Forbes: Nashville in dregs of green-commute poll
As if to reinforce the message of Joey Garrison's City Paper piece this week on just how far Nashville has yet to go in developing viable mass transit, Forbes is now out with a chart ranking the top 60 U.S. metro areas by various metrics related to commuting. It is not a proud civic moment for the Music City.
Crunching census data on the percentage of commuters who got to work by carpooling, walking, biking or using public transport in 2008, the magazine ranked Nashville 55th as a "green commuting" city. In an overall ranking that factors in travel time and other data as well as greenness, we come in 49th, just ahead of Chicago and L.A.
Salt Lake City came in first overall. The snarl that is the Tampa-St. Petersburg-Clearwater area came in last, a ranking many acrophobics out there will consider justified purely on the grounds of the big swoopy bridge you have to cross if you want to go south from the airport.
[h/t Freddie O'Connell]
Have you read the latest
Have you read the latest report from Washington State on what going green has cost the Dept. of Transportation in lost revenue? Now they don't know what to tax next so that they can keep up the road infrastructures, etc. It's a circle folks, one idea costs another.
What we could do right now is
What we could do right now is remove uninsured vehicles from the road.
The Forbes story and chart
The Forbes story and chart are about much more than mass transit. Nashville is only three places behind NYC on the chart and only one place behind Washington DC and both of those cities have huge public transportation infrastructures.
Before Nashville invests massive amounts of money into light rail or other mass transit solutions, it should think carefully about the smartest approach.
Salt Lake City, for example, is very highly ranked on the chart and one of its innovations was encouraging car-pooling and raising money for transit infrastructure by creating miles of highway lanes where solo drivers can pay extra to get into the fast lane. Sounds clever to me.
Aaron, it's interesting that
Aaron, it's interesting that you omit any reference to the Utah Transit Authority, who have built two light rail lines, are currently building three more, and have an additional line in the planning stage. Light rail is to connect the airport to SLC to suburbs, including stops at the area's universities and colleges. A quarter-cent sales tax provides dedicated TRAX funding.
Additionally, UTA operates a heavy rail commuter line from SLC to Ogden. They plan to extend it to Provo.
Citing Salt Lake City as an example of how auto-based transportation and highway construction is the answer to our problems is so partial a picture as to be utterly misleading. Much more significant is the commitment of the sprawling SLC area to mass transit, particularly rail right-of-ways.