Reevaluating Salemtown's "Future Needs"

Eight years ago in the run-up to Metro Council elections I surveyed what were in my opinion Salemtown's "future needs" that deserved Metro government attention. I did not just pull these needs out of the air. I read planning documents that had been put together with the community feedback of residents of Salemtown. Then I picked ones that I thought were realistic and realizable in one or two council terms.

Now that we are in another council election year, I want to go back and reevaluate whether those needs have been addressed or not.

• 3rd Avenue greenway from Morgan Park to MetroCenter. In 2007, I wrote:
  

  [Metro] should address is conversion of the public property bordering the Treatment Plant to a landscaped greenway spur connecting to Morgan Park. That spur should include a decorative wall to hide the unsightly Plant from the view of the neighborhood. The strip of land running from Hume Street on the south to Coffee Street on the north is currently unlandscaped green space with a chain link fence and some trees and rose bushes.
  
  Currently, there is nothing about the green strip that attracts pedestrians strolling around the neighborhood. The rose bushes on the chain link fence seem almost like a token, half-hearted effort by Metro to beauty-up the strip. The space as it stands more designed to encourage people to hurry past in cars, because there is really nothing to see but a sewer plant.

  
  Nothing has changed along 3rd Avenue North, except the rose bushes are gone and there are more developments flying up on private property. The chain link fence still catches blowing trash. Metro has made no effort to overhaul and to reboot the public roadside strip into something people can use and enjoy. Metro has made no effort to block the blight and institutional ugliness of the water treatment facilities and their large grass-covered ash dumps blocking a clear view of the river. This area still has unrealized potential. The residents along 3rd deserve better.


• Renovation and buffering of the I-65 interface with Salemtown. In 2007, I wrote:

  we need a more vigorous and comprehensive effort by our next council member to pursue a wholesale renovation to the I-65 corridor through Salemtown that includes many of the community-sensitive compromises that TDOT made with West End-Hillsboro neighbors when they put I-440 in the 1980s.
  
  The Neighborhood Plan calls for noise walls and heavy landscaping along the perimeter of Salemtown. The plot of an interstate up against the walls and yards of urban neighborhoods without the addition of sound buffers is unconscionable. Our next council member needs to find ways to help us motivate TDOT to correct its obvious oversight.

  
  The state transportation department renovated the interchange between Rosa Parks Blvd. and I-65 in 2011, which improved the roads for auto traffic, but did little to benefit Salemtown. While TDOT did do away with concrete covered medians on Rosa Parks in favor of grass, they did not landscape them. Bushes and ornamental grasses could be useful obstacles for cars driving over the medians. TDOT cut down trees along the interstate, which served as partial buffers for road noise in Salemtown and then they refused to consider sound walls like those along I-440 in west Nashville. Instead, they threw the responsibility back on to Erica Gilmore, who did nothing to advance the cause of abating the roar of eighteen wheelers, despite the fact that in her 2007 campaign she acknowledged the problem. Salemtown still needs help with interstate buffering and better landscaping.


• Convert the Fehr school building back to a functioning public school. In 2007, I wrote:
  

  Salemtown is a neighborhood of families that will not stay that way very long unless some measures are taken to keep it from becoming a place super-saturated with amenities only for singles and young families with no children.
  
  One of the things that should happen to attract families with children to locate and to stay here is to replace a quality neighborhood public school here. However, there are no feeder schools proximate to the North End. Fehr School sits right in the middle of Salemtown. Decades ago it provided an education for neighborhood children, but it is used to provide other Metro Services now, having little to do with the neighborhood itself.

  
  Erica Gilmore and the Metro Historical Commission deserve credit for making progress on this future need. In 2011-2012 they picked up the cause that many of us had been working on for years: preserving the civil rights landmark from demolition. The Metro Action Commission, which was headquartered at the school, dug in its heels at times against historic overlay, but they finally gave in and Fehr is now protected. In 2011, MAC moved to a new headquarters downtown, which meant that folk seeking utility bill assistance from social services would no longer have to line up early on cold mornings in front of Fehr. Head Start currently occupies Fehr, which suits the educational purpose of the building. In the past few months, I have participated in constructive community discussions with Metro Public School officials, organized by current council candidate Freddie O'Connell, on converting Fehr back to a functioning neighborhood school. I am not sure that we are close to achieving that, yet. If it happens I would hate to see Fehr become a charter school. If anything it should be an unadulterated public school open to all children in Salemtown and its environs.


• A neighborhood-attuned council member. In 2007, I wrote:

  Salemtown, just like the rest of 19, is experiencing tremendous growth and redevelopment. The result is that we do have some greedy entrepreneurs who could care less about working with the neighborhood honestly for balanced growth in which everyone wins. Recently we found ourselves in the unenviable position of contending with both investors and Metro officials because growth is outstripping infrastructure in our neighborhood. The investors don't care because they only want to make money. Departmental officials only want to cover their butts. And many of our residents feel caught in the middle with no where to turn.
  
  It is not supposed to be like that. We are supposed to have an advocate on the Metro Council who not only listens to the contentions, but who is willing to get right down in the middle of the ruckus and help the sides reach a balanced and negotiated compromise. That council member should also be one to assist neighbors in consulting Metro Departments that are not always responsive or accountable. The Council Member should be leading the charge on updating our sometimes century-old infrastructure, while encouraging measured and responsible growth.

  
  Erica Gilmore has been considerably better than her predecessor on the Metro Council, Ludye Wallace. Where Ludye rarely showed an interest in Salemtown, CM Gilmore has attended our events and, especially early in her tenure, responded consistently. She went to bat for preserving the Fehr school building and many neighbors are grateful for her work on the conservation overlay. But I cannot give her much more than a solid "C" for advocacy for our neighborhood. She initially mishandled the conservation overlay process but then acquiesced to demands for community meetings. She was generally inconsistent with important community meetings. We were not always notified about meetings. And on the important question of a new minor league ballpark, she seemed prepared not to hold any meetings at all. When she did hold community meetings she ran them with a tight fist instead of encouraging open debate, negotiation and balance. The meetings were always framed as developers answering questions rather than getting feedback, and during one unpleasant confrontation with Salemtown Neighbors over rezoning, she seemed to question the association's legitimacy. We deserved better representation. I hope we get it in 2015.


• Extend the riverfront redevelopment transit loop into Salemtown. In 2007, I wrote:

  Salemtown proper is cut off from the Cumberland River by the Central Wastewater Treatment Plant. The Plant ... cuts our neighborhood off from direct contact with the river. So, the closest landing contacts our residents have with the river would be East Germantown and Downtown.
  
  So, it would make sense to extend the proposed transit loop past East Germantown to Salemtown and possibly MetroCenter. This could be done most easily by footpaths: extending the proposed greenway from East Germantown to the Cumberland River Levee Greenway in MetroCenter. But if a trolley run is planned for the Downtown to East Germantown leg, I hope that the future District 19 Council Member would look into the possibility of doing what he or she could to extend that trolley leg to a Salemtown transit stop (perhaps a greenway turnaround at the 3rd Avenue Treatment Center strip).

  
  So much water has passed under the bridge since I originally wrote this. I'm not even sure that the 2007 Riverfront Master Plan that included various landings applies. My point was that the trolley lines should stretch beyond downtown and East Nashville. More to today's context: with the opening of the new ballpark and the continuing densification of North Nashville, we are going to need more of the transit options that the east-west corridor currently enjoy. Trolleys running down 3rd between downtown and MetroCenter make sense more than ever. We got the extended greenway from Morgan Park to the Downtown Connector and Cumberland greenways. We have our walkable connection to the river that we did not in 2007, so if landings are still planned, we're in good shape. Mass transit still needs some work. We need pilot bus rapid transit projects for North Nashville. Light rail would surpass my wildest dreams (and is likely beyond what the next CM could accomplish). In Salemtown we need traffic and parking plans with street permits for residents, given the crush we will experience with the opening of First Tennessee Park. Metro seems to have failed us by not providing a comprehensive, smart northern transit plan (walking, biking and driving) with the building of the new ballpark.

Most of the changes that I argued we needed in 2007 still apply. Some have taken different forms over time. But most of upgrades Salemtown ought to have--many of which were expressed by previous community plans--are yet to be realized. I hope that the next council member from this district can help us realize them.

Ding! Dong! The AMP is [officially] dead!

UMM, NO.

I have been arguing from jump that the east-west connector proposal (involving bus rapid transit) should be dead on arrival because it deliberately excluded sections of Nashville, like North Nashville, that needed it more than the hotels on West End did. The Amp plan was a case of class and ethnic prejudice that once more mustered public revenues and infrastructure in support of wealthier, whiter communities at the expense of others.

Early on I was simply ignored and no bus rapid transit supporters responded to my concerns.

When they started responding to me, it was to make the case that the transit authority had considered all modes of travel (conveniently leaving out that not all corridors had been considered).

When the arguments that the Amp was a case of transit inequity started gaining traction across the city, Ampsters in what now appears to be a peel-off move, insisted that West End was merely the spine of a region-wide transit plan that would also bring BRT to corridors elsewhere beyond the east-west corridor. All of the sudden they began vaguely predicting future northward legs.

Today the Metro Transit Authority officially proclaimed the Amp dead. And MTA's new executive admitted what many of us had known all along, namely that the Amp was never designed to spread beyond east and west Nashville. These are CEO Steve Bland's exact, pertinent words on the Amp today:

Frankly, it would have been difficult to replicate in other corridors.

Nope. We were not the fools some made us out to be.

Suburbanization is a failing development model in Tennessee

Charles Marohn describes how a city like Memphis got itself into a bind by relying on subsidized suburbanization as an answer to the ills of industrialization. Now with "soft defaults" (vs. hard defaults in Detroit) the chickens are coming home to roost:

Relying on the automobile to facilitate growth by horizontally expanding the city, Memphis shifted away from the traditional pattern of neighborhood development and played its part in building the American Dream of large yards, easy driving, and free parking.

Suburbanization, sold as a way to cure blight and promote prosperity, was radically new and untested. It was also irresistible. Driven by federal programs and financial incentives, Memphis – like most American cities – built highways through the middle of the city, annexed property and extended public utilities outward.

In the process, core neighborhoods were destroyed and residents relocated to neighborhoods built in the new, experimental style. Streetcars were abandoned and the economic activity at the old stops shifted to new commercial corridors. Old buildings were torn down to provide parking and millions of tax dollars were spent widening streets to accommodate the automobiles now necessary for daily life.

Eventually, the vitality of the city was inverted from its traditional historic pattern of a strong core surrounded by incrementally growing neighborhoods to one where most economic activity took place on the edge. While this shift left many people behind and devastated the historic neighborhoods of Memphis, the result was seen largely as a social problem, not an economic one. Easy growth on the periphery – where land is cheap, the development community is ready, and all the government incentives are in place – was then, and remains today, the community’s default strategy for economic improvement.

Somewhat unhindered by the levels of industrialization borne by Memphis, Nashville is no less exposed by its overreliance on exurban expansion and what Mayor Karl Dean embraces as "regionwide growth". Nashville recently depends on gimmicky baubles like the new Music City Center, a "We Are Nashville Promenade" and an east-west rapid transit connector ("The Amp") in order to spike short-term economic activity without reference to long-term viability in the city for its inhabitants.

Marohn warns of "new massive gambles" undertaken by sprawling metros to keep heads above water: convention centers and retail complexes driven by municipal debt and tax breaks for already wealthy corporations. Likewise these conditions also apply to Nashville, where it feels like we are mortgaging our future sometimes to fund huge new capital projects that enable the Dean brand more than aid Nashville proper. We are definitely sacrificing urban services, from which the Mayor perennially demands cuts, in order to bankroll the diversions.

In the end, an emphasis on regionwide growth seems like warmed-over, evangelical suburbanism. It constitutes a doubling down on failing economic policies that hurt both Memphis and Nashville in the long run. Once the smoke-and-mirrors floor show of the Dean administration ends, what will be left with?

Nashville said to be possibly taking a giant leap ahead on Tuesday (but likely leaving North Nashville behind)

The Obama Administration is reportedly going to roll out its 2015 budget today, and the Mayor's minions are all abuzz that POTUS may drop $75 million on Karl Dean to run his bus rapid transit line down West End almost to Belle Meade. The excitement and the predictable blowback at Hizzoner's self-imposed blindness catalyzed by power and money has gone national:

For Nashville, the backlash calls to mind a recent battle over the planning of the city's half-billion-dollar convention center, which opened in May, and was a cornerstone of the administration of Dean, the second-term Democrat who has the support of the chamber of commerce and the business community writ large. Some residents and elected officials derided the project as a publicly funded gift for tourists. A similar line of attack has been heard over the particular route planners chose for the Amp.

"This bus gets the tourists from downtown to the nicer restaurant/bar district," as one elected official recently put it. "The concept is: we're not building a transit system for Nashvillians. We're building a fun bus to run tourists out to West End and the cool bars."

If President Obama does award Karl Dean a huge grant to build a new transit line for a corridor that needs it less than any point north or south of downtown, it will merely the latest stanza in the dirge I sing for the support I once held for Barack Obama.

The President's stimulus package, if properly funded, could have been a dramatic turnaround for our nation's cities and our national workforce. It was constricted by a leader who has preached the virtues of bringing the unrepentant, uncivil GOP along.

Obamacare is not much more than Romneycare.

Federal education policy has been directed at privatizing public schools and managing high-stakes testing with an eye to giving big business more control in school districts.

Our foreign policy continues to be marred by Bushian tactics, including the civil-rights-violating detention of prisoners. Mr. Obama's drone-slaughters of civilian targets have far exceeded anything Dubya ever did.

And now, instead of granting rapid transit in working-class communities or in neighborhoods predominated by people of color, President Obama may reward Nashville for serving the entertainment and tourism industries one more time before Karl Dean leaves by subsidizing party buses to run visitors to-and-from their hotels, bars and honky tonks quickly.

A President who has been more comfortable serving up tepid Republican pablum may enable a Democratic Mayor who is himself a nice fit for red-state, neo-liberal Tennessee politics.

If Nashville wins this grant today, then it could complete Karl Dean's tenure of serving Nashville's wealthy and influential while leaving communities like North Nashville behind. The Amp is the perfect compliment to the Music City Center. If funded it will be a subsidized pleasure line on which tourists can depend.

And those who make promises that it is only the first step in BRT extended to underserved communities cannot back up those promises. Despite their empty promises, they are going to stand by this Mayor to the end. It's not illogical. If you want to play, he's the game in town. However, Mayor Dean--being term-limited and having higher political aspirations--will never have to be accountable to deliver on those promises.

If the federal government does come through, I predict that in a few years, when we're told there is no more grant money and the budget is too overextended to serve places like North Nashville, Amp supporters will be eating their promises. The best thing that can happen now to bring everything and everyone in Nashville back down to earth is that Obama finds another neo-liberal Mayor elsewhere to support in 2015.


UPDATE:  The Obama transit dept. is recommending $27 million next year for the Amp. If approved it is a little more than 1/3 of what the Mayor's Office wants. So, which 1/3 of the project will get built and which 2/3's waits to see if federal money shows up in 2016, 2017, 2018? Downtown to West End gets BRT first? Without $75 million in 2015, how much longer does North Nashville have to wait for its promised bus rapid transit lines to materialize?

Also, consider this one: “Evidence suggests expanded rail operations produce higher ridership gains than more bus service.” There is a reason the BRT grant is called "Small Starts". It is not nearly as bold as rail, which would create more ridership. The fact that BRT is cheaper, but limited to the hotel and entertainment corridor suggests that the Mayor's Office not only plays it safe in choosing locations, but does so on the cheap. Rail would have made a bolder, more attractive statement.

Racism and the "stage-managed narrative" in transit and ballpark plans

Last year I gave Metro Councilmember Scott Davis a pass on his view that a new east-west bus rapid transit line would help "low-income residents" in his district even as it won't help the same classes in North Nashville. Based on the opinions of poli sci professor, Sekou Franklin, maybe I should not have been so quick to concede CM Davis's boosterific points for "the Amp".

Dr. Franklin's recent column is a scathing reflection on the transit injustice wrought by MTA and Karl Dean's administration and the minions supporting "the Amp":

...Amp advocates, backed by the mayor’s office and Metro Transit Authority officials, selectively picked winners and losers for the project. They relied on flawed data, steered federal civil rights officers away from studying North Nashville bus routes and backed zoning changes to boost the appearance of higher ridership in the West End corridor, which stands to benefit the most from the Amp.

The pro-Amp group’s East Nashville angle also has been an insincere attempt to inoculate itself from racial and civil rights scrutiny. Pro-Amp advocates claim that Amp terminals east of the river will help working-class blacks, when in reality, they are located in a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood. The project could actually accelerate the displacement of blacks who still remain in the Main Street-Five Points area.

The Amp debate also has exposed how Nashville’s leading officials exploit the politics of race while lacking any real commitment to systemic racial inequities. Similar to the debate about the Sulphur Dell ballpark, Amp supporters have brought attention to distressed communities and African-Americans, but only to bolster a stage-managed narrative of Chamber of Commerce boosterism — a narrative that is not intended to help African-Americans or distressed communities, but meant to convince urban pioneers that Nashville is the premier Southeast destination.

The irony is that the so-called distressed neighborhoods for both projects (Germantown for Sulphur Dell and Main Street-Five Points for the Amp) are places where working-class African-Americans are being pushed out in record numbers.

In both cases (a new ballpark and the east-west connector) development for the business sector has taken priority over residential interests and social justice. Metro Nashville does not seem committed to balanced, smart and sustainable growth, but seems more bound to a malignant growth that devours quality of life and historic communities. The scales are tipped toward money and power. If you don't have much like the predominantly white Courthouse class does, then you are only in the way.

The truly sad part for me personally, is that there does not seem to be a critical mass of people organized at the grassroots who care enough to speak up for equity in development and in mass transit. The opponents who do speak out are ignored, pigeonholed and marginalized, even by North Nashville council members who are supposed to represent them.

1,500+ people attended 5 BRT meetings, but the Metro Transit Authority is only going to meet with individual businesses about the Amp proposal

Those of us in rapid transit deserts can only dream.

This is truly a head-scratcher:

More than 1,500 residents participated and shared valuable input about the project. In the coming weeks and months, MTA will closely review all the public input it received from the meetings, meet with individual businesses along the route and then schedule a second round of meetings in March to share revised design plans.

I asked the anonymous person doing the Amp's promotional social media why MTA was not meeting with neighborhood associations or residents along the route (ignoring completely, of course, those of us outside the east-west corridor), but he or she has yet to reply to me. Anonymity has its privileges.

Assuming they do follow up with more than a select group of token businesses likely to tell officials what they want to hear, how do they possibly have time to meet with all of the businesses along the route from East Nashville to St. Thomas Hospital between now and the mid-March meetings?

The only conclusion that I can draw is that Metro officials are once again drawing up transit policy while privileging the voices of those with more money: business owners. I watched more than just business owners give feedback at the two meetings I attended. Nonetheless, their feedback, their votes count more than those of us who are no less affected by these biased, maddening transit decisions.

"Cleveland's curse" could be North Nashville's curse if Amp is built

For the sake of argument, let's grant without question the major points east-west connector supporters are giving for building the Amp:

1. Since Cleveland, which some ballyhoo as a success, is the model for Nashville's Amp, the odds are good that BRT on West End will succeed.
2. Amp will increase growth along its corridor because all transit stops drive up the value of nearby land.

Even as I grant these arguments, the reality that remains represents the motive of my opposition to the east-west connector: it is not equitable transit. Proponents can call it "the first step" in regional transit if they wish, but repeating it over and over is no guarantee of more than one step. In fact, the logic of development would encourage keeping BRT rare to maximize the riches along a wealthy corridor. And who would blame East Nashvillians for trying to keep their Amp funds away from the risk of future northward BRT expansion? So, believing that Amp is a first step would be the height of gullibility.

And, ironically, Cleveland provides the case for being wary.

There are indications that Northeast Ohio is having problems expanding past the initial progress they have made. As proud as Clevelanders are reported to be of their BRT line (a.k.a., "HealthLine"), there are real questions as to whether they have the will to expand BRT to spread the benefits to others:

With some minor gripes aside, we all get to witness BRT success everyday. But, has the influx of “choice” riders to the HealthLine whet the appetite for another BRT line?

Certainly, at $200 million for 5 miles of infrastructure and hybrid buses, an award-winning BRT system is not cheap. But, this isn’t just infrastructure, it’s transformative, high-value infrastructure. The economic return is an estimated $4.3 billion for infill and redeveloped buildings on Euclid Avenue. It makes the case for a second act. But is there a will among the leadership at Greater Cleveland RTA, a city in its service area, and at the source of funding, NOACA, to build another BRT line in Northeast Ohio?

It took quite a bit of swimming upstream to get the Euclid BRT line funded (80% was federal and 20% a local match. The case was built more than a decade earlier in the Dual Hub Streetcar plan...).

So much has changed in the world since 2008 — much for the better in transit projects. Nearly every city in the U.S. is clamoring for a new streetcar line — and at least half a dozen, including Dallas, Charlotte and Cincinnati are poised to add lines soon to existing streetcars in Salt Lake City, Phoenix, Denver, and Portland.

Before the recent leadership change at NOACA, observers noted, there was no more juice to do a follow up project at transformative scale like the HealthLine ....

RTA's director of planning, Maribeth Feke, told CEOs for Cities where the transit agency could envision another BRT line. But does anyone else besides RTA see BRT as a catalyst for revitalizing old streetcar districts...? Without a concerted effort to the multi-year planning and development, it's unlikely the region will see another Bus-Rapid Transit line soon.

So, ballyhooed Cleveland has their beautiful BRT line, showcased by many, including Nashville's Amp proponents, but the wealth is not going to be spread around any time "soon". BRT is not expanding, even though the HealthLine garners positive national attention and mimicry.

Cleveland's limited progress does not bode well for progress in North Nashville, where I live.

Now explain to me again slowly why I should support, especially with my taxes, a BRT line that bypasses my community and pumps wealth into already wealthy communities with no guarantees of transit equity? Why should I look to Cleveland and be inspired to support Nashville's Karl Dean's Amp? Why should I wish to subsidize West End wealth when the political will to fight the same fight for North Nashville transit would likely be lacking after east-west BRT is built?

Metro's Midtown "Open House" on the Amp threatened to turn into a town hall meeting earlier tonight

".... go to Cleveland. See what a mess it is."

Tonight's Midtown transit "open house" or "workshop" (or whatever officials are deciding to call it at the moment) nearly busted out into a full blown public hearing on the east-west connector after one person in the audience asked an Amp engineer who was finishing up at the podium if he would take questions from the floor.

The citizen expressed his opinion that he did not think that projections could be correct based on his own experience with metro transit. The engineer moved to the fellow and started answering his questions as if they were having a one-on-one, and someone else in the crowd spoke up and asked the engineer to use a microphone so everyone could hear him. The engineer declined to grab the mike and expressed his own wish that all questions be expressed at the tables.

I wondered why he seemed resistant to fielding some crowd questions before turning to the tables. As I saw it he could have answered and parlayed the group to dispersing more diplomatically without seeming so bent on individual conversation. If the reticence to discussing these issues is about controlling the rabble, it really does hit me the wrong way.

In the meantime, a third attendee spoke up and encouraged others present to go to Cleveland and see "the mess" that a similar system is there. Pitchforks were starting to emerge. Meeting organizers seemed on the edge of losing control to the masses.

But there was a lull, then some aside chatting, and before anyone else had a chance to take the floor, engineers regained control and got those in attendance to the tables where different members of their team could manage expectations.

Crisis caused by uppity populism averted.

Crowd backed down the hallway, the foyer, and outside.

In the meantime, people were still trying to get into the main room, but the crowd was stacking up in the hallway and out the front door. I actually left 20 mins into the meeting because I felt guilty about taking up space when I had already attended the East Nashville meeting. I asked one member of the design team whether they were expecting this many people. I learned that they were not either tonight or in East Nashville the night before last. I joked with another official as I was leaving whether the number of people in the building was a fire code violation. The reply: "I plead the 5th". When I got outside to my car, there were yet others walking through the parking lot to the building and I saw several cars circling and stalking potential parking spaces. As soon as I backed out one of them grabbed mine.

Before I left I heard interesting things. First of all, the engineer at the podium said with emphasis, "In no way are these final designs, yet". I do not recall him saying that in East Nashville. If he did it was not with as much verve or I would have remembered it. Whether he felt like he did not need to make the point across the river or whether this was an attempt to be more measured, he left himself wiggle room to refer to this stage as a "visioning" process. Although again, even if a final stage is "only" 30% complete, a good part of the vision seems already achieved. Haggling over the details at specific intersections does not seem like "visioning" to me.

I heard many more concerns expressed at this meeting than in East Nashville, particularly about where bus riders would park around West End, whether 5,000 riders per day with Amp was believable, whether historic preservation would be endangered by infrastructure changes and whether adding extra lanes would create more snarl. I was in earshot of a woman who exclaimed that, given the current parking situation along West End, there was absolutely no way that riders would be able to find parking to catch the bus. I heard one design team member tell one concerned transit rider asking for ridership comparisons to projections that he did not know what the current daily ridership was.

As I left, I noticed a police officer who seemed to be letting people into the room as others like me exited early and I wondered, with this much unexpected popular response to a transit proposal, pro and con, should not the public meeting process have started long ago with honest communication so that we would all not be so caught off-guard now? More specifically, why weren't we permitted to "vision" long before the transit authority reached 30% of the final stage of the project?

UPDATE: Rather than simply reporting the news, the Tennessean is resorting once again to bias by speculating in their report about how many green and red reps attended. Just like in East Nashville, most of those I saw in attendance had no form of pro or con signifiers displayed, so why does Brian Wilson feel emboldened to say that there was "balance" between pro and con? Did he interview every single person? I doubt he will share his method of counting, but it cannot be very scientific. There could have been many different points of view beyond simply polarized opinions, and it really is unfortunate when the news media fabricates "facts" instead of conveying them.

My takeaway from last night's East Nashville Amp meeting: they ask for your input, but then want you to go away

Oh, the contradictions. Last night I attended the East Nashville public meeting on the Mayor's proposed east-west rapid bus transit connector held at East Park community center. I expected a major PR push without cracks or holes for this series of January meetings. The Chamber of Commerce, the beast hauling Karl Dean's transit bid, hired pro flacks and so I expected more than this:

• The meeting was billed December as a "charrette". The Mayor's Office prefers to call it an "open house". It could not seem to settle on either, so it was convoluted and confusing.
• The Amp has been described by engineers as being in the final stages of design. Last night the engineers described this stage as a "visioning process". Since when does visioning follow final design?
• Transit officials introduced the meeting by saying that businesses could talk to engineers about the changes that they wanted to see. Transit officials introduced the meeting by saying that the audience could ask questions and get information about the way the Amp will be designed. The two messages did not seem to me to compliment one another.

So, I sensed a split-mindedness in last night's meeting: Metro wants you to give feedback, but then go away. Or maybe they want you to give the feedback that fits with engineers' final design, which was laid out on four twenty-five foot tables. How can this be a visioning process when the design is staring back at you in the face from humongous blueprints? Unless the only public vision that will count is that which is already laid out?

The old proverb, without vision the people perish, applies to North Nashville in this case. There was no accommodation for someone in the audience like me, who believes that BRT would work in North Nashville, to envision the Amp for us too. All an engineer could have said to me over his huge map of East Nashville was that North Nashville could not be addressed in this mass transit plan. No kidding. Any of us who came to this community meeting thinking that we would could make a difference in transit equity were rendered invisible. The vision of the Mayor's rapid transit minions can only extend so far. They are blind to the rest of us.

But we're not the only ones. Transit representative Holly McCall (who also represented Karl Dean on the Music City Center) told the audience that business owners were invited to speak with engineers about their concerns for the line that would run by them. The meeting seemed more focused on businesses, which is not atypical for this Mayor's Office, although it is clear that Mr. Dean is getting resistance to Amp from the business level. But what about residents? What about residents of Cayce Homes public housing? This line hardly serves their needs. Again, it is an artery laid out to drive up the real estate values of wealthy property owners and to serve Nashville's largest corporations. Is it really a "community" or "public" meeting when invitations to share are made to business leaders present?

If this had been an authentic charrette, all stakeholders present would have participated in a small group process of working through differences and reaching a consensus. But the meeting was too much open house in which the public was invited by the Transit Authority to view the way things actually are. People were encouraged to write their comments on sheets of paper and turn them in. That is no replacement for a charrette, and it is certainly a less accountable means of encouraging public input.

I am under no delusion that the Amp suffers significant opposition in East Nashville. Once the bus line was extended there in order to draw more support, the Mayor effectively divided and conquered organized grassroots opposition to sending rapid transit up West End. It is common sense to assume East Nashville supports rapid transit for themselves. But to claim as the Tennessean has this morning that supporters "largely outnumbered" opponents on the basis of counting green shirts against red ones is misleading. Far outnumbering green and red shirts were shirts that did not announce any position on the AMP.

Nonetheless, I was in earshot of an Amp supporter who complained that the media was interviewing a couple of red shirted opponents in the room, thus, he speculated, creating an impression that opposing turnout was on par with supportive turnout. I stood there thinking, "How can you judge from this crowd of clothes who stands for what? I oppose the Amp, but you cannot tell from what I am wearing." (I had a green pullover on). And what is someone who is neutral or otherwise unsure supposed to wear? How many of those people were there and individually counted by the news media?

As I walked from the meeting to my car I chatted with a woman I don't know. She asked me how I thought the meeting went. She asked me whether I thought our feedback mattered in the plan. I replied that they did give us these comment forms to express our feedback, assuming they would indeed read them and permit input to influence the plan. She told me straight up that she did not think that the feedback mattered because this east-west connector is exactly what Karl Dean wants. We both seemed to agree that in the end Hizzoner is most likely to get what he wants and that these "public" meetings are publicly pointless.



UPDATE: Because of parental responsibilities I could not attend the Downtown public meeting on Tuesday evening, but there are indications in the Tennessean (which did not resort to the same useless t-shirt counting of their previous report) that the same questions I have were expressed by some in attendance:

Several project skeptics angry with the broad contours of the bus line were just as critical of the public meeting’s format, which was largely an informal question-and-answer period during which people could talk one on one with the project’s engineers.

Questions aside, the manner in which developers went about the plan annoyed Nashville resident Michael Rogers.

“They’re going up there and making it seem like a done deal,” Rogers said. “I just feel it doesn’t build trust.”

Because so much of the development remains in flux, whether from the amount of federal and state funding to the planning that still remains, there wasn’t much that could be gained from being there, said undecided downtown resident Julie Lammel.

One of the other regrettable impressions that this project's boosters keep trying to create is that the east-west connector is merely the first step in a long process of regional growth. Those are empty promises at this point with no guarantees, especially with Karl Dean's mayoral tenure coming to a close. Nashville's dustbin is filled with well-intentioned capital projects that never materialized.

If built the Amp is just as likely to be the only leg of beautiful BRT in Nashville, serving the wealthier segments of our county while continuing to neglect others. That prospect would be more consistent with local history.

If you don't follow the Amp Twitter feed, you may not know that the Transit Authority changed the West Nashville meeting location a week before the meeting

Once public meetings to seek input on the Mayor's east-west bus rapid transit proposal were organized and announced in early December, the powers-that-be did a remarkable job of saturating every line of communication possible with news about the meetings. We even received a card by snail mail to go along with all of the news we were getting about the meetings on and off line, inside and outside the news media. The card delivered by the U.S. Postal Service:

West Nashville meeting info is now wrong on this post card!

But last Wednesday, 8 days away from the West Nashville meeting, the pro-AMP coalition announced that the location of the meeting was changing to West End Middle School via Twitter and Facebook. I tweeted questions on what plans were being made for people who did not follow or friend the AMP's social media presence and whether there would be new hard copy post cards sent to Nashvillians to keep people from showing up to MBA instead of to West End Middle. As of this moment, I cannot get a straight answer from the transit tribe.

Still eating their static.

That link they tweeted goes not to a new update but to their December 12, 2013 press release on the meetings. Whoever edited the release made no effort to change the date or flag the statement as "UPDATED" as is the usual practice for these things when people actually care that vital information about changes not slip through the cracks. All they seemed to do was drop down to the West Nashville meeting bullet and change the location.

Shoddy webpage update!

At best, this is a meager attempt to communicate significant changes to an exclusively and largely sympathetic online audience of people on Twitter and Facebook while calling no attention from the largest number of people to the change on the original release. At worst, it reeks of an attempt to depress turn out in West Nashville neighborhoods where opposition to the Amp is relatively strong. Whether this is simply inept communication or more of a confidence game by pro-Amp forces, they should exercise the kind of thorough communication now that they did in December.

Kerr errs on Amp opposition

I've said it before and I'll say it again: the hoop-like excuse that Metro Transit apparatchiks may have held "public hearings" before they settled on "the AMP" (east-west bus rapid transit connector) is no reason to believe that those hearings were effectively conducted for the public. Tennessean Gail Kerr comments this morning, "There were early public hearings on whether we should build a bus route at all, but there were sparse details at that point." This may seem minor to some, but it confirms my view that the process is more rigged to keep the public uninformed and destablized so that stronger trump cards can be laid later. The public hearings were designed to keep us guessing, not to bring us on board to reach a consensual decision in which everyone won a little of something.

The only other interesting point in Ms. Kerr's column is the ironic encouragement of people to attend public hearings now, as if the process is substantively different than it was. She seems to be merely saying of the latest hoops, "It's real this time around." I suspect that what is real is the opposition the Mayor is facing from the neighborhoods down low and from Tennessee Republicans up high. Four late-called community meetings seeking input looks like a mad scramble to lend legitimacy to a limping bus line.

Otherwise, Kerr's column is unadulterated garbage. She calls those of us who advocate a northward leg "snooty" because she alleges we believe that buses should serve mostly "lower-income people". Nope. I advocate a northward leg because it would serve mostly people. Not corporations. Not tourism. Not wealthy campaign donors. Not property owners with maximized property values. Nope. I believe that mostly average folks of various incomes are whom a Charlotte Avenue line would serve. Her preconceived notions about who lives in North Nashville may make her the "snooty" one.

But what ultimately makes Ms. Kerr's hard copy not even worthy of chucking into the compost heap is that she expects opponents of the AMP not to differ in their motivations and in their strategies for expressing dissent to an east-west connector. She bases her assumptions about the resistance on an email thread "obtained" by a couple of reporters. That's right. An email thread. One of the more mercurial, fluid and volatile forms of communication; an email thread. She relies on that to opine that opponents are not unified, to insist that we are "disjointed".

But Ms. Kerr is confusing her snapshot of a lack of consensus on how to respond to the Mayor's next gambit with a lack of purpose or a lack of solidarity. And keep this in mind: Ms. Kerr herself was coached by a PR firm in the past to flip talking points to Tennessean op-ed. By such flack standards, democratic consensus may appear to be "disjointed" and lacking in a common goal. It is not the failing of opponents of the AMP that they have different views on how to get to the shared purpose of defeating an east-west connector. It is Ms. Kerr's own failing to step outside of a world where coordinated selling points are spoon-fed to journalists.

Controlling public meetings amounts to controlling outcomes

As we rapidly approach one of the first announced community meetings on "the Amp" bus rapid transit system connecting East Nashville and Downtown to West End, the Mayor's minions continue to insist (debatably) that the public has been given fair opportunities to address the questions of when and where rapid transit will go. The Mayor himself disqualified North Nashville from the process, saying that we should have read his mind and kissed the ring years in advance if we wanted to be considered worthy of rapid transit.

The Chamber of Commerce (which supports Amp) hired a lawyer-up public relations firm, which suggests to me that these meetings are going to be more bully pulpits for making the sale of AMP than they are open town hall meetings for gathering input from you and me.

Metro has a particularly heavy-handed history of conducting community meetings, whether it be holding meetings at days and hours inconvenient for most people to attend, not plainly specifying in published agendas that certain questions were up for discussion, couching issues in specialized jargon that makes average heads spin or strictly controlling how questions are asked to discourage messy democracy. These tactics become especially nasty given the strong executive form of Metro government, where voters have very little influence after elections on the Mayor's Office.

I've documented over and again here the draconian tactics that are used in the planning and rezoning process by Metro officials, but I went back through my emails people have sent me from community meetings they attended to find more examples.

One that stands out was related to me by Mike Peden. Last winter CM Edith Langster, empowered by a couple of developers and Metro Planning, filed a Midtown rezoning request to allow a number of properties to be exempted from a compromise supported by the community in 2012 to prepare for overlays consistent with the Midtown Community Plan. Community plans are heavily influenced by participatory public meetings periodically held.

Leaders in the community expressed concern by email about Langster's bill. Metro Planning held a community meeting last March and CM Jason Holleman encouraged constituents to attend saying of Langster's proposal that it would not provide "protections for individually National Register Eligible/National Register Listed buildings and design guidelines will not be included for the area around Elliston Place".

Mike attended the meeting and related what he witnessed:

The room was packed. Several people had to stand.

The attorney from the Planning Office that spoke is clearly in favor of ... CM Langster’s proposed rezoning. He spoke as if that bill has already passed.

There were several questions raised about transit and MTA, but he made it clear he was not going to discuss that issue.

Jason Holleman attempted to ask questions but the attorney from Planning would not allow him to speak. He said that is why they requested everyone write questions on the cards so he would not have to get into a one-on-one discussion with anyone

Community plans always involve discussions about transit options, so why should they be prohibited by a lawyer in a community meeting? Less than a month later a Metro Planning spokesperson would tell a Vanderbilt writer of a "cultural shift" prompting zoning changes in Midtown that included the need to "cut down expenditures on gas". If planners can bring up transit as a motivator for their policies, why can't the community raise the question with planners in community meetings?

Also, requiring questions on note cards is just another way of keeping the unwashed masses at arm's length. And shutting down a council member with questions about impact on design and preservation seems extreme.

But these are the kind of tactics you have to watch out for in the upcoming community meetings, which they tell you now are about getting more of your input. Will they listen and incorporate input? Given the track record, I am not a believer.

A few thoughts on Sulphur Dell since the Mayor's financing plan is introduced

You cannot look to ballpark supporters for sober cost-benefit analysis on the question of financing a new Sulphur Dell and subsidizing the Nashville Sounds in the process. I have a few observations about the events of the past few days in the spirit of being more rational about that process:

• The Friday late afternoon news dump of this story last week was curious. A couple of hours before today's ballpark meeting was announced GOP State House Speaker Beth Harwell announced to the news media that she would not support dedicating $35 million in state funding for Karl Dean's new bus rapid transit east-west Nashville connector, "The Amp". That can always change, but for the time being it is a blow to the Dean infrastructure priority list. It is a blow to his brick-and-mortarmentum. The Sulphur Dell announcement could have been planned all along or it could have been announced to soften the PR blow on and divert news media attention from a limping Amp plan.
• It is obvious that Karl Dean's modus operandi is to move ahead with these voluptuous capital budget plans with minimal popular input. He pursued the new convention center even though local opinion polls indicated that Nashvillians did not support it. He threatened to demolish a popular working-class entertainment venue, the State Fairgrounds, and sell off most of the land to private developers until there was impressive public backlash threatening to rip Metro Council limb-from-limb. Hizzoner could have eliminated most of the strong, organized popular opposition to the AMP by moving bus rapid transit north to Charlotte, but he dug in his heels and all but dared state Republicans to kill funding. They are able to embrace popular opposition, and the Amp is on the verge of unraveling. Likewise, he is ramming the ballpark plan through the Sports Authority and Metro Council with no regard to public questions or feedback. We will see if he can push this before any organized opposition gains the footing necessary to slow or stop the ballpark.
• In the context of today's meeting announcing the financing plan, the October 24 "community meeting" continues to appear to have nothing to do with the community. None of the questions asked by the community are being considered. Everything is running to script and any of the concerns that many of us have about traffic, parking, flooding, fireworks, etc. are generally being ignored, even by the Mayor's Office of Neighborhoods. Buoyed by Metro's offer to build them a garage, the state is fully on board now. If Metro will not listen to community concerns, what chance do we have the state?
• Our council member, Erica Gilmore, is ignoring the questions from the October community meeting. She does not seem to care to represent all of us. During tonight's council proceedings, she was described by one reporter as "celebratory" about the ballpark plan. Not a concern in the world about community impact. She seems to have checked out on some of us.
• Before people start waxing on about how historic and "uniquely Nashville" the Sulphur Dell agreement is, they need to keep this in mind: the Metro Finance Director admits that the plan for Metro subsidizing the Sounds' new digs is based on the practices of other cities. Metro taxpayers are going to cough up $65 million to help pro baseball owners get wealthier because other cities do exactly the same thing. Ironically, being like other cities violates Metro Planning's first guiding principle: Be Nashville.
• Seven years ago I expressed qualified support for the previous administration's plan to increase Metro operating budget spending $250,000 per year in maintenance costs for a new ballpark at the old downtown thermal plant site. It seemed like a fair trade-off, given that Greer Stadium required $5 million to bring it up to ADA compliance (completed in 2009 after the old deal fell through). I was more open previously to tax-increment financing (also a part of Dean's deal). I have had a change of heart about TIF, which I find to be overused and abused by opportunistic politicians nowadays. The Mayor's current proposal to carve out $345,000 from the annual operating budgets may not seem much more than the older plan, but we live in different times: cash flow to Metro services seems more strapped as the years go by. And a ballpark at the thermal site generated fewer questions about the potential negative impact on residential neighborhoods than the Sulphur Dell site does. Any support I express for a new Sulphur Dell has even more qualifications than my previous support.
• The Mayor admits that the Nashville Sounds baseball club will not be contractually obligated to pay the $50 million that he plans on them paying for development. So, why would they need to hire a big-money lobbyist when they are not even required to pay for the development?

After going through the financials, I am still not ready to support a new Sulphur Dell without some assurances that Salemtown's quality of life will be protected. I am also not satisfied with how the concerns of the community, democratically expressed, are being overlooked and ignored by those we elect to represent us.

And this guy claims to be Mayor of all Nashville?

I do not think that the Mayor's Office realizes just how polarizing their justification for not planning rapid transit for North Nashville is. I do not believe that this administration grasps how their cavalier response expresses the idea that Nashville is not one city, but a fractured arena of interests competing for Hizzoner's good graces. Or maybe they get it, but they just don't care. Their cynical replies to a reporter are not even subtle in sovereign tone:

community activists and council members from North Nashville soon took up the chorus, suggesting their part of town was getting screwed yet again on a major public investment. As recently as April, state Rep. Brenda Gilmore floated the mention of a lawsuit if the route was not altered.

All were valid concerns. The problem, to the Dean administration, was that they were coming years too late. By that point, according to the mayor's office and Metro transit officials, foundational decisions about the project had been set in stone.

So, if North Nashvillians wanted bus rapid transit we should have bellied up to the trough with our power and money like the wealthy West End business interests and leveraged the Metro Transit Authority budget decisions in our favor. Never mind that it would have been more ethical for the executive branch to insure that infrastructure was distributed fairly around the city in the real absence of greater influence and wealth.

In truth, many of us who have attended these "public" meetings know that there are 1,000-and-1 ways to use meetings to mask and to misdirect. Procedural tricks are used all the time by those who have mastered rules and bylaws to allow hidden agendas under the guise of transparency with deniability intact (see the excuse, "All of the meetings were public", as if the public can attend all of the meetings along with every other public meeting Metro holds).

Now, claiming that we are too late to the party is part of the confidence game. The Mayor's Office has it both ways. This thing is only set in stone now because meetings and decisions were orchestrated to foster impenetrability. And now we are the chumps who did not see it coming. As if we ever could have.

In my opinion MTA has already pulled a fast one on us by not publicizing the alternatives analysis (and I don't mean modes of transit alternatives under consideration). Had North Nashville leaders been able to see the results for studies outside the east-west corridor, they likely would have been mobilized to fight Karl Dean's exclusive reservation of BRT for West End.

But in this administration's preconceived notion of Nashville as a social Darwinist theater of winner-take-all, such popular mobilization is discouraged.

6 important questions I would ask planners of a new Sulphur Dell ballpark

These are questions I am hoping will be answered at next week's community meeting on a new Sulphur Dell ballpark sponsored by Metro Planning. They are in no particular order:

1. Please tell us how you are going to incorporate the idea of "Complete Streets" (that is, making streets safe for all forms of transportation besides cars) into the ballpark development.





Complete streets at Fenway:
2 sidewalks, 3 planters & 1 rain garden!

• Karl Dean paid lip service to Complete Streets consistently throughout his tenure. He should not have a problem demonstrating that the redevelopment around the Sulphur Dell site will place limits on auto traffic while installing amenities for bicycle and pedestrian traffic. In their stories on Dean's ballpark designs, the news media is fond of dropping the factoid that the Mayor is a big Red Sox fan. If Dean fails to include complete streets in his design, would it be too much for the media to point to redevelopments around Boston's Fenway Park that have aggressively incorporated Complete Streets and to ask about the lack of consistency at Sulphur Dell?


2. How does a new Sulphur Dell fit alongside the North Nashville Community Plan?


• Pick your plan. 2002: traffic calming along the major roads and a diversity of housing stock to attract diverse groups of residents including lower density options. 2010: parking solutions for busy urban corridors, leaving flood plain undeveloped, conserving green space, restricting taller buildings to major corridors. The community has a clear track record of expressing how they would prefer growth to be managed rather than be permitted to run amuck. A new ballpark plan should be consistent and sensitive to already formulated community plans, which represent the most significant democratic brake on the power of money and on Johnny-come-lately political influence.


3. What measures are taken to incorporate flood mitigation into this ballpark plan? What will be the impact on the North Nashville neighborhoods of Sulphur Dell flood mitigation in the event of another catastrophic flood?


• This is a simple equation: the old Sulphur Dell flooded because the ballpark sat on flood plain. In May 2010 the area flooded again. Metro plans to do what it tries to prohibit Nashvillians from doing since 2010: build on flood plain. If they do not take measures for mitigation, the new Sulphur Dell will likely be inundated in a catastrophe. If they do mitigate future floods, the water will have to go somewhere. The most obvious place it will go is higher into the surrounding neighborhoods.


4. What is the mass transit plan for the North Capitol area to MetroCenter on game and event days/nights at a new ballpark? If the only plan is to build more parking for car owners on site, what plans do you have for alleviating overflow parking and congestion in the nearby neighborhoods?


• Parking is already becoming a huge challenge with the rapid wave of mixed-use developments sweeping the area, including massive apartment complexes. The stadium plan includes even more mixed-use residential along with the entertainment complex itself. The strain on on-street parking, our primary mode of parking, will only grow more intense. If the Mayor is committed to Complete Streets in more than just words, Jefferson Street will become a choke point of cars, bikes and people without a mass transit strategy that he has yet to divulge (if he has one).


5. Besides uncertain, pie-in-the-sky predictions of local job growth with new businesses around a new ballpark, what job strategies do you have for hiring people from North Nashville for every phase from construction to team operations?


• Watchdogs of another of Mayor Dean's immense capital projects, the Music City Center, discovered during the construction phase that Hizzoner did not follow through on promises to extend contracts to local companies and that jobs created by MCC looked lousy. The planners of a new ballpark should have to explain why North Nashville can expect more from the development than Music City Center offered our community.


6. What commitments can we get from the Nashville Sounds baseball club that they will provide programs and service opportunities for North Nashville youth (for example, inner city baseball training programs)?


• I am not aware of anything that the Sounds are working on with neighborhoods around Greer Stadium. North Nashville needs the ball club to commit to be more involved here.

Those are six I have off the top of my head and a good start toward formulating other important questions. Look forward to hearing from others who are concerned about our quality of life.


UPDATE:  Nashville Scene reporter Steven Hale gets Metro Planning to explain why they would schedule a community meeting on the ballpark in the middle of a weekday afternoon when most people cannot attend the meeting. Planning's response to Hale indicates to me that this meeting may be more of a pitch of a done deal to the community and less of an invitation to influence the ballpark plan:

This was the first meeting Metro and the State could schedule that could work for all of the speakers, and we wanted to get the conversation started.

For those unable to attend, we plan to tape the meeting so that they can view the presentation online and make comments and ask questions. We also hope to offer more community meetings as this process continues to give additional opportunities for community questions and comments.

So, there is a slate of speakers and they are going to tape for the "benefit" of those who cannot attend. It does not sound like to me that they are enlisting the community's participation in the formulation of this plan. In fact, it is reasonable to assume that since the unnamed speakers' attendance is more important than the community's attendance, the plan has been agreed upon between Metro and the State without reference to community planning. Yesterday in an email exchange with Planning's Craig Owensby about the meeting I asked him whether such a perception was correct. I received no response from him on that particular question.

Bus rapid transit plan being sold as tried and true even though it is a convoluted experiment hemmed in by straw men

Vanderbilt professor Malcolm Getz sent a letter opposing the plan to fund bus rapid transit down West End to Metro Council a little over a week ago. His comments are relevant to my views of the BRT proposal:

The Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) sent a funding request to the FTA prematurely. The MTA systematically suppresses critical documents and misrepresents the effects of its proposal. We have filed multiple Freedom of Information Act requests for the original Parson's-Brinkerhoff study, and have not received it. We have received (through FOIA) the Alternatives Analysis and the Preliminary Engineering Report (118 pp. and 333 pp. respectively.) All of these reports were taxpayer funded and none have been made available to the public. The reports published on the MTA website are merely excerpts and summaries, and do not reflect the facts presented in the full reports. The MTA claims public involvement and implies public approval.

The MTA’s letter to the Council today refers to the "Alternatives Analysis" for the corridor begun in 2011, which forms the basis for the MTA Board’s January 2012 recommendation to advance the current plan. The plan removes lanes from traffic to dedicate them to buses. The Metro Council, State officials, and the Federal Transit Administration should insist on seeing the Alternatives Analysis. I have discussed the lack of public access to the full report with Mr. Peter Rogoff, the Federal Transit Administrator.

A pivotal issue is increased traffic congestion. The project removes two lanes of traffic and a turn lane from key sections of the highway between 440 and 5th Avenue. As a consequence, the project will dramatically increase traffic congestion, creating choke points. This effect will begin immediately as construction begins and will remain at a higher level after the project is complete. Although a number of other cities have deployed limited-stop bus rapid transit, only a few have provided lanes just for buses, and among these, none have taken lanes from major arterial roadways in the center of the city where no alternate routes are available for traffic. The AMP proposal is an experiment, but is presented as "tried and true."

The MTA claims that the new bus service will enhance access to the three major hospitals between 440 and 40 but the plan provides no bus stops at any of the three hospitals. Travelers face transfers to other vehicles or long walks to complete their journeys. Indeed, the bus stops are a block or more from major cross streets that provide connection to these major destinations. The quality of bus service to major mid-town destinations will be inferior to that provided today. This information is not included in the Summary Reports.

The primary effect of the project for bus riders is to move people from today’s cost effective service to a less convenient and more expensive service. The MTA claims the project will serve 4,500 weekday riders daily. But its own ridership estimates demonstrate that the vast majority of these riders are already making trips by bus. A very high level of expenditure per added local bus rider means the project is not cost effective.

The MTA proposes to dramatically reduce the frequency of the local bus service, making bus service less convenient for many people who make short bus trips and value being able to enter and exit buses at any blue bus stop sign. A major reduction in local bus service means that access to mid-town hotels and restaurants will degrade. The proposed limited stop bus service will not appeal to convention visitors.

I have spoken to many groups about this project and found that, once people understand the details, even many enthusiastic supporters of better public transportation for Nashville—and I count myself among them—become skeptical of this plan. It serves Nashville poorly. The MTA should make the public documents available for review and reconsider the issues of traffic congestion and bus ridership.

I have made it clear before that my opposition to Nashville's "Amp" as proposed by Mayor Karl Dean is based on the fact that alternatives analysis of routes has not been made public for scrutiny. We cannot thoroughly judge the validity of the claims of Metro Transit deciders (for instance, that West End is the best route for bus rapid transit) until we have access to the data collected from all routes. It would be interesting to know whether there is something to hide about Charlotte Pike and other alternatives that might make the West End corridor less compelling than the Mayor's supporters let on. (One other interesting question raised by CM Josh Stites is whether the HCA jobs projections, now sinking into refilling Lake Palmer, were included in MTA's filed proposal for federal funds).

The failure to be forthcoming is magnified by the fact that Metro Nashville has a tradition of neglecting North Nashville and of concentrating resources and infrastructure west and east. While the new "Amp Coalition" represents a rebranding of the mission to build an east-west connector and an attempt to flip the script to say that West End is merely the first move to provide BRT for everyone, I can see no good reason to have faith that North Nashville is even on the agenda of these hip transit nexters.

For his part the Mayor, rather than simply ordering that all analyses be made public, has taken to tilting at windmills:

The strongest case for The Amp would seem to be that as the mayor says, worse traffic is coming no matter what. West End, a corridor that is already often congested, will only get more and more crowded as the Middle Tennessee region grows (according to the city's oft-cited projection) by a million people between now and 2035. A transit option without a dedicated lane does little to solve this, the mayor and project supporters reasonably argue, because it would be subject to the same worsening congestion.

Unfortunately, the mayor wields this argument against an opponent unrecognizable to anyone who's been following the debate over The Amp. Call it "Dean to Straw Man: Drop Dead."

Sure, people may say, "Let's just leave everything alone, let's change nothing" — but largely they aren't saying that. There are those who strongly support investing in transit but think that we should start on Charlotte Avenue (and include parts of North Nashville, where many people depend on public transit). There are others who say a BRT Lite system — like those in operation on Gallatin Road and Murfreesboro Road — would be a better option on West End.

Why is Hizzoner acting so quixotic on an issue he should be winning? Steven Hale goes on to suggest a possibility: Mr. Dean may be expecting us to buy into Amp not on the basis of its merits, but simply because he himself as Mayor expects us to. If this is mayoral hubris, it is further indication to some of us who have not seen alternative data that West End might not be able to stand on its own merits.

Do the comparatives clearly indicate what kind of ballpark $40 million would build?

We have nothing but pipe dreams and promises of cash so far on Mayor Karl Dean's idyllic project for a Sulphur Dell ballpark. The journalists worth their salt have started asking questions about ballpark costs and risk along with the query of what exactly we are going to get for the money laid down for Sulphur Dell (the sequel).

Take J.R. Lind. He's looked around at other minor league ballparks that fall within or not far outside the Mayor's projected $40 million cap. Other recently-built Triple-A stadiums would blow Karl Dean's budget save for Werner Park (home to the Pacific Coast League's Omaha Storm Chasers). According to Lind, Werner Park was built for $36 million. If you exclude a grass berm in the Omaha outfield, conventional or permanent seats at Werner Park come nowhere close to Greer Stadium's 10,000 capacity.

Little sprawl on the prairie

However a closer look at more of the details about Werner Park cause me to wonder whether it is a good financial comparison with a Sulphur Dell project. The Omaha stadium is not urban. It looks like it sits on the prairie. In fact, the Storm Chasers left their old city ballpark to move 15 miles outside of Omaha. Werner Park looks like it took its cue from the Major League's Ballpark in Arlington: an attractive stadium built in the middle of a large empty plain to spur more suburban sprawl away from cities. Since there is no city around each of those developments, builders have other developments to urbanize those ballparks. In the case of Werner Park, the plans include mixed-use "Pennant Place". The short-term benefit for Werner Park is that developers realize a project that's cheaper than one they would build in city neighborhoods where prices are higher.

But that is precisely where cracks in comparisons between Werner Park and Dean's Sulphur Dell emerge. A new Sounds ballpark in the North Capitol area is going to be more expensive to build. This is no slam on Lind's points about the ballpark budget, but $40 million would not nearly buy near Downtown Nashville what it would buy in suburban Omaha.

Werner Park is also surrounded by the standard sea-of-asphalt surface parking, a relatively cheap way to store privately-owned vehicles. Reportedly, no mass transit runs between Omaha and the ballpark, so fans have to drive themselves. Mayor Dean is proposing a parking garage, which he hopes the state will build. If the state does build it we would not have to consider the fact of its greater relative expense (Nashville has very stubborn, rocky soil, by the way). But the transit question may show a parallel: Mayor Dean has expressed no transit plan beyond a parking garage to move people to and from Sulphur Dell. All of his mass transit eggs are in the East-West Bus Rapid Transit Connector, which will not serve points north and south.

Just as people drive to and park at Werner Park, so they would drive to and park at Sulphur Dell. That is not a problem on the prairie. It is a huge problem for high-density urban neighborhoods.

Above all, Mayor Dean cannot just slap something down on an empty canvas like one would on the prairie. He should consider the character of Downtown neighborhoods, Bicentennial Mall, Jefferson Street, the Cumberland River banks and every neighborhood between Sulphur Dell and MetroCenter.

But let us assume for a second that we could build a Sulphur Dell inspired by a similarly priced ballpark like Werner Park. Guess what? The Omaha development does not seem to be making the huge economic impact promised by developers and county politicians, who "tapped tax revenues" to fund the ballpark as a "stimulus package". The prairie is not giving way to retail, office space, restaurants, residential, or entertainment as promised when Werner Park was a concept, despite the fact that over $800,000 in municipal funds were spent to run water and sewer lines in.

This begs the question of how much Metro might have to pay to upgrade its ancient North Nashville water/sewer lines for a new Sulphur Dell development. And it is clear from the Werner Park experiment that idyllic dreams of a new field do not necessarily translate to benefits that ripple out in new development and growth.

But there remains the nagging reality that to find a Triple-A ballpark construction budget comparable to what Karl Dean wants to build at Sulphur Dell, we had to look to cheaper suburbia. I fail to see how $40 million will pay for anything close to it here.


UPDATE: Nashville Business Journal dreams the possibilities based on a slideshow of "other cities' ballparks", including the Major League ballpark in Baltimore, which cost $110 million to build 21 years ago. More like impossible dreams?

AMPlifire: Hizzoner lumps concerned opponents of his westward-friendly BRT line with people who do not care for the environment or mass transit

Now there's going to be people who disagree. There are going to be people who are against change, who aren't interested in the environment, who aren't interested in other people being able to move around. That's fine. But I think most Nashvillians are.

--Mayor Karl Dean to Channel 4 News

Yeah? Well, if Mayor Dean cared about the environment in North Nashville, why would he permit Metro Water to dump toxins and contaminants into a new riverside landfill near Salemtown? If he cared about moving North Nashvillians around, why wouldn't his AMP proposal include us?

AMPartheid

More like: "moving for whom?"

I am grateful for the opportunities to meet some great leaders since moving to North Nashville ten years ago. Because our kids attended the same public school here, I have had more occasions in the past year to enjoy conversations with two such leaders, Sekou and Tene Franklin. I was impressed, but not at all surprised today to find Sekou's thoughtful, timely, and honest response to the Mayor's transit plan. A number of us have expressed frustration that the bus rapid transit project leaves our community behind in favor of subsidizing and further skewing West Nashville growth. But few of us are as adept as Sekou is at drawing out the nexus between a historical context of prejudice and contemporary transit decisions:

Since last year, community leaders have asked the Nashville Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) to extend the Amp route to North Nashville, which has one of the largest concentrations of blacks in the Mid-South region. North Nashville also has a historic tie to unjust transportation policies, most notably the Interstate 40 development that dislocated scores of residents, churches and businesses in the 1960s.

Many North Nashville neighborhoods are under-resourced and need better transportation options. The community also has a high number of hospital workers, renters, senior citizens, disabled residents and college students, all of whom could benefit from an Amp stop. However, MTA officials rejected pleas for an Amp terminal in North Nashville in the initial phase of the project. This snub could lead to a system of transportation apartheid in which some communities receive the bulk of transit investment — in this case, more than a $1 billion for neighborhoods in the Amp corridor — while others such as North Nashville are rendered invisible.

In February 2011, the Federal Transit Administration (FTA) sent a civil rights team to Nashville to assess whether the MTA was following federal civil rights law. The two-day visit occurred during the initial phase of the Amp design. In their visit, the FTA officers were shown routes in West, East and Southeast Nashville. Yet, for unexplainable reasons, the MTA did not allow them to visit North Nashville. This was yet another example of how communities such as North Nashville are treated as if they are invisible.

That last paragraph is galling. It is shameful that transit leaders intentionally ignored North Nashville on the question of lawful access to transit. It also casts a pall on the arguments of east-west corridor supporters who say they honestly believe West End is a better choice without any reference to MTA's shoddy treatment of North Nashville on a question of civil rights.

The shameless roll out of an east-west rapid transit corridor is the extension of the historic injustices that do not disappear with new generations leaders. While some local progressives attempt the tortured logic of scolding the Mayor for wanting to govern "the fun parts" while absolving him of responsibility for extending the time-honored, sanctioned neglect of North Nashville, Sekou Franklin reminds us that this BRT transit policy, in doing nothing to break from an infamous tradition, is the natural extension of that tradition. The link is not so easily severed just because Mayor Karl Dean is an odds-on jolly for taking down a Republican in a hypothetical run-for-office.

No degree of public relations can cover up the wounds reopened for some in North Nashville. You can pat your progressive self on the back all you want about supporting transit and helping some boiler room workers exit West Nashville faster at quitting time to access the same slower, lesser infrastructure they know all too well along points north. But liberal preening will not alter the reality that AMP extends Nashville's legacy of unequal development, and it serves disproportionally white, affluent communities before any other.

As such, it is transportation apartheid. Sekou calls it out for exactly what it is.