The Scene sat down with Mayor Freddie O’Connell to talk about his proposed transit plan, and what pieces he thinks are important for Nashvillians to consider when voting in November.
What’s the biggest thing you want a voter to take away from the transit plan?
The biggest-picture thing is the overall program should not only help you as somebody in the city — it should help the entire city. Even if you are very committed to your current commute pattern and you drive by yourself, almost everywhere you go, you’re gonna get more green lights out of this program. If you’re in a neighborhood that is challenged because you’ve got a corridor that runs right by where you live, and it’s got a broken sidewalk network, and you have to walk on dirt paths, you’re gonna get something out of this. If you are spending two hours on your commute because you’re transit-dependent right now, this is probably going to bring either better frequency and more likely even that point-to-point opportunity to not just have to come into downtown everywhere. So child care gets closer, groceries get closer, health care gets closer. If you’re working a third shift, you’re finally going to be able to actually have an opportunity to catch a bus after 1 a.m. We really did try to structure the program to meet people where they are and offer them better options, no matter how they’re moving around the city.
What do you tell people who look at some of the basics of the plan and see only the bus improvements and think it won’t help them?
I come back to: That's not the only thing that's in it. That's why we have from the jump called it a transportation improvement program because it's full of improved infrastructure. We expect that overall crashes on our roadways are going to go down. We do expect that almost everybody in the city is going to get to reclaim more time if this gets approved, because there will simply be smarter traffic flow around the entire city that is moving people through safer corridors and intersections. If the only thing that you're looking at in this plan and seeing are the transit elements, the bus elements, there's definitely more to the story there.
Can you delve into signaling in particular, since so many people who are car-dependent want to know how that will work for them?
We had started to see some of this work. In fact, we’re picking up on a thread that came up in Mayor [John] Cooper’s transportation plan, which absolutely informed our overall program. When we started the Nashville Department of Transportation out of what used to be Public Works, there was this idea of traffic management centers. So we’ve got a smaller one that’s a combined police substation and TMC about to open on Broadway, and then a more comprehensive one over at the Howard Office Building. Every time we convert signals to this, it’s a grid. It’s not even just that at your traffic signal that you might otherwise be stopped at a red light when no cars are coming the other way. Now, because of understanding traffic patterns with each one that comes online, it may be the entirety of Broadway, for instance, where a whole network of lights stays green after a special event to help traffic flow. It not only knows that you’re at this intersection — it probably knows, “Oh, you’re trying to get on the interstate to head back home after something.” It will ultimately literally mean a larger number of Nashvillians have more green lights than red lights as they’re traveling around the city. The program lets us, over the period that it’s in effect, modernize two-thirds of our signalized intersections.
Many people had expected light rail in the plan. Why did you decide not to include it?
Fundamentally, it’s a math question. Even the single light rail possibility from the airport to downtown at a probably minimum cost of $300 million per mile that you would need for implementation of a light rail corridor would mean that that single corridor would effectively consume all of the financial envelope for the program. Basically, we could do one light rail route for a key corridor, or a program with citywide impact. We just wanted to design a program that could have the most impact the most quickly, with the best overall cost-benefit analysis from Nashvillians, and frankly just the sheer cost is what made the decision not easy, but necessary.
And I would add to that, when we went into this conversation six years ago, it was [before the plan to partially fund a new Titans stadium with public money]. Where it might be nice to have a balanced financing approach that included hotel/motel tax, after we just added a percent to the hotel/motel tax, I think that would have been pretty difficult for the hospitality scenario in the city. So what we’re left with is a very simple lower overall financial envelope program that just can’t support light rail meaningfully.
Since the plan’s dedicated funding opens up the chance for more federal dollars, is there any potential for light rail expansion if this passes and the city can then tap into those funds?
Absolutely. What we kind of guided both WeGo, NDOT and our consultant team to design — and Metro Planning right alongside them — was to ensure that all of these corridors were actually rail-ready. So that you could imagine a corridor that when we look at a federal program … when we get to local, preferred alternatives suggest this would be a great corridor for rail. We’ll be ready to make that decision on the basis of federal funding availability.
The ability to unlock this amount of federal funding could go away after this year. Could you speak to why it's important to pass the plan now to be able to acquire that funding?
I want to be clear: We do expect that over the 15-year life of this, there will be multiple federal funding opportunities. There's just never in my lifetime — and I don't know if we'll see it again in my lifetime — been an opportunity as extraordinary as the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. Every single time I've interacted with USDOT partners in the past year since I took office, they always say, “Are your applications in?” They want to see us implement successful projects, but they also know that right now, we can't qualify for all of the programs that some of our peer cities are eligible for on the basis of our lack of dedicated local funding.
What’s your argument for the plan when some might say they don’t want to or can’t afford to pay for it right now?
I think there are a couple ways to look at it. One, there’s a tremendous amount of financial accountability built into the way the state created bipartisan legislation to let us do this in the first place. We had to go get our accounting process approved by the state comptroller. We had to go get an independent audit for the financing plan. We have to show you what we’re doing. This isn’t us just asking for money and it’s like a blank check. This money is directly aligned with all of these improvements. Now, if you don’t want to pay for it, then you get exactly what we’ve been doing for the past quarter-century, which is little better than nothing. And it’s why we ranked as one of the worst commutes in the country earlier this year in a report that came out in Forbes magazine. That’s not what I want for the city. We are continuing to see growth that … started a couple of years ago continue, and we’ve got to interact with it more successfully. I’d also say for most households, this is going to be $6 or $7 a month. When you go into Target and spend $50, you’ll throw a quarter in the jar to pay for this program. And the majority of the program’s local revenues are actually going to come from out-of-county residents. This actually lets us capture the success of Nashville’s destination economy.
So I understand the overall concern. But meanwhile, all along the way, we're trying to tackle affordability. Already today, if you live within a quarter-mile of our somewhat limited transit system, you're on average saving $200 a year more than people who don't have meaningful access to transit. If you expand that number to tens of thousands of people across the city, suddenly you have a big net savings for a lot of households in the city. In addition to that, the regional opportunities should relieve pressure, even for people coming in from out of county. I think that while there is a cost, we're also trying to do everything we can on the affordable-housing front. We continue to build our toolkit there. Just this summer we launched the Nashville Catalyst Fund to sit right next to the Barnes Affordable Housing Trust Fund. We're bringing thousands of units online, and now we'll have a preservation tool alongside that. We're actively trying to tackle cost of living even while we know we're asking you to invest. But we're showing exactly what we're going to pay for, and the state legislation requires that that's what we do.
How do you fight back against opposition groups? That was a problem for the last transit plan with a lot of money in opposition, and there is at least one group this time around that mainly focuses on the sales tax.
We think we’ve gotten the program to meet Nashvillians’ needs. I think a lot of previous efforts maybe under-accounted for how Nashvillians are experiencing moving around the city, and so we really did want to build a plan that has something for everybody embedded in it. But I think the easiest way to talk about this is: As people go to the polls this November, our hope and expectation is that we’re trying to get the green light for more green lights. And I think that’s one thing that’s been missing from the conversation. This isn’t a program that’s intent is to produce a bigger volume of empty buses. This really is a program that is trying to create more options for people who have told us for more than a decade that they desperately want them, and in some cases desperately need them.
What’s the logistical challenge of placing the infrastructure in places that haven’t had it before?
We really are going to have to take this on a corridor-by-corridor, block-by-block basis to figure out where today, right now, we could start engineering in some places, because we know we’ve got the curb-to-curb width to do stuff, that the sidewalk network may already be in reasonably good shape. There are other places where you’re going to have to deal with complex complications of things — like, there’s a rail crossing here, or we have to acquire a bunch of right-of-way to put a sidewalk into place. That’s also one of the reasons why, on one hand, we know we’re going to be able to deliver some things that you can see, touch, feel, experience in year one. But we also know that across 15 years, that’s one of the reasons why dedicated funding is actually so important — so you can do that long-term planning and know that while we’re delivering a sidewalk over here in the first couple of years, we’ve got to be doing right-of-way acquisition and corridor design and something else out here [that] may happen in year six or seven. But if we can’t depend on that [dedicated funding], we also can’t go as easily to our state and federal partners, and so the dedicated funding element lets us do these longer-term looks at corridors that may have some more complexity to them.
What’s the importance of these corridors?
One of the things that we heard over and over again in reflections on the last time we’ve looked at something was, “Where is the regional connectivity?” One of the best parts about this is, we started this conversation with awareness that Nashville is at the heart of a growing region. And so while we’re not paying for everybody who lives out of county all the way — we are making sure that we have park-and-ride locations, that we’re increasing some express service, that even the WeGo Star with a recent study is going to get some attention with nights and weekend service improvements. Seeing the level of regional thinking in the implementation has been enough to earn the support of the Regional Transportation Authority, enough to earn the support of the Greater Nashville Regional Council. Again, just like we think we’ve gotten this right for Nashville and Nashvillians, we also think we’ve gotten this right in a way that our regional partners are going to appreciate and benefit from.
Digging into Mayor Freddie O’Connell’s transit referendum, which will be on the ballot in November
