Everyone keeps talking about letting downtown “grow” into itself. The only reason it’s growing at all is because the city gave investors with capital a reason to invest downtown which brought people to the heart of the city in the first place.

The city invests, by all accounts, frugally into the city infrastructure and 15 years later we have a professional sports team, a thriving economy, Olympic trials, unprecedented tourism, and ever improving private capital flowing into the city to make a buck and improve the quality of life in OKC.

People talking about transit need to lay off the pipe. It’s so popular to talk about mass transit in Oklahoma because people here have no idea how much it costs. Several lines? We’re talking about several billion dollars minimum and billions more to keep it up. There is nothing that this city needs that can’t be taken care of with a beefed up bus system.

The Convention is an interesting concept, and I think when we build a center that we do it right, we pump a solid 600 million into it, but I see that maybe being talked about in 5-10 years.

Core 2 Shore gives us the most immediate impact for our money.

-It further beautifies the city
-We start losing weight because we are now walking and biking to events and locations.
-We break out of our bricktown bubble.
-We encourage new business and further private growth
-We provide a place for Steve Lackmeyer to roll around naked.
-We have a center piece that links our river, to bricktown, to the business district to the new Devon tower.
-People will actually want to live downtown, because there is a reason to.

However, that bridge does not also cross an interstate highway! Our new I-40 is the 800-pound gorilla (“Grand Canyon”). It very effectively lacerates C2S; a couple RR tracks wouldn’t even be noticed (the “12″ tracks would only occur at the station). It is going to be very difficult to prevent the segment of C2S between I-40 & the river from becoming an island. More than one very cool pedestrian bridge will be required.

Two rail lines would be more than adequate. We’re not a city of nine million people. Rail is a tool, not an end in itself, and it’s the least flexible of all our transportation options.

Any tourist wanting to “see the sights and move around OKC” is most likely going to also be staying in a hotel in the area. You don’t do something like that in an afternoon, especially trying to use public transportation to do so. So, they’ll likely be getting off the highway to go to a hotel, and from that hotel, they may want transit to the sights. Downtown, a streetcar serves a “see the sights” function far better than a train. It’s an easier, cheaper, more attractive and more flexible means of transportation around the CBD than light rail.

I think we need to think about what will make Oklahoma City an attractive place in which people will not only want to work and visit, but also to live. A walking city is a healthy city. That’s what we need to emphasize. Our population spends all of its time trying to figure out how to get places without moving their feet, and it’s causing massive health problems. Transit is only a means to an end,and that end should be getting people out of their cars or trains. The Core to Shore plan, IMO, is actually an attempt to do just that: to tie our now attractive river to the CBD. It’s a shame we have to have a highway in the middle of all of that, and I would have preferred the highway south of the river. But, let’s not add to the problem by creating a visually unaesthetic grand canyon of transit. We might need to start talking about a cablecar instead of a pedestrian bridge.

Santa Fe has a couple of elevated tracks, which are already being used by the aforementioned 40 trains a day, and no room to expand. We could build a transit hub from scratch at the mill, but where are we going to find a couple hundred million dollars to do that? It’s not like Oklahoma has shown a lot of eagerness to invest in transit, and it’s extremely wasteful when we already have the infrastructure.

I think the beautiful pedestrian walkway plans, combined with a transit hub that lets people exit right off the highway, leave their cars and get on a train or walk, would do a fantastic job of connecting downtown to the river, the rest of OKC, and all over the state. Maybe it’s not the perfect solution, but compared to the alternatives, there’s just no contest.

If I think about some other transportation hubs around the country/world, Union Station in D.C., maybe South Station in Boston, Kansas City rail yards, stations in London, etc. there is a common theme in that freight and passenger service are not usually completely combined. A freight yard has different needs than a passenger yard and with C2S developing as it is and BNSF already having the yard it needs elsewhere, forcing it into Union Station is an unnecessary waste of track space and potential C2S space. Also, since we are unlikely to get a commuter rail and a streetcar system in the near future it would make sense to have a separate dedicated station for the two elsewhere than Union Station (maybe the Sante Fe Station or a new station not yet built). Union Station is not very close to the heart of downtown and it makes sense to be just a stop in any commuter system, if anything, rather than a central hub.

I like the forward thinking aspect of a commuter/streetcar hub idea, but Union Station does not seem to be the way to go. Other than the nostalgia factor, why would we try to put a square peg in a round hole? Irregardless, lay off the conspiracy juice for a while. Even if you and some others believe it, in the eyes of most people you lose credibility and are relegated to being just “one of those people.”