Mayor Questions Validity of JTA's Transportation Center

[Ocklawaha]

FORT WORTH TRANSPORTATION CENTER

Fort Worth is part of a much larger metropolitan area then Jacksonville, this photo appears to be taken about midday (no shadows). In spite of the metro size and the number of carriers it serves, I can count 5 people in this photo... That's a number that ought to work out for Jacksonville, because IF we go ahead with this stupid design that would be ONE CUSTOMER PER BUILDING!

Bottom line really is, WE ALREADY HAVE A TERMINAL BUILDING... USE IT DAMN IT.  We don't need 5 new buildings or 1 new building, we've been given a gift of a 'free' transit hub and we're apparently to dumb to see it.

THE TERMINAL EXTERIOR TODAY


THE JACKSONVILLE TERMINAL TODAY


LEFT: PICTURE TAKEN FROM THE SAME APPROXIMATE LOCATION AS THE PHOTO ABOVE, (note the horrid drop ceiling that was added by the railroads).
RIGHT: CLOSE-UP VIEW OF THE TICKET WINDOWS WHEN IN FULL OPERATION


GET RID OF THE PRIME OSBOURNE "BOX" AND WE'D HAVE THIS MUCH AREA TO PLAY WITH

Now tell me we can't handle the combined crowd at any given time equal to our current JTA Rosa Parks Center, everyone you see over at Greyhound, the Skyway's throngs and finally the folks out at the Amtrak Station, all in this same waiting room space. We could do it several times over with room left over for the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.

OCKLAWAHA

[thelakelander]

Images of St. Louis' Gateway Transportation Center.  Modes served include Amtrak, Greyhound, local bus and light rail.  Total cost was a little over $31 million.








On the JTA Making Moves video, Steve Arrington made it sound like the Jacksonville site being so complex was a major reason for the $180 million price tag.  The St. Louis site appears to be a much more complex design solution for the same modes of transit, yet it still came in nearly $150 million less.

Twenty years in the making, St. Louis recently opened its $27 million Gateway Transportation Center, a 37,000-sf multi-modal building that provides facilities for Amtrak passenger train and Greyhound bus service in a single 700-foot-long structure. Designed by KAI Design & Build, St. Louis, the facility features a long, curving design that illustrates its purpose for moving people. Train passengers walk through an enclosed multi-colored glass walkway and two sets of stairs, elevators, and escalators to reach the Amtrak train platforms at one end of the building. The Building Team included general contractor K&S Associates, architect Kiku Obata & Company, civil engineer Jacobs, and landscape architect SWT Design Inc., all based in St. Louis.

http://www.bdcnetwork.com/article/construction-completed-st-louis-gateway-transportation-center

Local St. Louis resident's comments about the pros and cons of their new transportation center: http://urbanreviewstl.com/2010/12/readers-like-st-louis-gateway-transportation-center/

I think these projects in our peer cities really show where we've gone off path locally and why our center is too expensive to get off the drawing board.  Building facilities with parking garages above them and an new office building in an abandoned DT are highly questionable and expensive decisions that have little to do with the core needs of a transit center.  The last expensive decision is the ideal of building a separate terminal station for each mode.  There's tons of building material and labor cost duplication, not to mention the whole point of having an intermodal transit facility gets lost by making it more inefficient for the average transit user to transfer between modes.

[thelakelander]

Imagine if we had to deal with St. Louis' site conditions instead of having vacant blocks of property that happens to be next to a convention center, railroad and an interstate?  My guess, is that we'd just throw our hands up in the air, claim it can't be done and move on.......or kick out viable businesses and demolish a couple of blocks of downtown instead.

St. Louis Gateway Transportation Center

KAI Design & Build had a difficult task: To design a train, bus, and light rail depot that stretches under four highway overpasses.

Dignity has been restored to the rails in downtown St. Louis. For more than 25 years, until recently, boarding Amtrak in the city involved not a station but the “Amshack,” a modular number hidden under the freeway on what looked like a set from The Wire. You would buy your ticket and pray the wait wouldn’t be long. Then you had to make your way through a treacherous gravel yard to reach your train. All along, there was a wonderful Romanesque train station nearby: Union Station, opened in 1894, was once the world’s biggest and busiest station. It closed in 1978 and reopened in 1985 as a hotel and shopping mall, butâ€"this is the sad partâ€"without trains. In 2004, the local Riverfront Times reported that the Amshack was “thought to be the oldest temporary depot in the world.”

How far things had fallen in the way of railroad romance. But they have now swung upward again with the completion of the St. Louis Gateway Transportation Center, a new downtown depot built to serve Amtrak. It’s not Union Station’s limestone castle, but, with 16 trains a day, St. Louis can live with less, and these days, two platforms serving four newly built tracks is enough. More important than capacity are the connections. The Gateway Center, which cost $27 million, gives Amtrak passengers a modern portal but also direct access to MetroLink, the local light rail system, and to Greyhound buses.

Fitting these functions together on the site that was available took surgical skill, because Metro, the local transit authority, owned only one parcel downtown where all three transit systems met. It happens to be directly beneath four overpasses of Interstate 64, so the 35,700-square-foot building appears to have been slippedâ€"or pouredâ€"around several of their columns.

“It wound up being a very curvilinear project because of all the site constraints,” says Melissa Kreishman, the project architect at KAI Design & Build, a St. Louis firm that led the Gateway station’s design. The building stretches 700 feet, with angled façades and windows laminated in syncopated Mondrian-like colors to suggest the notion of movement. Along the north wing are Greyhound’s operations, including 10 bus bays and turnaround space. At the far northern end is a sidewalk crossing to MetroLink trains and the MetroBus station. The south wing extends an enclosed skywalk over the Amtrak lines and down to the two platforms. Between the wings lies the main ticketing and waiting area, with a broad view north toward downtown.

There were constraints on the ground but also from above: There is constant highway noise to keep out and huge loads of plowed snow that may crash onto the building from the overpasses. So the building needed a certain amount of armor for the harsh environment.

“It was not easy squeezing the project onto that site,” affirms Tom Behan, the city’s chief construction engineer. “But it’s now a whole lot neater than what was there.”

http://66.151.101.112/transportation-projects/st-louis-gateway-transportation-center.aspx

[Ralph W]

Heaven forbid any design that has to be more than the sum of its parts. This can be likened to an architect trying to place a building on a lot with a number of older majestic irreplaceable trees. Rather than design the structure to complement what is already there, the design butcher decides the trees have to go so his monument can be ofcookie cut parts to meet his standard of perfection.

[JeffreyS]

St. Louis is a great city.  Love the lite rail there. Sometimes it's elevated then ground level and even a subway at times.  Designing what is beat for each situation.

[Jaxson]

I agree with Ock that we have the perfect building for a transportation hub.  The problem is that we have too many people in town who want it to become their boondoggle...

[Ocklawaha]

How true, I just came off of listening to Arrington's diatribe and I'm convinced that the poor guy has completely lost his mind. He seems to be 100% convinced that his way is the only way but then perhaps he has forgotten the Skyway, one of his other achievements. Remember this is the same guy that said the Skyway would carry 60,000 people a day, then blamed its failure to get more then 5% of that number on downtown parking garages and retail failure. Without a doubt retails exodus from the CBD effected the ridership, but even if the retail had doubled we'd have to assume that every single person that works downtown would rush to the Prime Osbourne "commuter lots" and ride .50 miles on the Skyway. He and JTA is using that exact kind of math, plus lobbying the Mayor and Council with a disinformation campaign... "QUICK! BUILD GREYHOUND OR THE WINDOW OF OPPORTUNITY CLOSES!," one of them recently told me.

The "window of opportunity," can only mean the opportunity to grace our city with a leviathan of a project and they are using Greyhounds possible sale of their station as the grounds for such ridiculous statements.  If they were really interested in revising their plans what would keep them from going to the city and temporarily moving Greyhound onto the Prime Osbourne property? When the convention center moves out, Greyhound gets the best terminal in their entire systems history. All of this is possible if we just stop this insanity before they start digging.
Give them a couple of lots on Adams and like termites they will shortly infest the other 14 acres with their scheme with "Phase two" demands.

WE DON'T NEED TO ADD A SINGLE BUILDING FOR A REAL TRANSPORTATION CENTER, PLEASE STOP THEM MAYOR BROWN.

OCKLAWAHA

[Old Jim]

The JTA proposal is insanity. I can only hope the mayor is listening to other opinions. A big shakeup in JTA management would be a nice start.

[Ocklawaha]

Their chief transit planner should be given a nice retirement package (For YEARS of services rendered, Skyway, Kings Avenue Garage, JRTC etc) and shoved out the door.

OCKLAWAHA

[Jaxson]

MULTI-MODAL PLAN
Another boondoggle
I cannot understand why we end up with frustrating delays and costly overruns in this city.
And, just when I thought that we learned from our experience with the county courthouse, we see another monstrous mistake in the making - the proposed regional transportation center.
With a price tag of $180 million and a facility that sprawls out over half-a-dozen blocks, this transportation center lacks the basic common sense of making the most of the buildings that we already have.
I do not see why Amtrak and Greyhound service cannot be located in the old Jacksonville Terminal building at the Prime Osborn Convention Center.
Instead of a common-sense solution, the Jacksonville Transportation Authority chooses to create a Taj Mahal that dwarfs multi-modal stations in similar-sized cities.
It does not allow people to travel quickly and efficiently between modes of transportation - the whole point of combining such facilities.
JTA needs to go back to the drawing board, and we need to move forward with a better plan sooner rather than later.
John Louis Meeks,
Jacksonville

Read more at Jacksonville.com: http://jacksonville.com/opinion/letters-readers/2011-07-21/story/letters-readers-exaggerated-impact#ixzz1SkJfI2nm

Source: The Florida Times-Union

[exnewsman]

MULTI-MODAL PLAN
Another boondoggle
I cannot understand why we end up with frustrating delays and costly overruns in this city.
And, just when I thought that we learned from our experience with the county courthouse, we see another monstrous mistake in the making - the proposed regional transportation center.
With a price tag of $180 million and a facility that sprawls out over half-a-dozen blocks, this transportation center lacks the basic common sense of making the most of the buildings that we already have.
I do not see why Amtrak and Greyhound service cannot be located in the old Jacksonville Terminal building at the Prime Osborn Convention Center.
Instead of a common-sense solution, the Jacksonville Transportation Authority chooses to create a Taj Mahal that dwarfs multi-modal stations in similar-sized cities.
It does not allow people to travel quickly and efficiently between modes of transportation - the whole point of combining such facilities.
JTA needs to go back to the drawing board, and we need to move forward with a better plan sooner rather than later.
John Louis Meeks,
Jacksonville

Read more at Jacksonville.com: http://jacksonville.com/opinion/letters-readers/2011-07-21/story/letters-readers-exaggerated-impact#ixzz1SkJfI2nm

Source: The Florida Times-Union

The only problem with this letter is it doens't take into account that when the JRTC was being designed the city didn't have any plan (and still doesn't) to move the POCC from its current location. Had that been a definite then I'm sure the while plan would have turned out differently. There's been TALK for years and years about moving it, but only talk. Peyton said publicly it wasn't a priority for his administration.

So you can't move Greyhound or anybody else into an already occupied building.

In theory - that would be the best option for this transit center. But until somebody from the city says YES we're moving the convention center...

[thelakelander]

We have a new administration in office with new priorities.  Wouldn't it be easier to go sit down with them and figure this out before moving on a $180 million project?  To me, it seems like a simple discussion between Blaylock and Brown regarding the future of both projects is in order.  Until this is resolved, I'd put the entire thing on ice.

[Jaxson]

MULTI-MODAL PLAN
Another boondoggle
I cannot understand why we end up with frustrating delays and costly overruns in this city.
And, just when I thought that we learned from our experience with the county courthouse, we see another monstrous mistake in the making - the proposed regional transportation center.
With a price tag of $180 million and a facility that sprawls out over half-a-dozen blocks, this transportation center lacks the basic common sense of making the most of the buildings that we already have.
I do not see why Amtrak and Greyhound service cannot be located in the old Jacksonville Terminal building at the Prime Osborn Convention Center.
Instead of a common-sense solution, the Jacksonville Transportation Authority chooses to create a Taj Mahal that dwarfs multi-modal stations in similar-sized cities.
It does not allow people to travel quickly and efficiently between modes of transportation - the whole point of combining such facilities.
JTA needs to go back to the drawing board, and we need to move forward with a better plan sooner rather than later.
John Louis Meeks,
Jacksonville

Read more at Jacksonville.com: http://jacksonville.com/opinion/letters-readers/2011-07-21/story/letters-readers-exaggerated-impact#ixzz1SkJfI2nm

Source: The Florida Times-Union

The only problem with this letter is it doens't take into account that when the JRTC was being designed the city didn't have any plan (and still doesn't) to move the POCC from its current location. Had that been a definite then I'm sure the while plan would have turned out differently. There's been TALK for years and years about moving it, but only talk. Peyton said publicly it wasn't a priority for his administration.

So you can't move Greyhound or anybody else into an already occupied building.

In theory - that would be the best option for this transit center. But until somebody from the city says YES we're moving the convention center...

The POCC is a cop out for kicking the can down the road.  There should be plans for a multimodal facility that shares space with the POCC in the event that the convention center stays put.  It is unrealistic to insist that the convention center move before any plans go forward with the multimodal facility.  For the time being, can we not have Amtrak and Greyhound share the Jacksonville Terminal building and then expand when the convention center moves off the grounds?  I do not think that we can afford to build a sprawling complex simply because we are waiting for the convention center to make the first move.

[fsujax]

There are plans for Amtrak, commuter rail, HSR and the POCC to co-exisist.

[Jaxson]

There are plans for Amtrak, commuter rail, HSR and the POCC to co-exisist.

1. Do these plans have to cost $180 million?
2. Do these plans have to sprawl out over seven city blocks?
3. Do these plans include actually using the existing buildings in the old terminal building?
...just curious...more aimed at our aimless JTA than you, by the way, fsujax...