The two-day event in Kalamazoo, Michigan opened with a presentation by Jason Hellendrung, ASLA, Senior Associate Sasaki Associates, Inc., on the planning and design of Cleveland's Euclid Avenue corridor and Rapid Transit Bus system. (An executive summary is attached.) It culminated in a roundtable discussion moderated by Jeff Caster, ASLA, State Transportation Landscape Architect with the Florida Department of Transportation.

Caster began the discussion with a historic overview and some sobering facts: highways are the largest built structures on the planet; US Interstate 90 occupies just a few acres less than the state of Rhode Island; and roughly 61,000 square miles of the nation is paved. And he issued a stirring call to action. "It’s amazing to me that we can make such a difference in a place with the transportation work we do. We have an opportunity to change millions and millions of people’s lives by making transportation systems serve society as fully as possible." Prepared questions focused on the relationship of transportation development to hot-button issues including urban revitalization, economic development and environmental sustainability. But discussion started, and frequently returned, to the cultural issue that participants agreed profoundly affects all others: America’s obsession with the auto.

“What if your population is so in love with their cars, and local government is so fixed on cars, that the transit authority has a rule that no bus rider should have to walk more than 30 feet to get from the station to the platform?” Joy Kuebler, ASLA asked. “In Buffalo we talk and talk about why we need to get out of the car and why we need to have skinnier streets but we can’t get the local administration to understand that’s the direction we should all be going in.” Her frustration was echoed by others in the room. What’s at stake? Participants cited public health: an epidemic of obesity related to lack of exercise, and an explosion of asthma and other pulmonary diseases exacerbated by poor air quality. Disappearing green space: undeveloped land swallowed up by 10-lane highways and suburban sprawl. Dissected communities: corridors that divide rather than connect. And stultifying class distinctions: user stratification that places the private car on top and the public bus at the bottom of the heap.

Design professionals are clear — they don’t expect cars to go away anytime soon. But they do want to implement a better balance, especially in urban areas, between transit, pedestrians and cars. Their goal, as one participant put it, is to “tame the beast.” Daryl Harden. ASLA, of the Michigan State DOT confirmed some progress in that direction. “I see a push to get our transportation system away from the motor vehicle as much as we can. To make our communities more walkable, create more green space and minimize the impact of transportation without minimizing its effectiveness. We look at things like converting four-lane roads to three lanes and creating more opportunities for pedestrian access. The pressure is there to make the pavement a much lower percentage than it has traditionally been.” Trevor McIntyre, Director of Architecture for IBI Group in Toronto explained, “In planning new-urbanist type communities as much as 50 percent of the land may be used for parks and streets. Typically the park percentage is much lower than that for streets, but there are new grid patterns that try to balance that by making the roads narrower and replacing some of them with open space.

There was unanimity on the need for wider acceptance and increased use of mass transit. Daryl Harden underlined the critical role of efficient public transportation in enabling lowincome workers in his state to secure jobs. Ernie Wong, ASLA, Principal Site Design Group, Ltd. in Chicago, noted its importance in enabling seniors to remain mobile and engaged. He cited as an example his own mother who moved from a sun-belt retirement community, where she was dependent on the car, to an urban area where she happily uses public transportation. Trevor McIntyre talked about the value of mass transit to students. “We worked on a master plan for a 55,000 person university and managed to get transit users up to almost 80 percent,” he explained. “Students use bus transit not because they love it, but because they can’t afford cars, parking or gas. The key is to treat it not as an independent system, but as a part of planning in which buses arrive in the heart of the campus where services and amenities are located.” In some places abandoned public transit arteries are being resurrected or re-purposed. Diane Burnette, director of a Kansas City, Missouri community development nonprofit and administrator of a community improvement district reported that voters in her city passed an initiative to fund light rail to replace an abandoned cable car system.

Participants agreed that education and marketing are key to raising the profile of mass transit and increasing ridership. “You keep starting from ground zero,” said Connie Krisak, ASLA of Martinez Wright & Mendez in Austin. “We got people in Dallas to use mass transit and it was a huge success. But we had to have the same argument again in Houston which now has seven and a half miles of rail carrying 40,000 people a day. And when we go to Austin, it’s the same thing all over again. People refuse to think that it can work for them until it’s there. There’s a stigma about bus and rail. The transit itself is just a part of the solution. You have to educate.”

What will it take to get a critical mass weaned from their dependence on the car? Some suggested gas prices of five to ten dollars a gallon might do the trick. Ernie Wong wasn’t so sure. “The car continues to be a status symbol. Until we get to a point where we’re looking at mass transit and other transportation as status symbols, it’s not going to change.”

Everyone agreed that getting people out of their cars and onto public transportation is a great idea, but design professionals insist that transportation systems need to be an integral part of the larger whole if they are to succeed. Michael Stern, ASLA, of Strada LLC in Pittsburgh summed up the challenge. “As long as we think of transportation systems as corridors instead of networks that interconnect things and have overlapping uses among pedestrians and cars and public transit – until it’s an integrated system that brings all those things together – it’s not really addressing the problem.” Jason Hellendrung added, “We should all be hammering on our clients to understand that the corridor doesn’t stop at the property line. You should be looking at the magic 1200 feet, the 10-minute walk from the station.” And that land, he explained, should have housing, restaurants, convenience stores and street furniture. He pointed to new models coming out of Europe for mixed income, mixed race, mixed use, walkable communities woven together by public transportation.

Sam Lovall, ASLA of Hamilton Anderson Associates advocated for greenways as part of a holistic approach. “Getting people out walking and riding their bikes helps solve some of the health problems we’re seeing,” he said. “But another problem in urban areas is the dissection of neighborhoods by interstates. Greenways help to reconnect the fabric of neighborhoods. People passing each other on a trail are more likely to talk to each other than people sitting next to each other on mass transit. I don’t know what the phenomenon is, but it seems to be an attribute of the greenway system.”

Jason Hellendrung put the question succinctly: “How can you get funding for public transportation from wealthy people who are paying taxes and are wedded to cars when the perception is they’re funding a system for people who are old or handicapped, often poor and minorities? Outside of major urban areas like Boston and New York, how do you get the “beautiful people” to use public transit and to pay for it?” Not surprisingly, no one had a ready answer. In fact, participants explained, the issue is still more complex. Even when there is funding for transit, the funding for mixed use planning around transit that weaves communities together and makes transit systems work for people isn’t there yet.

Dave Ostrich, ASLA of WRT LLC in Philadelphia defined the funding dilemma. “The client may be the city, but ultimately we’re working for three major groups: DOTs, the Corps of Engineers and the National Park Service, because those are the groups that administer federal funds coming down. I don’t know of any states or cities that have extra money. They are barely making ends meet and under DOT funding we can do the transit part but not the streetscapes and amenities and we can’t do urban planning with ISTEA money.” He advocated for broadening the public funding model for transportation systems beyond the highways, roads or bridges to encompass the contexts they serve.

There are some new economic approaches out there. Ernie Wong reported that Chicago has leased a portion of I-90 to a private enterprise and is projected to profit substantially through the deal. And the city has collaborated on a bus shelter program with a company in France that has set up all the bus shelters in the city of Chicago free of charge in return for advertising. “They’re using the buses as rolling billboards. So it’s an amenity to the city that is basically free of charge to the taxpayers,” he explained.

Paul Saito, ASLA, Principal, Saito Associates Landscape Architecture, noted the importance of creating attractive investment opportunities for major initiatives, such as the Fresno Area Sky Train, a monorail system for the Fresno-Clovis metropolitan area in which his firm is involved. The ambitious project, whose goals include limiting urban sprawl, protecting the environment, and strengthening neighborhood unity, will be built through a public/private partnership. FAST, which is a corporation formed with local individuals and partners from Japan, will operate the Megalev System, while the City of Fresno will provide the right of way and operate the connecting Electric Shuttle Bus System. FAST common stock will be issued on the open market and the public will be invited to participate.

Many successful transportation projects bring together public and private funding partners. Public investment can leverage significant private resources. Sasaki estimates that a public investment of under $200 million in Cleveland’s Euclid Avenue has helped harness about $3 billion worth of investment in an urban corridor formerly lined with vacant stores and abandoned lots. Chicago’s Millennium Park started as a $140 million transportation project because it was being built as a cap over a railroad, but attracted more than $275 million in private funding to create and maintain the exceptional park that resulted from the process.

Private developers are sometimes the primary source of funding. Richard Alomar, ASLA of di Domenico + Partners in New York City explained the catch-22 of developer partnerships. “It’s great to work with developers, especially if you can write the guidelines,” he said. “But the downside is, once you have a developer in place, you have a billion-dollar monster on your back. They feel that since they are putting up the money they should call the shots. Oftentimes we find great partnerships in working with just community boards and commercial alliances because eventually it’s about the people who are using what you design.” These partnerships can be key to achieving buy-in from the local community and developing projects in a way that will really benefit the constituencies they are meant to serve. And there are non-funding partners that can make the difference in the quality of projects. “We often work with public agencies and departments with standards programs,” Alomar continued. “And when you design with standards you get standard designs. We’ve gotten around that by collaborating with artists in the Percent for Art program and, in the case of NYC Transit, the Arts for Transit program, where you can actually design creative seating, pavers and lighting for a project.”

Participants questioned the definition of sustainability. The answers ranged from “do no harm” to specific strategies for mitigating environmental impacts: promoting car pool parking and other hubs; building rain gardens, storm water retention systems and permeable pavements; improving the quality of natural systems, such as streams, on site; and providing increased vegetation and shading. Joy Kuebler lamented: “So often at the end of a project those elements of sustainability like permeable pavers and rain gardens are slashed because the project is over budget. So our up-front efforts to add on the sustainability pieces that we know to be successful are hacked and burned. How do we get around that?”

Michael Stern answered that landscape architects must get smarter about how they address infrastructure and how they work with engineers from the beginning of a project so that those things aren’t add-ons but are part of the whole infrastructure system that supports the project. “We have to find cost-effective ways to make that happen,” he said. “You can tell everybody that a rain garden is better for the earth and will make you sleep better at night, but it’s a stronger argument to say we’re going to reduce the amount of pipe that we need in this project by 50% by using that solution.” And Stern argued for a broader understanding of how we achieve sustainability. “A lot of what we’re been talking about – mixed use development, integrated transportation systems, reducing energy costs – is directly related to both environmental and economic sustainability,” he observed. “I’ve always felt that urban redevelopment projects are inherently sustainable because they reduce all these other costs. Whether a project is green in its technology or not, its function and result ought to reduce environmental impacts, which would contribute to sustainability.”

Trevor McIntyre pointed out that LEED points can be earned for projects located in close proximity to transit systems and in that respect, sustainability is a by-product of transit planning. Additional points for specific sustainable solutions, like green roofs or solar power, wind energy or recycling gray water, may then be added. “If you can tell the public they are getting something green, it’s a win-win. Those things really help to make a project go ahead.”

Costs aren’t the only thing standing in the way of implementing sustainable practices. The overlap of natural and built systems across multiple jurisdictions can also present obstacles. Tetsuya Yamamoto, Senior Landscape Architect with HNTB Corporation in Washington, D.C. who has worked in the Chesapeake Bay watershed area remarked on the difficulty of establishing collaboration between the municipalities and the state government.” One small project cannot always make a difference,” he said. “But if you can get several together, they can have a big impact on the environment. At the same time, it’s not always so easy because each jurisdiction has its own agenda and slightly different codes and permit requirements.”

Kevin Walls, Principal Architect, Atlanta Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport, said ditto to the above, explaining that the Atlanta airport lies within three different counties, four different cities and is accountable to the FAA, TSA, Customs and Border Protection. “There are a lot of different local and federal groups to deal with,” he reported. “So although some of us are pushing sustainability, the policies are sometimes difficult to get through.” At time sustainable results can be achieved through a less direct approach. “We’re doing things like a consolidated rental car center with rail out to it, rather than ten different rental car agency buses driving into the airport. The impetus was keeping the buses off the curb, not sustainability, but we’re gaining it and I don’t care how we manage it as long as we get there.”

Paul Saito reported on his firm’s goal to attract sustainable partners for the Fresno Area Megalev System across various governmental jurisdictions. They will try to convince the City and County of Fresno, along with other cities within the county and regional school districts, to become partners. “And we will also try to convince the National Park Service to become partners in extending the Megalev System up to Yosemite National Park, which is now being overrun by cars, with more than three million annual visitors,” he said.

Willson McBurney, a landscape architect with PBS&J, voiced what we have come to recognize as the plaintive call of the L.A. “Every time landscape architects discuss sustainable solutions among a sea of engineers, we ask the question, why didn’t you let us help you in the beginning? We can always think about these impacts to our environment back in the planning process, like we’re trained to do, rather than cleaning it up on the back end once the impact’s been made. It comes down to communication during the design process.”