Five Minutes to Freedom

After all these years of light rail boosterism I can’t believe I’m saying this but Fort Worth really should hold off on planning what is basically a streetcar, light rail, even BRT network at the moment. Construction of a new network, with three corridors similar to 2010 plans is expected to take a decade and cost somewhere around $800m but perhaps more when operations are considered.

I love a good tram network, with dedicated lanes much much more. But while Trinity Metro has a 15 minute bus network that serves main corridors, with plans to upgrade some to 10 minutes, I can’t help but think what it might look like if they upped the service ante even more before spending all that capital money.

Try it out and see what happens if you brought frequencies down to 5 minutes on those key routes! It will be much cheaper and faster to implement and you may see a huge benefit to it. Maybe do it for just a year on a probationary basis, then plan for transit in dedicated lanes. See what happens!

I know why they are making these plans. It’s for economic development purposes in three areas that they have targeted which have some existing momentum. They have even mapped out the number of acres available for development and empty parking lots. And while I understand denser development is a hard to sell people along a corridor, increasing housing and “parking” without adding something else they believe will reduce that burden is always a tough sell to the NIMBY set.

The answer at this time in my mind is going to be frequency.

A few other things should be considered as well. One is just the current administration’s unfriendliness to urban transit projects of any kind. It makes sense to jump in the queue if we know the Capital Improvements Grants (CIG) program is going to be around for a while, but with the current dismantling of agencies and disregard for the rule of law I’m going to cross my fingers on that one.

But second, I want to see things work. We’ve been building a lot of middling transit for a long time and at some point maybe we should try something different to start. Maybe (de)congestion pricing has me fired up in terms of efficacy, but what if Fort Worth just threw out some of the incremental stuff on buses and said we’re going for it. 5 minute headways, best in the country for a city of our size on these key routes of cultural and civic importance to the community.

I think it could work.