For Charles Hales, Thursday morning was all about "why transit matters."
Hales, a former commissioner of planning and transportation for Portland, Ore., and longtime proponent of mass transit, spoke yesterday morning at the University of Rhode Island's Shepard building in downtown Providence. In his keynote address for a conference on transportation in Rhode Island, Hales promoted the far-reaching economic benefits of public transportation in American cities. His speech kicked off a day's worth of panel discussions, walking tours of the state and a rally at the State House advocating public transport.
The conference, "Getting There: Transportation for a Prosperous, Sustainable Rhode Island," was organized by Grow Smart Rhode Island, a public interest group that works for sustainable urban development. Its events addressed responsible planning methods and sustainable development within urban areas.
"We've come a 50-year full circle from when cities had streetcars," Hales told approximately 100 audience members. "And we moved to a system where we tried to run our societies on oil."
With global warming, shrinking oil fields and renewed interest in urban centers threatening the automobile's dominance over transportation, Hales said it was time for cities to begin turning back to mass-transit systems.
"Cities doing this are going to be the economic winners," he said, listing investments in public transport options such as expanded bus routes, lanes dedicated to buses, downtown streetcars and commuter trains in suburbs.
While in Portland, Hales was hailed for leading the team that built the first new streetcar system in the United States in five decades, and he has since worked with several cities to promote sustainable development options, said Scott Wolf, Grow Smart's executive director, in his introduction for Hales. Wolf called Hales, who is now the transit planning principal for the Omaha, Neb., engineering firm HDR, "a national resource for the American urban renaissance."
Hales began his address with a call to redefine public transport in America. He described traditional reasons why transit matters - low-income Americans are dependent on public transportation, he said, and some of those with means of driving to work seek public transportation to avoid a stressful commute. "It's a good old American value to have a choice, and we'd like to offer these poor folks a choice in how to get to work," he said.
Finally, Hales described an admittedly tongue-in-cheek third reason: Some commuters value public transportation simply because it gets other drivers off the road.
People view highways as critical transportation and public transportation an excess, Hales said. "Most Americans still look through bifocals at how we spend money on transportation," he said.
While optimistic that global warming will disprove the belief that "this generation is not capable of altruism," Hales said the dwindling oil supply will push people to use more public transportation even before they switch to energy alternatives. The alternative energy "dog don't hunt," Hales said, citing nuclear power as a taboo, wind, solar and geothermal energies as impractical for cars, the turning of waste products into light crude oil as reliant on oil-based plastics and ethanol supplies as falling far short of the nation's fuel demands.
Instead of these alternative energy options, Hales proposed a number of mass-transit opportunities already taking root across the United States.
"Light-rail" systems - essentially long sets of streetcars which travel from suburbs into urban centers - are being built and expanded even in sprawling cities, notably Phoenix and Minneapolis. Bus rapid transit systems, which use designated lanes and large stations to imitate light-rail routes, have gained prominence, and traditional commuter rail systems can be major draws for travelers even in smaller communities ensconced in the highway system.
"That's part of the good news for Rhode Island - it's not just cities that have a transit tradition," Hales said.
The conference's first panel, immediately following Hales' address, brought public transport to a local level with remarks from both city and state officials.
"Our whole plan for the state is a focus on Rhode Island's quality of life, quality of place," said Kevin Flynn, associate director for planning in Rhode Island's Division of Planning.
With buses in Rhode Island now reported to be leaving riders behind at bus stops due to overcrowding, Mark Therrien, assistant general manager of planning for the Rhode Island Public Transportation Authority, who was a speaker on the panel, noted an increase in riders and "an opportunity to move in a new direction."
But audience members demanded more than plans. One woman called for a state-wide light-rail system along the shores of Narragansett Bay, only to be dismissed as unrealistic by Therrien.
"We need to go where we're going to see a lot of development," Therrien said. Currently, there isn't enough demand along the bay to merit such an expensive project, Therrien said. Establishing public transportation between Warwick and Woonsocket would be a better use of funds, he said.
Panel member Melanie Jewett, principal planner for the Providence Department of Planning and Development, said Mayor David Cicilline '83 has called for a streetcar feasibility study. Another audience member questioned the usefulness of such studies.
"We are looking at all alternatives," responded Therrien, who hinted that a bus rapid transit system could be a less costly alternative to streetcars.
"A lot has to do with the stigma," Jewett said. "Whether we like it or not, there is a stigma against the bus as opposed to riding streetcars."
