City transportation plan needs to cover more than cars

All politics are local.  Thank heavens, since Anchorage is still a great place to raise children, with excellent schools and strong neighborhoods. We love our clear skies, wooded spaces and small-town culture.

And changes are afoot — positive changes that look out 50 years with fresh eyes.  How can we motivate our children to live here as they grow up and start their own families? How can we stem our out-migration and attract more young millennials?

For years, the joke has been that "Los Anchorage" is just on the edge of the "real Alaska." And there's some truth in that. Part of our challenge is that many "real Alaskans" prefer a more rural lifestyle, but then must commute to work every day. Unfortunately, those commutes are expensive, and the public has had to pay for widening freeways and cleaving historic downtown neighborhoods to make way for high speed traffic.  Those who live in town also pay in excess noise, unhealthy pollution and unsafe conditions.

Fairview still suffers from the 50-year-old, high speed Gambell-Ingra couplet that stalls new residential and commercial development. Downtown, speeding traffic makes it unpleasant to stop for a chat along the busy streets. Surface parking lots eat up prime real estate, and public money pays for those parking garages at a cost of over $40,000 per parking stall.

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South Addition residents report that high speed traffic and noise are among the greatest challenges to living there. While many walk and bike to work, school and beyond, it's neither comfortable nor safe for most people to use nearby buses. Traffic is too fast and bus service is too infrequent.

We can do better, and change is on its way.

We are close to adopting Anchorage's Land Use Plan with a goal to make Anchorage a better place to "live, work and play."  It seeks to build our city so urban dwellers can choose to live without a car, by building more homes close to work, shopping and entertainment. The Land Use Plan has the potential to pave the way for real transportation choices.

In addition, People Mover is advancing a bold move to provide 15-minute service within the urban core, providing for the first time, bus service where you can walk over to the next major street and catch a bus in the other direction, as you can in San Francisco, or Vancouver, B.C.  With more frequent service, commuters will have new, real options in mobility if they choose not to drive.

Unfortunately, not all of our planning is so forward leaning: Anchorage is rewriting its 20 year Metropolitan Transportation Plan, and the primary goal is still to move more cars with less delay. For the first time, there is one element that investigates integration of land use and transportation, but the bulk of the work in the metropolitan plan will concentrate on clearing bottlenecks even if that works against other community values.

The Metropolitan Transportation Plan still relies on yesterday's thinking. Over the next two years we will spend $800,000 deciding where to spend hundreds of millions of dollars, and sadly, most will go to roads.

This is frustrating. As other cities and states consider broad community values such as climate protection and adequate housing, our transportation spending is still focused on increasing vehicle throughput. That's important because transportation plans still come with relatively big budgets, even in these times, and Anchorage should be a leader, not lagging behind.

We have at least two tools we need to use:

• Federal law requires us to apply "performance standards" as we spend their transportation dollars, and Anchorage can take advantage of that requirement.

• State law requires us to conduct a "cost-effectiveness analysis" before major projects go into the state's transportation plan. State officials have offered no evidence of compliance with their own law.

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Forward-thinking and frugal transportation planners such as those in the Bay Area have added economic growth, environment, social equity and public health to their federally required "performance standards." Then they use these expanded goals to conduct "cost-effectiveness" analyses that save them from spending millions and billions of tax dollars on doubtful projects. We can do that too.

In a nutshell, it is time for Anchorage to grow beyond our usual thinking of focusing mostly on roadway bottlenecks and work toward improving mobility and the quality of life for all neighborhoods and family members, young and old.  Integrating essential community values into transportation plans will save us scarce public dollars and truly make Anchorage a better place to "live, work and play" over the next 50 years.

Cheryl Richardson is director of the Anchorage Citizens Coalition, dedicated to making Anchorage the most livable city in America.

The views expressed here are the writer's and are not necessarily endorsed by Alaska Dispatch News, which welcomes a broad range of viewpoints. To submit a piece for consideration, email commentary@alaskadispatch.com. Send submissions shorter than 200 words to letters@alaskadispatch.com.