http://www.desmoinesregister.com/article/20110927/OPINION03/309270029/0/LIFE04/?odyssey=nav%7Chead
New plan would make a truly metro transit system
Des Moines, like a lot of medium-sized Midwest cities, is not heavily dependent on public transportation. The reason for that is a chicken-and-egg question: Is it because people prefer to drive or because bus service here is not reliable?
That question is about to be answered.
Beginning next year, and continuing over the next 20 years, public transit service in the Des Moines area could look radically different. When fully implemented, you could take a bus from one side of town to the other without transferring downtown; you could expect a bus on busy routes every 10 minutes; you could hop on a bus in any community in the metropolitan area; you could transfer between bus routes at a half-dozen points, not just downtown.
In the future, you might see regular bus service between Ames, rapid express routes on bus-only lanes between major population and employment centers, and frequent shuttles circulating in densely populated neighborhoods in Des Moines and the suburbs.
These changes would fulfill the vision of public transit beyond Des Moines to a wider metropolitan region. The Des Moines Area Regional Transit Authority (DART) was created five years ago to achieve that vision, and today it has the support of 19 member cities along with Polk County.
The next step is new or improved service to all those communities. The DART Commission is set to approve a long-range plan tonight to move toward that goal. The commission should move ahead with this historic step. If riders and the communities get on board, it could eventually make metropolitan Des Moines more reliant on public transit and less reliant on automobiles.
The existing bus routes are little changed from the trolley-car era when downtown was the major destination for the vast majority of workers and shoppers. Bus service in Des Moines has since evolved into mostly a commuter service, with downtown the primary hub for transfers, even though people live, work and shop across a sprawling metropolitan region.
Additional service comes with additional cost. DART proposes to pay for the new service by increasing the transit-tax levy that the Legislature authorized Iowa public transit authorities to assess on residential and commercial property. That levy is capped by law at 95 cents per $1,000 of assessed valuation, or roughly $95 a year on a home valued at $200,000.
DART is not taxing at the limit now, and it should go slow in raising its tax rate. A tax increase is inevitable if service is to increase, since DART relies on the property-tax levy for about a third of its operating income. But taxpayers should see measurable improvements in mass transit service in exchange. And, they must see transit as a net plus for the region even if they don’t use it themselves.
The proposed service improvements reflect the need to put buses where people live, where they want to go and the quality of service they expect. DART cannot rely on guesses or wishes, however. It must market the new service aggressively. It must consistently offer reliable service. It must adapt quickly if new routes aren’t working, or to meet changing population and development patterns.
Des Moines will never look exactly like transit-dependent cities like Chicago and New York, but done right it could look a lot more like them than it does today.
http://www.desmoinesregister.com/article/20110927/OPINION03/309270029/0/LIFE04/?odyssey=nav%7Chead