If you would like to discuss this Initiative in greater detail or comment on the Principles, please attend the upcoming Vital Communities public meeting to be held on Thursday, April 11th at 7pm in the Beverly Livesay Conference Room (in the Tompkins County Human Services Building, 320 West State Street).  Or contact the Tompkins County Planning Department by regular mail (121 E. Court St., Ithaca, NY), telephone [(607) 274-5560], email (E-mail us) or the Internet (www.tompkins-co.org/planning/vci/).

This column addresses Principle 7, “Promote a multi-modal transportation system that supports economic health and community vitality,” and is written by Fernando de Aragon, Director of the Ithaca-Tompkins County Transportation Council.

Issues related to transportation make the news daily. On any given day you can read in the Ithaca Journal about concerns such as traffic calming, truck traffic, increased traffic from proposed land uses, and traffic on residential streets. Today, I’m sure you can find an article that has a transportation perspective somewhere in this newspaper.

We are an extremely mobile society; we depend on our transportation system every single day to get to the places we need to go, to accomplish the many chores of our too-busy lives. It is imperative that the transportation system in Tompkins County offers safe, efficient and convenient transportation choices to our residents, visitors and businesses.

Already we make a tremendous investment in maintaining our current transportation system, i.e., bridge and road maintenance and transit expenditures. According to the State Comptrollers Office the average annual expenditures of local funds for bridge and roadway operation and maintenance and capital projects is approximately $25 million per county in New York State. Annual expenditure estimates in the Ithaca-Tompkins County Transportation Council’s Long Range Plan include another $4 million in local funding for transit expenditures, which is matched with $7 million from the State and $8 million from the Federal government.  All told, approximately $44 million is spent on all aspects of transportation in Tompkins County per year. Over the 20-year horizon of the Long Range Plan, the estimate for transportation expenditures for Tompkins County hovers around the $880 million mark. 

This is an amazing amount of money and resources for one of the smallest urbanized counties in the nation. It is indicative of the importance we place on the transportation system for personal use, economic development and emergency uses. 

But even with this level of investment it is easy to see the limits of our current transportation infrastructure. Like most places in our country, Tompkins County depends mostly on private vehicles and trucks for the movement of goods and people. Overall, our roadways continue to operate fairly well. However, traffic congestion is clearly a problem at different times in different places, while transportation-related impacts to our quality of life are the topic great public interest and numerous public meetings.

We are fortunate to have what is widely recognized as the best transit system in upstate New York. However, that too has its limitations in the provision of services, mostly stemming from economic considerations, not a lack of interest in providing service to all who desire and need it.

The other “alternative modes” of transportation, namely bicycling and walking, need to be considered more seriously in the plans for the provision of an interconnected multimodal system. The ITCTC Long Range Plan includes data showing that, even with the proportionally little attention paid to them in the past, bicycling and walking account for 10% of the work trips in Tompkins County. (This is compared to an average of 6.5% in New York State and a national average of 2.7%.)  When combined with transit that number is even higher. That translates into fewer cars on the road and less congestion.

One of the most critical factors affecting trip patterns has little to do with the transportation system and everything to do with land use. The land use/transportation interrelationship has received much attention and is the subject of numerous studies and books. At the heart of the debate is the question - Does transportation lead and influence land use development or does land use development lead the expansion of the transportation network?  I believe you can easily find examples on both sides of the question to make your arguments. However, I have reached the conclusion that land use should be leading the provision of transportation. 

Principle 7 of the Tompkins County draft Development and Preservation Principles addresses transportation issues and encourages the use of alternative modes of transportation and promotes concentrated development patterns and reduced automobile usage.  We need to have a countywide vision of how we want to develop so we can strive to achieve it. With widely accepted land use Development and Preservation Principles in place, we can all focus our work on achieving a common goal.