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8.18.2003
Artificial Population Density The key to the survival for any business is to have customers. But what if your customers are spread out across a large area and therefore see frequenting your store as cumbersome? Obviously most businesses look for ways to reduce the barriers that people need to overcome to visit their establishments. This fuels the massive overbuilding of certain areas of cities as each business looks for ways to be in a location where people are already shopping. This raises the likelihood that customers will visit your store even if they are not specifically making the trip to do so. This can lead to certain negative effects especially if those customers are visiting that area by car. Congestion can actually serve as a deterrent to potential customers. Additionally, space has to be set aside to accommodate the parked cars. Connecting important or highly trafficked areas of a city with an easily accessible and reliable means of transportation effectively extends the range of each customer. If this is done in the way that would actually decrease the amount of automobile congestion then it would in effect lower two barriers at once. By only connecting critical areas you bypass the cost and hassle of creating a comprehensive city-wide transportation network. Once a person visits one of the hubs of the network they have quick and easy access to all points along that network including a way back to their original destination and more importantly, their car. In addition to connecting places such as key attraction, airports and major shopping areas you also create a means to access other cities as well by tying the city-wide network into a larger city to city one. The willingness of people to visit locations is dependent on the price, time and ease by which they can do so. People will travel longer distances if the price, difficulty and time are reduced, traversing vast distances if the destination becomes desirable enough. A rational plan for Tulsa would be to build this network along lines of utility. Locate the areas where people are already frequenting and tie those together. This has already been done for the highways system but with the major flaw of moving people and cars. By moving cars with people you multiply the area that each transporting person occupies, thus creating greater congestion and more parking than necessary. While cars are still the best ways for individuals to get from one specific location to another specific location what we are looking at here is a very conscious movement of masses of people along more prescribed routes. Take for example, a visitor from Kansas City. If that visitor has the ability to visit Tulsa and each of its major attractions without actually having to know or navigate the city then they will see the actual trip to Tulsa as more desirable. More importantly consider a visitor from one of the numerous smaller metropolitan areas that wishes to visit a specific store in Tulsa. If once they arrive at that store they have an easy way to access other places within the city without the extra hassle of navigating the roads with their own vehicles do you think they will see it as an opportunity to spend more time and money in the city? You bet. If the shopping, dinner and entertainment can be had with little more than a few rides around town on a cheap, fast form of transport then why not? In my imagination this transport takes the form of a train of some sort. But I don't rule out any better alternative that someone else might be able to dream up, but it must be able to travel outside of the normal traffic flows or else it will be subject to the same speeds and congestion as cars already face. It can utilize many of the same right of ways that have already been established by the highways and it will have the extra advantage of not interfering with existing traffic flows by either traveling above, below or between automobile traffic. The system, or network would be expandable and would offer the most benefits as it reaches wider and wider audiences in and outside of the city and state. The first critical step would be to tie Tulsa and Oklahoma City together and then to tie each of those locations to other cities to the north and south, with the most obvious choices being Kansas City to the north and Dallas/Fort Worth to the south. Promoters planning an event could then extend the reach of their potential audience to those cities and as long as access to the venue would require little more than a few trips on a fast and air conditioned train then you can count on people being willing to attend that event from other cities. Its no fun driving five hours either north or south to attend an event only to have to drive that distance back after the event has ended. It would be much more pleasurable if you knew that the return trip home might mean taking a nap or reading a book, watching a movie or visiting with friends. With the heightened fears of flying and the questionable long term viability of some airlines it might be time to look for better alternatives for at least the short distance traveler. This from the Kansan Online, August 18, 2003. The proposed route to connect Oklahoma City with Kansas City would pass through Tulsa and eastern Kansas, where most of the members of the rail task force live, Herbert said. My personal opinion is that the sooner that we get connected to a larger netwrok of people the better off we will be, and I would say this is a higher priority than building new projects. Improving the ways and means that people can move from place to place will always drive economic activity. PDF of Amtrak service to the nation A quick look over the rail service that Amtrak offers and you will notice a fairly obvious gap between Oklahoma City and Tulsa and a green line between Tulsa and Kansas City. That green line means that there is a Greyhound available from KC to Tulsa. How lame is that? | |
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