Case Study: Chattanooga, Tennessee
The role of transit in Chattanooga is one part of a comprehensive, decades-old project to reverse the fortunes of an ailing industrial center. The city's implementation of innovative transit technology has taken place within the context of a host of other projects designed to reconstruct the city's economy and improve its livability. This experience suggests that transit projects are successful when they work in conjunction with initiatives to restore density to urban cores, to encourage a mixture of downtown commercial activities and housing options, and to provide an intrinsically pleasant experience.
Transit innovation in Chattanooga also benefited from the local community's commitment to maintaining the region's hard-won air quality. Several circumstances account for Chattanooga's enthusiastic embrace of sustainable community policies. One is Chattanooga's early experience with severe air pollution. Chattanooga took rapid steps to improve its air quality after it was ranked worst in the nation in 1969.
GREENHOUSE GAS REDUCTION BENEFITS OF CHATTANOOGA TRANSIT PROGRAM:
Alternative Technology. Electric shuttle buses reduce emissions of regulated pollutants and GHGs and draw riders; cut auto trips downtown.
Reduced Parking in city center encourages transit use, reducing vehicle miles traveled.
Mix of Land Uses in city center encourages walkability, a low-greenhouse gas mobility option.
In fact, Chattanooga's municipal regulations concerning air pollution became the model for the federal Clean Air Act of 1970. Due to the concentration of heavy industry in a bowl shaped valley of the Tennessee River, Chattanooga's smog problem reached legendary proportions in the middle decades of the century, a problem which began to affect the livability of the region. This was manifested in disinvestment in Chattanooga's historic core, as residents and the business that served them left the city.
More so than other areas, the quality of life implications of industrial pollution were dramatic: Chattanooga simply could not afford to ignore the problem of air quality. Its implementation of an emissions-free, electric bus system in 1992 was the latest in a line of air quality measures stretching back over two decades.
Although Chattanooga was successful in bringing its industrial air pollution under control in the early 1970's, together with many industrial cities it suffered a major setback later in that decade as heavy industry quit the region. Economic conditions reached a low point in the early 1980's, when the largest mall in Tennessee was built fifteen minutes outside the historic city center, gutting downtown of small business.
Chattanooga's community leaders decided at this point that the city must reinvent itself. This led to a change in governmental structure, in which a city commissioner system was replaced by a more inclusive mayor-council system, and the drawing up of a twenty year regional plan based on extensive community involvement in shaping the new face of Chattanooga. Among the many objectives agreed to in the over 100 public consultations that went into the 1984 Vision 2000 plan, the community agreed to reduce congestion in the downtown area, to provide for some form of public transportation, to make downtown commutes more efficient, and to draw visitors to several of the areas' anticipated attractions.
Chattanooga's reinvention was well on its way by the time the first electric buses were dispatched in 1992. By then, a $45 million, privately financed freshwater aquarium had been built, serving as the anchor for downtown Chattanooga's redevelopment. The zero-emissions buses were conceived as a component of the overall high quality of life envisioned in the 1984 plan, with an extensive greenbelt replacing the former industrial area along the banks of the Tennessee River, and the conversion of roadways like Walnut Street Bridge into pedestrian causeways.
Making downtown Chattanooga a more desirable place to work, live, and recreate meant making it more pedestrian friendly. Eliminating the city's auto dependency and traffic congestion was a crucial part of the process. Chattanooga's particular geography amplified the drawbacks of its dependency on automobiles: constrained at its narrowest point to a width of only four blocks, and too long to walk on foot from end to end, moving from one end of the city to another meant driving on one of only three roads that crossed the city. To accommodate this traffic, Chattanooga provided three parking spaces for each downtown visitor—comprising 65% of the area's land use. None of this was conducive to the kind of concentrated economic redevelopment that was necessary to pull the city core out of decline.
The Chattanooga Area Regional Transportation Authority (CARTA) approached its transportation solution—a free, low- or no-emissions shuttle—with the same forward looking outlook that characterized Chattanooga redevelopment in general. "The concept," says CARTA Planning Director Frank Aron, "was to have people who live, work, play and visit the downtown to park once at the north and south ends of downtown and take the shuttle to their various destinations rather than drive to each place they visit."
With a mandate from the Vision 2000 plan to consider alternative technologies, CARTA officials decided to follow the example of Santa Barbara, California, and put into operation a fleet of electric powered buses. A local industrialist, Joe Ferguson, was hired as a consultant by the City of Chattanooga to investigate the feasibility of the plan, concluding that the technology appropriate to an electric system particular to Chattanooga did exist, but not in one place, or in the type of vehicle that was needed. Ferguson seized the opportunity to start up the privately financed Advanced Vehicle Systems (AVS) in Chattanooga, with an initial order of buses from CARTA. AVS would custom manufacture the type of buses needed in Chattanooga, and in so doing, make a long-term investment in the vitality of the local economy.
With assistance from the Federal Transit Administration, and the Tennessee Department of Transportation, funds were made available for an initial purchase of 11 electric buses from AVS. Part of this 1992 package included the creation of an independent research institute devoted to fuel cell technology, and the construction of a system of park and ride garages on the outskirts of Chattanooga to accommodate commuters bound for the downtown area.
The income from the garages, combined with the export of AVS buses to other cities nationally and internationally, have made AVS a thriving for-profit enterprise, and its buses a well received amenity. Since the early 90's, AVS has built and sold over 130 buses to cities such as Los Angeles, California, Tempe, Arizona, Eugene, Oregon, and Tampa, Florida. While downtown Chattanooga's revived commercial health has led to an increase in VMT, the increase "has likely grown by much less than it would have without the shuttle."
Once stigmatized as the dirtiest city in America, with a downtown hollowed out by a local shopping mall, Chattanooga has not only turned itself around economically, but, as one analyst puts it, "is one of the few American cities of its size - roughly one half million residents - that meets federal air quality standards for criteria pollutants."