Transit or Development First? Huntsville Says Both

The age-old riddle about which came first, the chicken or the egg, was long ago solved. It was the egg. Eggs are prehistoric and predate the chicken, which is relatively new in the evolution of things.

Sounds reasonable, but Dennis Madsen, manager of urban and long-range planning for the City of Huntsville, unveiled his own unique answer to the old puzzle Tuesday night at UAH’s Charger Union Theater.

Madsen spoke during the kickoff event for the University-Medical Transit Oriented Development (TOD) Planning Study, held to gather public input on how best to integrate public transportation and land development along University Drive.

“One of the things that many cities struggle with in terms of transit is you want to make investment in transit, but most folks say, ‘Well, we don’t want to make investment in transit until you can show ridership. Well, it’s very hard to get ridership until you can show that you’re actually making an investment in a chicken or an egg problem with growing your transit.

“What we’re trying to do through this process is to do chicken and egg, right? While we’re planning for transit expansions through BRT (Bus Rapid Transit), we’re also planning to grow our land use that feeds that transit. We want to do those two things at the same time.’’

The chicken and egg analogy continued to come up throughout the roughly half-hour presentation, which began with Madsen and was followed by James Vandiver of the city’s planning department, along with Patrick McDonough, Maggie Adams, and John Mitchell from HDR — a transit planning consulting company.

As Huntsville continues to grow, so will the need for more public transit. The city is trying to stay ahead of the curve with this study.

“Every time we do transit route updates, we see riderships go up,’’ Madsen said. “Our city was one of the fastest to rebound to pre-COVID riderships after COVID. There’s a lot of demand. There’s a lot of need out there. So we know we can continue to grow our road network. 

“That’s very important, but we know we also have to focus on alternative modes. We have to continue to build out our bike network. We have to continue building out our sidewalk network, but we also have to be thinking about the future of transit.’’

Huntsville received a grant from the Federal Transit Authority for the project. The University-Medical TOD Planning Study will focus on three clusters along University Drive: Northwoods, UAH and MidCity. 

According to the city, those clusters present a unique opportunity for residential development, including housing for essential workers, students and families. The study will also examine a variety of affordable housing policies for different needs and conceptualize designs of station areas and first/last mile connections to visualize how TOD might appear along the corridor and link to nearby areas.

Vandiver mentioned the opening last year of the new transit station on Church St., not far from the old one, as part of an ongoing effort by the Huntsville City Council the last 10 years to keep up with the growing population and mass travel needs.

“We’re not done yet,’’ Vandiver said. “We’ve done a couple of transit improvement plans over the past few years on some incremental transit improvements. We’re kind of on the last phase of our most recent transit improvement plan, which was finished in late ’23, that includes adding Sunday service. So for the first time, Huntsville will have seven-day-a-week bus service.’’

While BRT offers many advantages along the corridor that is being studied, one key factor is having the means to shuttle workers who don’t have transportation or wish to avoid increasing traffic.

“We’re also looking at our first peak hour of express bus service, which will go from downtown to several industrial facilities in the JetPlex and Greenbrier, including places like Kohler, Polaris, Amazon, Mazda, Toyota.

“Those employers have reached out to the city. They’ve had some concerns about employee retention because of the unreliability of their way to get to work. And with it being so far out, you have to have to have a car of some sort, whether it be your own, a friend, or a taxi. And of course being that far out, depending on where you live, say a taxi or Uber or Lyft can get really expensive.’’

After the kickoff event, the Huntsville Business Journal asked a question not discussed earlier: Will dedicated lanes be required for buses to implement BRT — especially along parts of the main corridor, University Drive, where widening an already heavily trafficked thoroughfare may not be feasible?

Not to worry.

“You can do shared lanes and it works,’’ Madsen said. “The advantage of BRT is it’s not like light rail and then it doesn’t have to be in its own lane. Birmingham does shared lanes. So you don’t have to. What we do is we try to look at what makes sense for a quarter. If we don’t have enough access to have capacity to dedicate a lane, we can keep them shared.’’

Shared lanes, which allow regular traffic to use them for turning or entering and exiting, can still allow buses to move through the city more efficiently. Widening, however, may be done at stretches west of Providence and on Highway 72.

TODs, conceived by the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy, are an approach to urban development designed to bring people, services and activities together with quality public transit supported by walking and cycling conditions to facilitate shorter trips, better lifestyles and more efficient use of city resources.