Tomorrow’s US general election is a massive turning point in history, but on the same day, many cities are also making big decisions around transit and urbanism. Here’s a rundown of all the main measures on the ballot across the country. Meanwhile, I’d like to highlight one that I find especially interesting: the “Choose How You Move” proposal in Nashville. It’s a smart combination of measures, including bus infrastructure, bus service, pedestrian infrastructure, and traffic signals, while the key word “choose” emphasizes that the point is to expand the freedom of people in the Nashville region.
In September I had the chance to spend a few days in Nashville, at the invitation of a group of civic leaders called Cumberland Region Tomorrow. I did a keynote at their event and also had a chance to meet with staff at the transit agency, WeGo.
Like many sunbelt cities, Nashville has been growing in a car-dependent way for decades, but meanwhile, it has evolved a dense core that is just too dense for everyone to drive. The city has three main functions concentrated downtown: State government, the usual mix of business office towers, and the country music industry’s main tourist attractions.
Just outside of downtown is Music Row, where the country music record labels have their offices, and Vanderbilt University with its large medical center. This density is typical:
This is enough dense development to generate a lot of need for alternatives to private car travel, but the street network lags behind that demand. Many main streets are state highways, managed for vehicle flow at the expense of nonmotorized human flourishing. Many lower-income people live on or near these highways, which are often unsafe for pedestrians, lacking both adequate sidewalks and a reasonable spacing of safe places to cross. Prevailing driving styles are aggressive even by US standards.
The transit network is far better than I’d been led to expect. The buses are modern, and there is a downtown transit center that should be the envy of many nearby cities.
But its main issue is quantity — there just isn’t much service — and the tendency of buses to get stuck in traffic.
Nashville’s last transit adventure at the ballot box was in 2018, where a proposed ballot measure failed with 64% voting no. TransitCenter reviewed the advocacy lessons here, but fundamentally, this was a plan for major light rail investment, including a tunnel under downtown, as well as a few Bus Rapid Transit lines. That made it very expensive and at the same time very specialized. The concentrated investment in a few corridors would leave much of the city feeling left out — a routine problem with infrastructure-heavy transit plans. The plan was also all about transit, and didn’t connect the dots to how many Nashvilleans experienced their transportation problems, for example as traffic congestion or the danger to pedestrians.
The new measure is much more balanced. It includes operating funds for expanded transit, infrastructure for bus priority, but it also includes sidewalks and traffic signals. That means more money will go to making high-speed streets safer. That’s all good for transit — in fact, it’s essential for a great transit experience — but it also has a large constituency of people who don’t necessarily care about transit all that much. While I wish the website provided more technical detail to those who are interested, it does a good job of connecting the plan to issues that matter to people, including housing and even loneliness.
I’ll be rooting for transit measures all over the US tomorrow, but this one will be especially instructive, because if it succeeds, it could be a good model for the next generation of measures in car-oriented cities.
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