Experts offer advice on building NW transit system

Creating a useful, popular transit system in Northwest Arkansas will take patience and the joint efforts of the businesses, schools and community groups that stand to benefit, outside experts told residents and local officials last week.

Indianapolis and North Carolina's Raleigh-Durham region are in the middle of building and overhauling their public bus networks after years of study and referendum campaigns, said Mark Fisher, chief policy officer for the Indy Chamber, and Joe Milazzo, director of North Carolina's Regional Transportation Alliance. Their buses come to stops every 15 minutes and travel along dense and busy corridors.

The two said their groups succeeded in getting public support and tax revenue for the multimillion-dollar improvements by focusing on local problems to relieve, whether it was congestion around Raleigh or difficulty reaching jobs in the nine-county Indianapolis region.

Reliable and frequent transit can help on those fronts and more, they said. It can help low-income families afford transportation to work and school. It can help senior citizens get to the grocery store without having to move out of their homes. It can help businesses employing far-flung workers or attract young professionals. It can appeal to environmental groups and people tired of rush hour.

All of this potential can grow public support among groups that otherwise might never work together, Fisher said.

"The chamber and labor coming together, old people and young people coming together," he told about 75 people Thursday evening in Rogers. "To do this really, really well, you have to build coalitions."

Fisher and Milazzo spoke at the third of four planned talks on improving mobility in a growing region, a series organized by the Northwest Arkansas Regional Planning Commission and Walton Family Foundation.

Transit is a somewhat fraught topic for Northwest Arkansas.

Ozark Regional Transit offers a dozen routes in Bentonville, Fayetteville, Rogers and Springdale with a yearly budget around $3 million, much of it from area cities. It sees around 1,000 riders a day and offers routes that often take buses to a given stop once an hour.

The organization recently cut service hours in Rogers and Bentonville after those cities declined to pay it more and stopped a route to smaller cities in Washington County after elected officials slashed the county's contribution. It spent the past year rebuilding after a fire destroyed much of its bus fleet.

Ozark Regional Transit's director, Joel Gardner, has said the system does the best it can with local money and cities' demands. In a November interview, he called its system a placeholder -- one that will be replaced with a better one in the future.

Yet many residents already need public transportation, researchers and service organizations have said. Clients of the nonprofit Center for Collaborative Care, which connects people near or experiencing homelessness to groups that can help, often have no access to a car and can't reliably get to work or doctor appointments, said Ayoola Carleton, the center's community partnerships director.

Ozark Regional Transit can help them go short distances, but one man would ride for four hours a day round trip between the Salvation Army in Bentonville and 7 Hills Homeless Center in Fayetteville, she wrote in an email.

"Absolutely, it would make a huge difference if the buses ran more frequently and reliably, and had more direct routes between heavily trafficked areas for our clients," Carleton said.

Milazzo said creating such a system the right way took time. The Raleigh area includes three major hubs: Raleigh, Durham and Chapel Hill. Passing new sales taxes in all three took five years, with none in the same year.

The transportation alliance also tested out pieces of the system gradually here and there, such as with a program that runs buses on highway shoulders during peak congestion. Pushing too hard for a new route or system can lead to failures or intense public opposition that spoils the entire project, Milazzo said.

"Being regional does not require doing everything together at the same time," he said.

Transit can't be created in isolation, Milazzo added. It needs adequate roads, highways, sidewalks and other transportation infrastructure.

Margarita Solorzano, director of the Hispanic Women's Organization of Arkansas in Springdale, said Hispanic families often won't use buses because they have no sidewalks to the bus stops. It can be dangerous situation for families with kids, she said.

"People would be willing to use it to do their normal routes, like work or going to school, if we had a better system," Solorzano said. "We have seen the economy and the infrastructure of Northwest Arkansas grow, but, at the same time, transportation issues remain, and it is a hassle for low-income families or working families to be able to hold a stable job."

Ozark Regional Transit has begun exploring possible changes to its system. A recent study supported by the Walton Family Foundation found a bus rapid-transit system on U.S. 71B could run for about $3 million a year and would need several times that amount up front. A consultant in February urged the transit system to find a long-lasting and reliable local source of money for the plan.

"Don't put something out there that's half-baked," consultant Ken Hosen said at the time. "Do it right or wait till you get the money to do it right."

The nonprofit Northwest Arkansas Council, which includes area business and civic leaders, has helped lead past regional projects such as the creation of the regional airport. Spokesman Rob Smith said the group would be interested in taking part in a similar effort around transit and praised the advice from Milazzo and Fisher.

"They talked about job access, and they talked about quality of life," Smith said. "We absolutely want to be in the middle of that conversation."

State Desk on 04/22/2018

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