LITTLE ROCK — Imagining Little Rock with a light-rail system along Interstate 630 is a difficult concept to grasp, but planners say that while it doesn’t make sense now, population growth, high oil prices and changes in federal transportation policy will force the issue eventually.
In anticipation of that future, engineering consultants have drawn up three potential public transit routes to be built along the Interstate 630 corridor.
Light-rail proponents admit the region doesn’t yet have the population - 800,000 to 1 million - conventional wisdom says it needs to support transit options such as light rail, and they further concede that the money isn’t available, either.
But they also say you cannot start planning too soon. In fact, it began more than a dozen years ago.
The plans are being developed under a 1995 commitment by the Metroplan board of directors to study light-rail options before building interstates beyond six lanes.
As part of plans to improve the Interstate 630/ Interstate 430 interchange, I-630 will be widened to eight lanes from the interchange east to University Avenue to take full advantage of the redesigned interchange, which is now one of the busiest traffic choke points in Arkansas.
Metroplan, the long-range transportation agency for central Arkansas, considers the I-630 corridor,with its critical concentration of hospitals, the state Capitol complex and other private business and regional public facilities, a place that could support the “early deployment of regional rail service.”
But the process under way now is merely to “inform” the Arkansas Highway and Transportation Department and institutions along the corridor that at some point a fixed public transit line will come, said Jim McKenzie, the Metroplan executive director.
Knowing where a potential public transit line will go will “benefit everybody.” As the Highway Department and others make their own long-range plans, the public transit line can be considered as well, McKenzie said.
He anticipates the next decade will involve moving to design the project. He figures it will take another 10 years to get it funded and built.
By then, the region could have a population exceeding 800,000, the price of gasoline could be in the range of $5 a gallon and federal transportation policy may well be steering more money toward public transit projects rather than roads, McKenzie said.
What’s happening now, then, is “very preliminary,” he said.
The proposed transit routes don’t include, as originally envisioned, a transit route on I-630 itself, primarily because the interstate wasn’t designed to accommodate transit facilities. Metroplan officials cite the overpasses as one impediment to building a transit system that could straddle the middle of the interstate. The overpasses have center supports, which would preclude transit unless the tracks were built above the overpasses.
Furthermore, the interstate is too far from the hospitals and other facilities transit users could easily access, the officials said.
“That was not going to be the primary recommendation at this point,” Richard Magee, deputy director for Metroplan and its planning director, said at the agency’s annual retreat last week at the Red Apple Inn and Country Club on Greers Ferry Lake.
The three proposed routes include one generally following West Markham Street, another that generally follows West 12th Street and a third option meandering between both. Consulting engineers are looking at comments gleaned from two public hearings on the proposed routes and refining the routes. A preferred alternative, which could include parts of all three routes, will be presented for public comment in late Mayor early June, Metroplan officials said.
But at a meeting on the retreat’s final day, Little Rock Mayor Mark Stodola expressed disappointment that the proposed routes don’t include one on I-630, which he called “short-sighted.” Obtaining rights of way on the other options would be “astronomical.”
“It would just seem to me .... that a raised rail in the [I-630] right of way would make some sense,” he said.
But besides the design impediments, building the transit on the interstate also presents other problems.
“Using 630 [for transit] would limit your ability for redevelopment,” McKenzie told the board members at the retreat.
Other metropolitan areas have seen redevelopment along newly built transit lines.
The proposed routes also outline other changes initially not contemplated.
One is that the consultants, Jacobs Engineering, decided to use west Little Rock stations to serve as connection for a future light-rail line between Texarkana and Little Rock, which is part of the congressionally designated South-Central High Speed Corridor. Originally, that line was envisioned coming directly into downtown Little Rock.
But McKenzie said that based on their work in other states, the consultants believe the west Little Rock station could feed more passengers onto the I-630 line if passengers came from both west Little Rock and from points outside the region.
Another new wrinkle is that the preliminary routes do not have light rail as the sole option. The routes could, instead, be designed to support bus rapid transit, which is a “higher-speed bus operation with less frequent stops on largely exclusive right of way,” Jacobs said.
But Jacobs also points out that investors are less confident in the permanence of bus rapid transit than light rail, which results, unlike light rail, in less development around that system’s stations.
Arkansas, Pages 7 on 04/04/2011