Can Common Sense, and maybe Mickey, Save Orlando’s Transit Mess?

The week’s debate about high-speed rail has once again polarized our populace, inflamed irrationality, and sent everyone back to their familiar corners.  Little constructive debate is possible when major newspapers are flailing the governor for rejecting money and the seemingly global revolutionary fervor is gripping local citizens who rallied in protest Wednesday night around downtown Orlando’s Lake Eola.  None of this will do any good for the service workers trying to get to their jobs in the theme parks or for downtown cube dwellers streaming to scattered office parks. With or without light rail the city inches closer and closer to the traffic hell of Atlanta, or worse even, DC. After all, both cities already have large rail transit systems.

What will do some good is a creative discussion of some real change that can occur to improve our commute.

We must recognize that we are stuck with our cars.  They aren’t going away.  We can’t wish them away. We have to make them better fast, because with changes blowin’ in the wind and with oil jumping back up over $100 a barrel.

The high-speed bullet train – a sort of latter-day interstate highway program – sounded like a great idea at first, a welcome alternative to the ardor of air travel and the gas-sucking monotony of driving.  It has shortcomings, however, it will likely prove obscenely expensive, and once one gets to the destination, one is typically relegated to more driving.

Nor is this some form of effective industrial policy.  The things will be built overseas – Germany, Japan or most likely China –  a great jobs program for someone else.  And tourists, who vastly prefer the freedom of car rental and driving, aren’t likely to use it except as a novelty for one of their visits to our wonderful place.  Perhaps the bitterest part of the bullet train pill: it will indebt our children and grandchildren to pay off landowners giving up their land in eminent domain – which produces nothing – and the cost of complex machines made overseas. The bullet train ends up being a clumsy solution imposed from above, rather than a grassroots solution to our real problems. 

Any frequent driver on Interstate 4 between Orlando and Tampa can tell you there are four basic kinds of traffic: tourists in buses or cars; freight, in the form of tractor-trailers: business travelers (who need the flexibility of a car on the other end): and personal travelers.  Instead of targeting an expensive solution at just the smallest form of traffic, personal travel, a 4-part solution is suggested, all of which would add up to far less than $2 billion that minimally the high-speed line would have cost.

And now, for the big one.  Right smack in the middle of the white-hot I-4 corridor lays a large, private entity, Disney, has been operating a private, train-based mass transit system for the last 40 years.  High labor costs?  Yes.  Fossil fuel driven?  Yes.  This entity has been strangely silent over the entire debate.

If this entity were to wake up and seize the opportunity before it, one might see a true train that works.  First of all, the monorail was planned with some sense: it connects dense areas together.   If Disney were to offer to build, as a private development, extensions of its monorail reaching out to Tampa on one side and Orlando on the other, the air rights for this system could be along government-owned I-4 (no imminent domain costs).  This entity is also highly encouraged to charge market rate and to make a profitable venture out of operating this system. And the taxpayers would not be stuck with the bill.

A vision for transit between Tampa and Orlando needs to be truly holistic, taking into account all types of traffic connecting the two regions.  This vision also needs to be locally driven, taking advantage of local strengths and assets already in place.  The high speed bullet train does none of this.  Instead, a multi-faceted solution that provides flexibility at both ends, leverages our current strengths, and partners with the strongest player in the region has a chance of truly making a difference in the present tense and likely future budget climate  This is what sustainability is truly about, and is what our future generations deserve.

Richard Reep is an Architect and artist living in Winter Park, Florida. His practice has centered around hospitality-driven mixed use, and has contributed in various capacities to urban mixed-use projects, both nationally and internationally, for the last 25 years.

Photo by Joe Penniston