel should be commended.

Speaking for myself, and the large community of supporters of New Urbanism, it’s refreshing to see little ways that pedestrians are taking precedent in an ever growing vehicular dominated society. Small efforts to support pedestrian and environmentally friendly places are integral to the overall success of the urban fabric. After all, it’s important to be reminded of whom we are planning for; those who live in the communities we are designing, improving and rallying for.

Read more here and here.

"Spurb" - Schott’s Vocab Blog - NYTimes.com

From Schott’s Vocab Blog - NYTimes.com:

Spurb

John F. Wasik’s term for “sprawling, unwalkable urban-suburban areas that have no connection to public transportation and central cities.”

Commenting on Mr. Wasik’s book, “The Cul-De-Sac Syndrome,” in The Daily Herald, a local paper in the Chicago area, Anna Marie Kukec wrote:

Still, Wasik draws much on his suburban roots for his books and has even touched on his own neighborhood in “Cul-De-Sac.” That book examines what caused the housing meltdown, how sprawl and tax breaks contributed to unaffordable homes and what could happen next.

As part of his examination, he even coined the term, “spurb,” or the sprawling urban area that’s not conveniently located near anything, like suburbs that seemingly spring out from the middle of a corn field, he said.

Writing for the Huffington Post in June, Mr. Waskik argued:

The spurb’s time has long past. Future energy demands from the rest of the world mean higher energy prices down the road. We need homes where there are jobs, infrastructure and transportation.

The tide is turning: Franklin takes a positive step toward community-building

Item G.6 on this past Tuesday's Common Council agenda reads innocently enough:

Reconstruction of S. 51st Street from W. Drexel Avenue to W. Puetz Road - 60 percent plan review and policy decision relative to additional funding in addition to the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act (ARRA) funding.

This issue was this: The stretch of 51st Street in front of Franklin High School is due for repaving. Despite its heavy use - and single entry-point to the school -  it has been without non-vehicular features (pedestrian and bike access) for as long as the high school has been there (approximately 1964). To simply re-do it as it is would be a lipstick-on-a-pig project, to be sure.

How did we get to this point? You may remember that, during the misguided "widen 51st Street" debacle, certain council members made a point of repeatedly saying that Franklin had "pretty much zero chance" of getting stimulus - aka American Reinvestment and Recovery Act  -  funds (city engineer Jack Bennett: "A chance in a million"; alderman Steve Taylor: "No chance in hell"; alderman Steve Olson: "We will not receive any federal dollars" ), therefor it was senseless to sweat the details.

At that juncture, the list considered for submission for the "no chance in hell" stimulus grant looked like this:

a) W. Puetz Road (S. Street to St. Martins Road)
b) S. Street (Puetz Road to Drexel Avenue)
c) S. 51st Street (North of Rawson Avenue to College Avenue in Greendale; the potential widened road)
d) Additional Project

These projects were chosen without public input based on what the city had in its medium range plans. The 51st Street item was particularly troubling in that it proposed a by-default widening the road; city administrators can deny it all they want, but the only plan filed at that point was indeed a default widening plan.

I addressed these auto-centric proposals in a post entitled "Common Council Tonight: Slouch toward mediocrity or reach for excellence?", which includes some background on how the projects were chosen.

I addressed the council on March 17th, saying in part:

American Recovery and Reinvestment Act funding should not be used to expand a system of roads that do not provide safe travel for people who are walking or bicycling. Too many Franklin streets are designed wide and fast, without sufficient sidewalks, crosswalks or bicycle lanes.

We, in fact, CREATE traffic with huge roads and no alternative.

Now we have an opportunity for a new approach. there's not a lot of time.

We currently have little or no consideration given for the safety of older people, children, or people with disabilities.

These incomplete streets are dangerous and create barriers for people to get to jobs, school, the doctor, and fully participate in civic life....

...

... I fear that Franklin seems content to ignore opportunities to increase connectivity and instead continues to encourage volume and throughput.

I have a list of almost 600 Wisconsin bicycle and pedestrian projects funded or co-funded by the federal government from 1993 to 2007. Franklin does not appear once.

We're going to have to address this.

As for 51st street: There are clear and ready-to-implement street schemes that can be deployed there to make it a neighborhood amenity and increase commercial foot traffic.

So let’s get on that.

I was far from the only one to speak out. The council heard from many, many residents who sounded a common theme: Why always automatically widen roads? Why can't we walk or bike anywhere in this city? Why no connectivity? Don't we care about the safety of children and the elderly?

It was a watershed moment made possible by the revelation that Franklin's stimulus requests threatened to be "business as usual" - auto-centric, and connectivity-be-damned. Responsive to the enormous amount of public input received, Mayor Taylor submitted a veto aimed at A) dismantling the poorly birthed project list and, B) constructing instead a list that addresses resident's concerns about safety, walkability, and accessibility.

Not everyone thought there was particular value in the discussion prompted by the aborted stimulus application items. Alderman Steve Olson - who repeatedly mentioned his own "lack of memory" at Tuesday's meeting, by the way - said the following months ago at the March 31st meeting:

The reality is, is - and I'm going to say it - this meeting tonight is a monumental waste of time. This common council and you all have had your time wasted for the last three weeks. We will not receive any federal dollars. We do not qualify for federal dollars based on the criteria that now comes before us. So this action item, whether the mayor's veto is withheld or overridden is meaningless, just as my colleagues have said.

The discussion that we're about to have is again a waste of time because we're not going to get federal dollars. We don't qualify. So, for my part I apologize that you're here. I'm glad that you're here; it's good to have people at common council meetings - you know, frankly, I get a little tired of seeing nobody here, so I'm glad you're here. But I think there are better things you could be doing with your time than worrying about a four-lane road that's just not going to happen.

Fortunately, my district's alderman, Kristen Wilhelm, and Mayor Taylor disagreed with Olson ("we will not receive any federal dollars") and made sure public input was gathered and weighed prior to our application for funds. The discussions and meetings for which alderman Olson had such little regard resulted in the decision that the stimulus application would concentrate on 51st Street in front of the high school. Furthermore, we were able to learn the following: Listening sessions - more "monumental wastes of time"? - reiterated and made clear that neighbors are very, very concerned with making that stretch of 51st in front of the high school, at long last, safe and accessible for non-vehicular traffic. That message was delivered without ambiguity.

Surprise: Franklin was granted a $1.5 million stimulus grant for 51st Street reconstruction.

Another surprise: Turns out City Engineer Jack Bennett submitted Franklin's stimulus funding request with plans and budgeting that DID NOT include the bike and pedestrian paths that all parties assumed were part of any plan for the street. In other words, the default plan (no paths) would go into effect if additional city funding could not be appended to the project to supplement the $1.5 million stimulus grant. With the grant, the city's expense to re-do the road with paths would still be cheaper than doing a road without paths minus the grant. Still, money's tight, right?

Long story short: On Tuesday night, this city took a huge step toward becoming a much more sustainable, attractive, and desirable community by altering the project slightly (putting off reconstructing the intersection, for instance) and preserving the pedestrian/bike paths that the community expects. A decision made for the citizens and not just their cars.

Aldermen Wilhelm, Solomon, and Skowronski voted for the re-budgeting and preservation of the paths plan; Alderman Olson voted against; Aldermen Sohns and Taylor were not present.

It's one small portion of the city, but a good, positive policy step; the people have been heard. Taken in combination with possible action by the Trails Committee regarding a Safe Routes to School program and its attention to 51st Street directly north of the intersection in question, Franklin is making strides toward improving its character and desirability by becoming more than simply a collection of subdivisions.

More later ....

The library discovers Facebook

If you're on Facebook, please become a fan of the Franklin Public Library, our community's most vital - and, arguably, only - public space. It's an easy way to keep up with programs and services offered at the library, a great city resource that we cannot take for granted.

Wondering why we don't bother building community amenities anymore?

I'm long overdue in noting the unfortunate end of the Franklin Cultural Center board's efforts to fund and build an arts center here. The organization was chaired by Don Dorson (read his letter after the jump). So much for local community amenities.

I also just started reading a newly published book called THE CUL-DE-SAC SYNDROME: TURNING AROUND THE UNSUSTAINABLE AMERICAN DREAM. And there's Franklin - a favorite for authors and journalists needing an object lesson in sprawl economics -  on page 53:

High-growth areas nearly always translate into higher property taxes. One study in Dane County, Wisconsin, where the tax burden is among the highest in the United States, showed that while the county's population grew 12 percent from 1990 to 1996, total property taxes soared 3.57 times faster than the population. Part of the reason is that developers rarely pay the long-term costs of building communities. Impact fees are often minimal.

Once subdivisions are built, builders are off the hook to fund schools parks, roads, and other infrastructure. In fact, the disparity between what a single-family home costs taxpayers and what developers pay is huge. In Franklin, Wisconsin, just south of Milwaukee, each new home cost taxpayers more than $10,000 for schools and services in 1992 (it was considerably more by 2008). The developer's contribution: $813 per home. Impact fees vary from locale to locale, but they never cover the full cost of development.

Is Franklin ready for Safe Routes to School?

Rabbit path: The current walking/biking route from the Hillendale subdivision to Pleasant View Elementary

Last night the Franklin Trails Committee, of which I am a member, met for the second time since its formation. It's mission is to address the creation of a pedestrian and bike path or trail on or near 51st street between Rawson and Drexel, while also discussing citywide non-vehicular connectivity.

The very first hurdle the Committee - and, by extension, the city of Franklin - needs to overcome is the outdated idea of bike and walking paths as purely recreational. Alderman Tim Solomon, a fellow member of the Trails Committee and also on the Parks Commission, seems especially prone to seeing non-vehicular trails as frivolous park-type amenities rather than vital elements of infrastructure. After all, up until now the city's trails have been under the direction of the Parks Commission, and our street system is notoriously unfriendly (read: deadly) to pedestrians and bikes.

After Alderman Solomon traced on a map a winding, Parks-proposed trail that eventually empties out onto 27th street, I was emphatic about defining the difference between UTILITY trails - which I believe the Trails Committee is charged with creating - and pure RECREATIONAL trails, which, while of great interest to me personally, do nothing whatsoever to facilitate the kind of connectivity in the city that will in turn encourage economic development. The trail Solomon traced described a potentially wonderful, winding course though fields and woodlands, but ultimately led from nowhere to nowhere - - another path where we need to build a parking lot next to it, perhaps?

I'd brought to the meeting a fairly voluminous amount of information on the state and federal Safe Routes to School program and associated grants. It's been clear for some time now that the area surrounding Pleasant View Elementary, which is a few hundred yards from 51st street, is woefully ill-equipped for accommodating non-vehicular traffic of kids and their parents who live mere blocks away (the entire city of Franklin is, of course, declared an unusually hazardous transportation area by the County Sheriff). Solving the 51st street conundrum and adding simple trails through currently unused land south of the school as well as improving crossings to the north on Rawson will make it possible for children in the subdivisions surrounding Pleasant View to choose to walk or bike to school and add connectivity to commercial sites on Rawson that could do with some foot traffic.

(Think this is an easy problem to tackle? Readers of this blog are aware of the torturous hand-wringing over whether to connect east toward 51st street or, inexplicably, send traffic through Hillendale subdivision.)

It turns out that the city has grant money available to build a sidewalk on the east side of 51st street from Drexel to Claire Meadows - - which seems fairly useless until you consider extending a path east from the West Evergreen stub-road through the vacant land south of Pleasant View.

Safe Routes to School offers fairly substantial grant dollars, but in order to have a chance at getting those funds the community - especially school officials - need to commit to a SRTS program that offers resources on everything from polling parents on their attitudes regarding walking or biking to suggesting sign placement and speed-abatement enforcement options.

So, in order to capture grant funds to help pay for improvements, Job One is to get the school administration on board with the Safe Routes to School program. Cross your fingers.

(See also Franklin Today.)

Suburban strip malls: There's no "there" there

Franklin's own Shoppes at Wyndham Village -- Good news: A handy Target store! Bad news: In no danger of being named one of the Great Places in America

Retrofitting Suburbia on suburban strip malls:

At best, the promise of freedom inherent to the road and the promise of self actualization promoted by consumerism endow the strip with the capacity to satisfy a broad range of individual needs and desires. At worst, the collective aspirations expressed by the commercial strip speak of the willing suppression of local identity by national systems of corporate investment and mass consumption.

More people staying put means more people involved in their community?

Joel Kotkin contends that "fewer Americans are relocating than at any time since 1962. That's good news for families, communities ... and even the environment."

Perhaps nothing will be as surprising about 21st-century America as its settledness. For more than a generation Americans have believed that "spatial mobility" would increase, and, as it did, feed an inexorable trend toward rootlessness and anomie. This vision of social disintegration was perhaps best epitomized in Vance Packard's 1972 bestseller A Nation of Strangers, with its vision of America becoming "a society coming apart at the seams." In 2000, Harvard's Robert Putnam made a similar point, albeit less hyperbolically, in Bowling Alone, in which he wrote about the "civic malaise" he saw gripping the country. In Putnam's view, society was being undermined, largely due to suburbanization and what he called "the growth of mobility."

Yet in reality Americans actually are becoming less nomadic. As recently as the 1970s as many as one in five people moved annually; by 2006, long before the current recession took hold, that number was 14 percent, the lowest rate since the census starting following movement in 1940. Since then tougher times have accelerated these trends, in large part because opportunities to sell houses and find new employment have dried up. In 2008, the total number of people changing residences was less than those who did so in 1962, when the country had 120 million fewer people. The stay-at-home trend appears particularly strong among aging boomers, who are largely eschewing Sunbelt retirement condos to stay tethered to their suburban homes—close to family, friends, clubs, churches, and familiar surroundings.

Read the rest at: Localism: Fewer Americans are Relocating - Newsweek.com

Great Places in America

The American Planning Association has announced their Great Places of 2009. East Newberry Avenue of Milwaukee is recognized in the "Great Streets" category.

When the "Great Parking" award people come around, Franklin just might have a chance ....

APA's flagship program celebrates places of exemplary character, quality, and planning. Places are selected annually and represent the gold standard in terms of having a true sense of place, cultural and historical interest, community involvement, and a vision for tomorrow. APA Great Places offer better choices for where and how people work and live. They are enjoyable, safe, and desirable. They are places where people want to be — not only to visit, but to live and work every day. America's truly great streets, neighborhoods and public spaces are defined by many criteria, including architectural features, accessibility, functionality, and community involvement.

Read the rest at: Great Places in America

Conservatives and Mass Transit: All Aboard? -- Politics Daily

One of the prime examples of an area of public policy where conservative dogma seems contrary to conservative ideology:

Effete liberals love mass transit and red-blooded American conservatives disdain it, right? That's the stereotype, all right. Libs love their commuter trains, while we conservatives dig our pickup trucks. There's surely something to those images, but a new book titled, "Moving Minds; Conservatives and Public Transportation," seeks to lead some 21st century conservatives to rethink their view of riding the subway. 

This debate comes at a time when conservatives stand accused of failing to embrace new ideas (in fact, the authors would argue this is really the renewing of an old idea, but you get the point.) Clearly, a conservative arguing in favor of mass transit dispels the notion that conservatives aren't receptive to exploring new solutions to the nation's ongoing problems. Both sides are guilty of taking stances on issues -- and sticking with them -- regardless of the emergence of new facts or changing priorities. It's all too uncommon to find an adherent of one political philosophy championing an issue generally identified as "belonging" to the other team. For this reason, if nothing else, the authors of this book deserve attention, even praise.

Read the rest at: Conservatives and Mass Transit: All Aboard? -- Politics Daily

We dare not observe International Walk to School Day in Franklin, Wisconsin

Today is International Walk to School Day.

But not in Franklin, Wisconsin, where nearby is still far away. There is no ambiguity about it: The County Sheriff has determined that all of Franklin School District is in an unusually hazardous transportation area.

Creating Neighborhood Capital from Strip Malls | Planetizen

This is a concept being talked about at dense urban levels - but what about suburban strip malls? Can it be possible to convert dead or dying strip malls into community-building assets?

"It's very clear to me that the rules have changed and that it's very possible for somebody who has a really good idea to create an audience that can sustain that idea if it’s really well branded and really cunningly conceived," says Sherman. "But developers, for the most part, are not those types of people. They're in a different silo."

From: Creating Neighborhood Capital from Strip Malls | Planetizen:

Strip malls probably don’t fit into the definition of progressive urbanism for most people, but maybe they should. Well, maybe after a little organizational tweaking.

The small retail centers are ubiquitous in American cities, with their generic shops selling donuts or beer, offering dry cleaning or key-cutting. They're a part of many neighborhoods, but not necessarily an essential part. They bring goods and services to the area, but are ultimately of the greatest benefit to their owners – off somewhere cashing monthly rent checks from the moms and pops running the little businesses within. That model can change, according to Ava Bromberg. She's a PhD student in UCLA's School of Public Affairs who is developing a new vision for small retail centers that would transform them into engines of social and economic capital at the neighborhood level.

"It's part mall, part business incubator, part cultural hub," says Bromberg. The idea is to overlay a distributed ownership model on the typical strip mall that enables the value created by this commercial real estate to cycle back and benefit the neighborhood it serves. Consumers are also business owners, property shareholders, and decisionmakers. In this model, the building goes from being a cash cow for one owner to being a bank for the community, into which investments can be made and from which public benefits can be funded.

But it's also about activating disused retail space for more than retail. Bromberg wants the spaces to partner with local institutions like hospitals and universities to create learning environments and job training opportunities on-site. The idea is to retool the existing neighborhood infrastructure to serve unmet needs within the community.

Read the rest at Planetizen.

James Howard Kunstler: The "suburban project" and Ralph Kramden's apartment

The suburban project was not a conspiracy by the likes of Robert Moses, Walt Disney, Frank Lloyd Wright, and President Eisenhower to produce a living arrangement with no future. It was the emergent, self-organizing result of special circumstances in a particular time and place: post World War Two America, with an immense supply of cheap oil, cheap land, and the industrial capacity to churn out all the necessary components for a car-dependent development pattern. Suburbia was spawned out of a couple of persistent themes in American cultural history: 1.) that cities and city life were no good; 2.) and that the romance of settling the wilderness could be reenacted, at great profit, in all that space beyond the towns and cities. It would be silly to deny the appeal of this arrangement at its inception. By the end of WW II, city life in the popular imagination was reduced to one potently awful image: Ralph Kramden’s apartment in “The Honeymooners” TV show.

James Howard Kunstler in Ruinous Debt to Create Futureless Suburbia - Contrarian Stock Market Investing News:

Institutionalizing sprawl and looking past existing infrastructure

Shoppes at Wyndham Village: Fill vacant space or BUILD MORE?

So, the Sentry grocery store at the corner of Rawson and 76th has announced that it will close by the end of October. The store was superfluous (throw a rock in Franklin and you'll hit a Pick n Save; I have three to choose from in proximity to my house), but the property will be a blight as long as it stands vacant. Across the street from that soon-to-be-empty building are a vacant coffee shop and vacant martini bar. The Shoppes at Wyndham Village outbuildings are largely vacant as well.

Meanwhile, at the Economic Development Commission meeting last night, I suggested that we focus at least part of our efforts on nurturing small, local businesses to fill some of these vacancies and encourage rehabs and retrofits. A fellow (and long-serving) commissioner responded to my suggestion by gravely reminding all assembled  that "our mission is development of tracts of land to attract business."

Really?

I will argue in a series of subsequent posts (and at the next EDC meeting) that our mission must be much, much broader than that. Stay tuned.

Light Rail spurs economic development and success in Phoenix

Not hard to grasp - Economic development and light rail, hand-in-hand successes:

The light rail here, which opened in December, has been a greater success than its proponents thought it would be, but not quite the way they envisioned. Unlike the rest of the country’s public transportation systems, which are used principally by commuters, the 20 miles of light rail here stretching from central Phoenix to Mesa and Tempe is used largely by people going to restaurants, bars, ball games and cultural events downtown.

The rail was projected to attract 26,000 riders per day, but the number is closer to 33,000, boosted in large part by weekend riders. Only 27 percent use the train for work, according to its operator, compared with 60 percent of other public transit users on average nationwide.

Read the rest at: In Phoenix, Weekend Users Make Light Rail a Success - NYTimes.com: