By combining a couple of transportation projects we've already built, and by uniting them with some on the drawing board, we can create an awesome new Southwest Louisville transportation corridor. You may have seen this graphic on the front page of USA Today last week:

How do we satisfy all these people without breaking the bank? Here are the pieces of the puzzle:

• Dixie Highway
• Downtown Multi Modal Station
• Riverwalk / Louisville Loop
• P&L Commuter Rail Line
• TARC #18 Bus
• P&L Commuter Bike Path
• AMTRAK Passenger Rail
• K&I Bike/Ped Bridge to New Albany

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Dixie Highway

This road is the backbone of Southwest Louisville, and it shows the limits to auto-centric design. The highway has been widened to its maximum potential. Additional lane-miles will be very expensive and we have long since hit the point of diminishing returns in terms of throughput per lane. This highway is engineering-complete, there's just too much traffic. Increased level of service will be achieved by giving people other alternatives to driving, thus decongesting the road and speeding the remaining motorists on their way.

Downtown Multi-Modal Station

Located at 7th and River Road, right behind the Muhammad Ali Center, this station is a true multi-modal station, with a commuter rail stop, a hub for TARC express buses, bike parking, showers, a taxi stand, bike rentals, and a bike shop. With the rail connection, the station will get the throughput it needs to succeed. The station is partially paid for using $1.8m of ARRA stimulus funds.

Status: Funding Allocated

Riverwalk / Louisville Loop

Heading from the downtown Multi-modal station, through Shawnee Park, and along the river all the way to Farnsley-Moremen Landing, the Riverwalk provides a breathtaking dedicated bicycle commuting route for workers based to the West of Dixie Highway.

Status: Completed 2008

Photo: Jonathan Guy

P&L Commuter Rail Line

With stops every three or so miles, the P&L commuter rail line, built in cooperation with the P&L Railway, serves upwards of 1000 passengers a day in its first year. Stretching from the Downtown Multi-Modal Station, along Dixie Highway, through Fort Knox, and on to downtown Elizabethtown KY, the commuter railway opens up new job options to huge swaths of the population. With the Federal Railroad Administration rumored to be relaxing restrictions on what sort of passenger trains may share track with commercial freight, the operating cost of this rail line is getting lower and lower. Louisville has a real shot to get the cost-per-mile of this track quite low, since only minor improvements and restoring abandoned passenger stops are needed to get rolling. Commuter rail scales very well indeed. Adding capacity is as simple as getting a spare passenger coach and clicking it on to the back.

Status: Study Funds Pending

TARC #18 Bus

The TARC #18 continues to provide local access along Dixie Highway, as far out as Valley Station. However, with the P&L corridor doing the heavy lifting - each train carrying upwards of 200 passengers - the endemic overcrowding of the #18 is eliminated.

The TARC #50 Express bus is made obsolete by the P&L Commuter Rail Corridor and is discontinued.

Status: Operational

P&L Bike Commuter Path

Paralleling the rail line, and built along the rail Right of Way, is a new multi use path for walkers and (especially) commuter bicyclists. This serves three main purposes:

1. An efficient commuter bike corridor from points east of Dixie Highway to the heart of Downtown.
2. Local transportation foot and bike access, not just for neighbourhood visits, but also to access the train. Suddenly, area kids can safely travel all over the corridor without having to cross a major intersection to get there.
3. Recreational use - of course its not all about transportation.

The path is created in public-private partnership with P&L Railways. The main point is to insulate P&L from any liability arising from people getting run over by trains. Perhaps a fence is installed between the rail and the track. Ironicially, the cost per mile to grade and pave this path is probably equivalent to the cost per mile of the commuter rail system in the first place.

Status: Informally Proposed by Public Works

Amtrack at Louisville Union Station, 2003. Photo Bryan Jones

AMTRAK Service to Indy and Nashville

With the coming investments in commuter rail, its going to increasingly pay to get connected to that network. As recently as 2004 Louisville had AMTRAK service to Indianapolis, but it was slow and unsatisfactory. With the renewed national commitment to passenger rail, we could regain our stop, and push south to Elizabethtown, Nashville, and Chattanooga. That gets us the density we need to play with the big boys.

Status:  "We did it before and we can do it again"

For the first year or two, Louisville's AMTRAK service would be a spur of Indianapolis, and during that time the easiest place to have the station is at the Downtown Multimodal Station, since the train has to turn around anyway. Once service to Nashville comes online, it saves a lot of time to have a "pull-through" station on the main line, and some have suggested that we should look at a train station at 14th and Broadway, with ample parking and good TARC connectivity.

K&I Bike/Ped Bridge

As a precondition to recieve federal assistance on bridge structure and AMTRAK-related track improvements, the L&I railroad allows bike and pedestrian traffic across the K&I bridge, completing the bike path from Valley Station all the way to New Albany.

Status: Stalled

Summary

A multi-modal transportation investment in the corridor gives businesses the assurance they need to invest in the area, sure that their customers have many ways to access them. With these improvements together, we enable a huge number of commuting options that just weren't there before:

• A fifteen year old can hop on his bike and get anywhere he needs to without crossing Dixie Highway.
• A G.I. based in Fort Knox can go visit her family in Chicago over the weekend without ever getting into a car.
• A business commuter from E-town to Louisville can squeeze out an extra 90 minutes of productivity a day by using WiFi on board the commuter rail.
• Residents of the corridor can stop spending the majority of their household income on transportation, and begin to reinvest the difference in their housing and businesses.

Southwest Louisville suddenly is a complete multi-modal corridor, spurring investment. Whether our economic future is sunny or gloomy, the corridor stands to benefit from choice. With a gloomy outlook, people will be hard pressed to afford to drive. In many cases transportation (automobile) spending is starting to overcome housing spending as the #1 family expense. With a sunny outlook and huge growth, we may one day outgrow Standiford Field, in which case the rail connection would allow a new airport to be built on the relatively cheap land in Hardin and Meade Counties. No matter how you slice it, this corridor idea is extremely robust to changing conditions. That robustness comes from giving people choices.