Nashville’s Traffic Woes Get National Attention

Nashville’s Traffic Woes Get National Attention

This is one of America’s booming cities. An average of 82 people move here every day, amounting to a growth rate of 12.7 percent between 2000 and 2013.

And, as is the case in many booming cities, the traffic is terrible.

Congestion costs the average Nashville auto commuter 45 hours a year, according to an annual Urban Mobility Scorecard prepared by Texas A&M. There’s little public transit in Nashville, and most people get around by car: Drive around one of the city’s hot areas—The Gulch, Germantown, Downtown—on just about any night and you’ll see parking lots chock full of giant cars and people driving around in automobiles, looking for places to put them.

There’s agreement among just about everyone in Nashville, including the new mayor, Megan Barry, that the city needs more public transit, and it needs it now.

“I want to hear from you, Nashville, on how we can improve our transit and transportation infrastructure so that you can get out of your cars if you want to,” Barry said, in her inaugural address in September.

Barry is hiring a transportation czar and told me, on the phone, that she will look for federal and state funding for transit projects. The mayor and civic leaders have traveled to cities such as Charlotte, Denver, and Vancouver, she said, to see how those car-centric regions were able to expand their transit options over the last decade.

But the mayor, and the region, have a big challenge ahead. Putting in new light rail or even bus rapid transit is costly, and can take away space currently used by cars. And it is difficult to find funding in Tennessee, a state where there is no income tax and municipalities have to depend on sales tax for revenues.

“If we had a dedicated revenue stream right now for transit, we would be building it,” JoAnn Graves, the executive director of the Transit Alliance of Middle Tennessee, told me. “We have not been willing to go into debt to fund any kind of transportation system.”

But, even if the city could find the money for a new light-rail line, would people use it? Like most Americans outside the biggest cities, people in Nashville are accustomed to using their cars. According to Census data from 2009, fewer than 3 percent of workers in the Nashville metro area used public transit to commute to work, making the city less public-transit-friendly than Houston, Richmond, Memphis, Tampa, and Kansas City, to name a few. (continue reading)

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