by Dean Schirf

The second public meeting date of the Lets Talk Transit was held at the Civic Center Hall of Mirrors April 13th with the following discussed/observed:

A recap of the first meeting was given by Rick Cain followed by a discussion of downtown density realities by city planning staff followed by consultant Mike McAnelly of the JACOBS Engineering Group, Inc, discussing the development of guiding principles that should be considered in putting routes together upon which a future streetcar system would run based upon primarily the following criteria:

1. What are the destinations points
2. Who would use it

Discussion centered on a total of some 265 responses received that provided some 1300 entries of dealing with various issues inclusive of destination/anchor points....a further breakdown revealed the use of the system that would be used by visitors, followed by employee/workers, with residents next and resident/worker coming in last.

A number of questions were asked of Mike McAnelly regarding a number of points, some of which required specific answers that this process has not yet addressed, such as where is the track going to be two tracked, loops located, etc. The purpose of this meeting was designed to get input from the public for prospective routes (which is only a starting point) ......this input will now be shared with the consultants and COTPA staff in conjunction with the ongoing Alternative Analysis process which will be considered for a more detailed route system(s) that will begin to move forward in bringing to reality the first phase of the downtown Oklahoma City streetcar transit system.

There is still a good deal of misunderstanding regarding the first phase of this transit system in that the system should begin serving a larger area of Oklahoma City and made available to those who would use it. In time, that will come if we do this all important first phase correctly......ridership, routes and destinations were discussed in detail on this specific evening along with another very key element in this whole process.....mainly that of economic development and the inducement of such development that would be impacted by a transit system, even a starter transit system such as the one being developed for Oklahoma City.

At this point, the tables then were giving specific assignments and directed to draw up routes that would best serve that table's specific assignment area. The areas addressed were residential, visitors, and destination/employer location stops. Each table was given large maps upon which to work from and a spokesman was selected to make the report regarding their respective area of assignment along with the map upon which the best suggested route was drawn to accommodate their respective assignment.

A question was asked how valid would such routes be considering that the convention center and the transit hub locations are not yet known, to which the consultant advised to go ahead and proceed as that will be built into the route structure at the point their respective locations are determined.

A final area of concern is the amount of participants that are/have availed themselves to this process with input and the like. It was mentioned that there are 552,000 people living in corporate Oklahoma City (1.2 million in the metro area) and yet there are very few responses for input being received for consideration that we will all be asked to pay for down the line. Efforts need to be reviewed that will publicize/disseminate this process for broader input.

In total, I felt the meeting was well staged and getting the participants actively involved in breakout sessions certainly added to the interest/input level as opposed to sitting in the audience and hearing report after report. Future meetings should allow similar input/interaction and questions from those attending should be answered.....q&a was cut off several times to move on with the agenda.....this is a tough thing to gauge and it does take time and if a meeting is needed to specifically answer questions then we should have one.

Oklahoma City is on the cusp of something very exciting.....something that heretofore we have never really addressed. It will not be easy in putting this together "right" but the citizens of our city have said "yes" in building the first phase of a transit rail streetcar system for this great place we call home......Oklahoma City is a growing dynamic city and region and now is the proper time to look at other alternatives of surface transportation....do we continue to build expressways, bridges and interchanges for vehicular traffic or do we broaden our prospective transportation choices for the future of all our citizens beyond asphalt and concrete......we have an excellent opportunity to move ahead and I for one am looking very much forward to it.

Many thanks to all those that took the time to attend the April 13th meeting of Let's Talk Transit in discussing the future of transit in Downtown Oklahoma City.