Tallahassee: A Transportation Complexity

MY VIEW -- As in fashion, and with car designs, what’s old is new again. The same can be said for urban design in our cities especially in the age of rapidly-rising energy costs, inadequate infrastructure, and efforts to “go-green”. In many corners of Tallahassee, we continue to see efforts to employ the methods of yesterday to develop new communities throughout our city. Evening Rose is one example that comes to mind as we look at what is being done in the name of smart growth.

The entire development has been designed to create a safe and inviting walkable neighborhood, with pedestrian trails, sidewalks and compact/dense building design. With an emphasis on Smart Growth, the entrance to the village center plaza will cascade gracefully amongst beautiful existing majestic oak trees, creating both a quiet refuge and hub of activity. – K2 Urban Corp

There was a point in time when most neighborhoods were built in the fashion of Evening Rose, near the heart of the city’s central core, with networks of sidewalks making it easy to transition from home to work, school, or shops. There is evidence of this type of development in Tallahassee as you look at some of the neighborhoods that surround our Downtown and Midtown areas, however for the most part, many of us live in communities subject to the creation of the automobile and highway systems. Modern living conditions, although often more spacious, have created a dependence on automobiles that will not be easy for us to break.

In the case of Tallahassee, the growth of our city did not translate into an expansion of our 1824 grid. One will notice most of the downtown remains true to the original pattern of straight, perpendicular East-West, North-South streets. Beyond downtown, however, Tallahassee’s roads bend, wind, curve and follow a pattern that is very difficult to justify from a planning perspective. A great debate has gone on about what to do to ease traffic through the complexity of our hub-and-spoke city, some see the need to add a North-South spur to work in conjunction with the East-West Interstate-10 allowing quicker and smoother flow to points South of Tallahassee (Wakulla, Franklyn, Hwy 98) some see the need for another circle well beyond or within the boundaries of Capital Circle (once a bypass around Tallahassee, now an inner-city road) to ease the flow of traffic, however many are having a difficult time deciding where such a road would be placed in our 180+ year old city, or how such a project would be financed.

Efforts have also been underway for sometime now to boost mass transit in Tallahassee. The City began its TalTran renaissance plan nearly 10 years ago, looking at ways to reduce the number of cars on Tallahassee’s streets and encourage us to ride busses. A product of this renaissance was a transformation from TalTran to StarMetro, new city busses, a new transit system director, and an aggressive marketing, re-routing, and service enhancement strategy aimed at attracting a class of new riders. Over the past few years, Tallahassee has seen the emergence of Park-and-Ride services, an innovative way of allowing commuters to drive shorter distances to work and thereby cope with less traffic. Early reports from these initiatives have been surprisingly positive with StarMetro showing a significant rise in passenger traffic on its 80X Routes to Southwood and Bradfordville, and plans for expansion in the near future to the Tallahassee Regional Airport.

Yet despite the efforts of the City, and our neighborhood and transportation planners, many Tallahasseeans are having a hard time peeling their hands from the steering wheels of personal vehicles. Some say they’re unable to wait around for the buses to pick them up as the intervals on certain routes may be up to an hour at a time, others cite the extremely hot and unpredictable Florida weather as an impediment to their use of mass transit. Yet most admit they have no plans to ever give up their cars.

The challenge we face looking at the rise in the price of gasoline nationally is the threat of a critical shortage in fuel, or prices far beyond reach of most of us earning a living wage. As difficult as times have become, with our wages not keeping pace with the rise in the cost of everything from groceries to homes and everything in the middle, how will we move around our city if we lose the option to drive our cars?

Fortunately our city has an extensive network of sidewalks and bike lanes on most of our roads. Should you lose the ability to drive your car, would you consider living in the heart of the city in a high-rise condominium building? Would you transition to the buses? Would you use a bicycle or walk?