Highlights from yesterday

I sat next to David Canada, the City Manager of Petersburg, Virginia, on the tour of the Penn Avenue Arts Initiative. It's incredible that a city manager attends the National Trust conference. He said that he doesn't go to the ICMA conference, and he attends other related conferences in order to get a wider perspective than he might normally get at a public administration conference. Because Petersburg is defined by its historic building stock, he says preservation is important to the city, and that's why (plus personal interest) he's here.

He's also on Governor Kaine's Urban Policy Task Force, which sounds pretty interesting too. (See "Governor Kaine Announces Creation of Urban Policy Task Force– Panel to design comprehensive strategy.")

Mr. Canada mentioned transit and transportation specifically the need for Virginia's cities to develop more transit.

And talking with him made me realize that we need to expand the idea for a regional railroad passenger system to include Petersburg. He also discussed the various regional high-speed rail plans from Richmond south to Charlotte, North Carolina, and to Virginia Beach. Current plans prioritize speeding up the trip from DC to Richmond faster.

A couple Virginia resources on rail are:
Virginia Assn. of Railway Patrons
Virginia Dept. of Rail & Pub. Transportation
Virginians for High Speed Rail

Speaking of higher-speed rail, USA Today has a piece about this today, "High-speed rail service derailed." From the article:

•The Southeast corridor, created in 1992, is supposed to bring high-speed passenger rail to Atlanta, Jacksonville, Raleigh, N.C., Washington and other cities.

"The problem is there's no federal money, other than some planning dollars," North Carolina transportation planner David Foster says. It will cost $5.5 million per mile — or $2.5 billion — just to upgrade the 450-mile Charlotte-to-Washington line, he says. ...

High-speed rail service in the USA is going nowhere because it doesn't make economic sense, says William Garrison, co-author of the book Tomorrow's Transportation and a professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. "What passenger rail lacks isn't money. It's riders," he says. "These high-speed rail proposals are big boondoggles. We're reluctant to subsidize high-speed rail for good reason: There's not a market for it."

John Spychalski, a transportation expert and professor at Penn State, says the problem is lack of political will. "People didn't bat an eyelash when we decided to build the interstate system in 1956." He says high-speed passenger rail has technical, as well as financial problems. Railroad tracks in the USA are almost all privately owned by freight companies that run slower, heavier trains. "They aren't too keen on operating a 125-mph passenger train when they're running heavy freight trains at 30 to 70 mph," Spychalski says.

2. The Penn Avenue Arts Initiative is really impressive, and was one of the best organized tours I've ever attended at a conference. They packed in the itinerary, explained the meta-principles of what they're doing, how they leveraged city-owned properties into arts-based properties--now including the dance company Dance Alloy and the Pittsburgh Glass Center.

The owner of Clay Penn bought her building for $15,000 and the adjacent lot for $1!

3. Last night I went on a private tour (so I missed the awards presentation and big reception afterwards) of East Carson Street with some colleagues from Cincinnati. It was led by the President of the South Side Local Development Corporation, Toni Gorenc. (I learned about the capacity of my camera battery too--about 200 photos--so again, I don't have photos there. Worse, I killed all the photos from yesterday accidentally. Life goes on.) This is one of the most successful urban Main Streets in the U.S.

There are vacancies, there is business turnover, and the business mix does skew to restaurants and taverns. One of the "problems" is the construction of the South Side Works development at the far western end, which has added as much retail space to the district as was extant before. It's a typical lifestyle center, in fact, I was reminded of "Silver Sprung." The central courtyard is just like the movie area in the development in there. Same kinds of stores etc. It's the typical question of authenticity vs. chain-based commerce. I could have been in Silver Spring, Maryland or Easton Town Center in Columbus, Ohio, except that the movie theater said "South Side Works" and not Easton...

Index Keywords: urban-revitalization