(The Knoxville News-Sentinel posted the following story by Don Jacobs on its website on October 9.)
KNOXVILLE, Tenn. — There are too many people driving too many vehicles on roads too congested to navigate, so it’s time to usher in the age of mass transit.
That’s the message delivered Wednesday by Ben Smith, director of the Tennessee Department of Transportation’s Public Transit, Rail and Waterways Division. Smith addressed 75 people gathered in the main assembly room of the City County Building for the last of 10 public meetings conducted across the state on TDOT’s “Transit for Tennessee 2025” plan.
“We’re simply not going to be able to continue building highway lanes to accommodate the motoring public, so we have to start now laying the foundation for a mass transit system,” Smith said.
With the state’s population expected to grow by 25 percent by 2025, and the number of residents over 65 projected to jump from 12 percent to 25 percent of the population, mass transit is no longer a pipedream but is emerging as a necessity, transit officials said.
About 30 million people used public transportation provided by 26 agencies across the state last year, Smith said. About half of that ridership occurred in Memphis, which has a rich tradition of rail cars, Smith said.
In the past, he said, the state funneled federal funding to local agencies for mass transit projects, such as the Knoxville Area Transit. That has been effective, Smith said, in that Tennessee “is one of five or six states that have some form of public transit in every county.”
But with the 2025 plan, TDOT for the first time is trying to develop an overarching mass transit plan involving rail, buses and aviation, Smith said. He expects a final report to be completed in the next 20 months.
A main component of the 2025 plan should be the rail system proposed from Memphis to Bristol.
Smith said the rail line could remove 350,000 tractor-trailer rigs from the interstate each year. Seventy percent of the trucks on Tennessee interstates are just passing through and aren’t delivering in the state, he said.
Knoxville City Councilman Joe Hultquist, who attended the meeting, said he hopes to see a rail system for East Tennessee “with that being fed by the bus system.”
Anyone interested in commenting on the future of mass transit in Tennessee can write to Jon Downing, Parsons Brinckerhoff, 1900 Church St., Nashville, TN 37203 or e-mail to tn.transit25@state.tn.us. Parsons Brinckerhoff is one of two private contractors TDOT is paying about $1 million to compile the 2025 plan, Smith said.