It's like something straight out of the Onion. The difference? It's not a joke, although its accuracy is roughly the same.
Yesterday the City of Lincoln posted a press release stating the Lincoln has been named -- get this! -- a "Top 15 City for Transit Innovation". That's right, according to "a study conducted by the Smarter Cities team of the Natural Resource Defense Council (NRDC) in collaboration with the Center for Neighborhood Technology (CNT)", Lincoln is "innovative" when it comes to transportation. I'll let that sink in for a moment.
Among the reasons cited for the distinction are StarTran's low fares and Lincolnites' low commute times. Fair enough. StarTran does have pretty low fares, especially for certain populations. If you're low-income you pay a whopping $7.50 per month. But StarTran's low fares are less about innovation and more about desperation. The demand side of supply and demand is very low in Lincoln, so prices simply cannot go very high if we don't want the buses to be completely (as opposed to mostly) empty.
It is also true that Lincolnites' commute times are relatively low, but again, that's not because of any innovation in transit. If there's any innovation it's in our zoning and growth policies which keep Lincoln "corralled" and prevent growth from sprawling outward by keeping the city's advance (more or less) contiguous. And Lincoln has no real suburbs. Bennet, Waverly, Hickman, Roca, Emerald, and all the other small towns around Lincoln have mostly managed to maintain separate, distinct identities rather than turning into sprawling suburban tumors like Elkhorn, Gretna, and Papillion up the road in Omaha. That is starting to change. Waverly and Hickman, for example, are both picking up the pace of development, much of it driven by folks who work in Lincoln.
No, Lincoln is far from "innovative" when it comes to transit. Show me an innovative bus network rather than the tired and woefully flawed spoke and downtown hub system we've had for decades. Show me bike racks and biker-friendly policies on buses. Show me bus rapid transit programs. Show me a marketing campaign that actually gets Lincolnites to give a damn about StarTran. Show me citywide carpooling programs. Show me anything that isn't just more of the same in a very slightly different package. Then we can talk about innovation.
Until that time, this study proves only one thing: these Top N Cities for _______ "studies" are complete rubbish.
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YES. The fact remains that it is really difficult to not have a car in Lincoln. It can be done, barely, but the people I know that have done it get by by borrowing cars. This is especially true since you can’t go anywhere in the city by bus in the evening or on sunday.
But yeah, all these “top 10 cities” things are dumb.
I’ve been living car-free for 4 years now. The key for me is living where I do. I can walk to the grocery (Ideal Market), walk or bike to work and downtown, and the bus runs right by my apartment, so trips to shopping malls, etc are easy (and free, since I have a co-worker’s bus pass.)
But evenings in winter present the real challenge. Ice or snow and dark and bad eyes are a bad combo. So my winters are spent in hibernation.
And on UNL bus passes. Oddly, if you buy a parking permit, you get a free pass? To encourage you not to park? Seems backwards to me.
StarTran does have a nifty website that tracks, in real-time, the many buses you would have to take to get to where you will indubitably drive, ride, or walk to instead:
http://getonboard.lincoln.ne.gov/
yeah…but every single time I drive by a bus…it is 90-100% empty. Innovative! With the amount of money that is pumped into StarTran on a yearly basis, it would be better to give all the bus drivers a minivan and just say drive wherever people want to go all day. Bus’s running routes empty is not innovative at all, it is a waste of cash and resources. Could even have set times that the smaller vehicles would be in Strategic areas in town to be most effective. heck…we could probably even find some of the riders that could drive that would volunteer to drive parts of the day. There is nothing innovative about the current system in any way…been the same “system” for the last 15-20 years.
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