Random Thoughts

April 28, 2004

Lucky 13

May 1 is the 13th anniversary of Northern Express. Lord, how the time has flown by. The other night I was watching an HBO comedy special with Chris Rock who was commenting on his age. “It‘s been a long time since ‘New Jack City,‘“ he said. Right you are, Chris, because that was the first long-forgotten film we reviewed in issue No. 1 back in ‘91.
All these years I‘ve been wandering around thinking that the Express was something “new“ in Northern Michigan; yet today we must surely have a few readers who weren‘t even born when that first issue rolled off the press. Still, I hope the Express has been singular enough that most readers will recall the first time you picked us up. Thanks for hanging in there with us.
It‘s tough keeping up with youth. Actually, quite impossible. Other publications in Northern Michigan brag in their media kits as to how elderly their readers are under the notion that advertisers will flock to that standard. Although our paper appeals primarily to baby boomers and Generation X, I‘ve kept one eye looking over my shoulder through the years in hopes of attracting younger readers under the theory that a newspaper can only lose a single generation before it becomes extinct.
Sitting at a lunch counter the other day, I was pleased to see several high school students reading the Express -- our News of the Weird and Modern Rock columns. That to me has been our greatest achievement -- serving as a doorway into the world of newspapers for young readers. In our own small way, we‘re ensuring the continuity of print journalism -- a valuable commodity. We‘re attempting to attract younger writers to keep that trend on a roll.
***
Some things haven‘t changed a lick in Northern Michigan since our first issue. The Kalkaska Trout Festival -- it‘s still flippin‘. Mushroom festivals, the Bayshore Marathon & 10K... still kickin‘.
One thing that has accelerated through the years, however, is the blight of urban sprawl. But here it‘s hard to point fingers, because as Pogo noted, “We have seen the enemy and he is us.“ Even many of the environmentalists here talk the new urbanist line of the need to live in the city core, yet live far out in the boondocks themselves as part of the long-commute sprawl culture.
A favorite pipe dream of mine, repeated periodically in this column through the years, is that some day Traverse City might consider a light rail train line as an antidote to traffic congestion and an incentive to limit sprawl by encouraging people to move closer to the city.
Portland, Oregon, a city that is culturally similar to Traverse City in some ways, has a light rail line that everyone seems to love. But to really see light rail in action, you have to go to Amsterdam, where dozens of small electric-powered commuter trains criss-cross the town. Travel around the city is cheap and convenient, and similar systems involving subways or trams are in place everywhere in Europe and Asia.
Here, we have BATA‘s buses -- a good beginning for a mass transit system. But unfortunately, buses tend to have a bit of a downbeat image all over the world. In foreign cities where there‘s a mix of buses and rail alternatives, you‘ll tend to see people choose the faster trains or subway systems. Trains are fun, cool and sexy. Buses at the very least need to be reinvented.
Why not a light rail system in TC? Imagine it starting in whatever new town center is established in Acme. It could run along the bike trail all the way to downtown Traverse City and then out to Meijer‘s and the Mall before looping back along Airport Road. Separate lines could dissect the city along Eighth Street and Cass Road. You could park your car in Acme or Garfield Township and avoid traffic hassles by commuting the rest of the way to work by rail.
Traverse City could be like Portland, San Diego or Amsterdam -- one of the “cool“ cities that Gov. Granholm is promoting, which would encourage new high-tech businesses here as well as even more tourism.
A new study by the Victoria Transport Policy Institute (a rail advocacy outfit), says that urban rail systems increase mass transit in their communities by 400%. It‘s not hard to imagine that number rising to 4,000% or more here, where few people presently commute by bus.
The study also claims that urban rail systems mean 36% fewer traffic fatalities, 14% less money spent per household on commuting costs, 21% less miles put on your car.
At least 10 U.S. cities built light rail lines during the ‘80s and ‘90s -- Buffalo, Minneapolis, Atlanta, Baltimore, Washington, D.C., etc. -- and currently the push is on at the federal level to allocate more funds for a variety of rail schemes throughout the country. Critics of light rail claim that it has actually increased traffic in places like Portland because riders get frustrated with transfers and go back to their cars.
Then too, critics note that rail systems are expensive. Los Angeles‘ 22-mile light rail line cost $877 million in the 1990s. Of course, they had a lot of expensive real estate to displace and nothing comes cheap, including new roads, bridges and subsidizing the automobile culture.
The critics may be right in the short term, but what‘s the alternative? Are we going to keep pumping more and more cars into our streets until we have the same level of gridlock you find in Mexico City, Hong Kong or London? Then there‘s the price of gas. It‘s presently $5 per gallon in Britain and we‘re heading in that direction ourselves, no matter what Prince Bandar might rig for the short term.
Feel free to write in as to why light rail is a bad idea for the region, if only to keep the idea alive. But consider also how nice it would be to go whizzing by those long lines of cars that stretch in traffic jams a mile or so through Traverse City each summer, speeding to your destination in a light rail train.