Commuter Rail's Return?

[marcuscnelson]

Where to start...if you're one of these little transit nerds like so many of us are on here, then you're dying inside at some of the questions from the general public.  Very easy to pull the wool over people's eyes.

People in general know little about transit and know even less about the architecture of what makes transit work. Makes it hard when you have to hope that your transit agency knows what it's doing.

There was a small crowd of *young* people that gathered afterwards with one of the general team.  VERY knowledgeable and just schooling the crap out of JTA.  I was blown away - I kind of figured maybe one or two were members on here.  I handed out my business cards and asked them to reach out to grab beers, coffee or lunch.  Made me optimistic.

But as all things in Jax, the best, smartest people with the most common sense ideas and having the awareness of what's successful beyond our borders are the absolute furthest from the levers of power and decision making.

That's quite exciting! I remember being pretty much alone at things like JTA's U2C events or FDOT's highway expansion events, so to hear that someone else is in that fight is encouraging.

Aside from the fact that I'd personally rather see JTA pursue an intown system of at-grade but largely separated ROW for light rail or street cars (I basically would love to see Charlotte's LYNX just replicated here) *before* pursuing systems that will not generate ridership numbers and may cost JTA political capital for building something actually useful later, my easiest problems to pick were on the real estate side since that is what I do for a living.

It definitely could make sense to build a web of light rail (or even automated light metro) along the major arterials like Atlantic/Arlington, Beach, Southside, perhaps Normandy or 103rd. My take from a transit infrastructure standpoint has been for a while that any rail transit system in Jacksonville needs to have a focus on speed to be competitive with driving. Especially if people have to make bus or ReadiRide connections in order to reach their final destination, reducing the time spent on those trunk lines is incredibly important. Obviously there has been a stance for a while that commuter rail is practical because of its ability to utilize existing rail corridors, which there aren't many of that would be particularly suitable for light rail, aside from the S-Line. Of course, if we simply used the billions of dollars FDOT is spending on highway expansion for transit instead we could basically do whatever.

Take two of the Duval transit stops:  Baymeadows/Old Kings and Avenues Walk area.

Baymeadows
I know a family member of the company that owns the shopping center that they want to replace with high-density mixed use around the transit stop.  I'm pretty sure they have not had discussions with this group, which is thankfully local.

It's silly, but it seems like this study isn't really meant to actually make the land deals for TOD. It's meant to set the policies that would then be used to govern that TOD. But of course, their slow-rolling of actually making this happen is exactly why Race Track Road appears to no longer be an option. JTA historically has always been slow on real estate (see: BJP right of way funding).

Avenues Walk
This guy went on and on about this stop, showing examples in other cities (notably Halcyon in Atlanta).  I call Avenues Walk a little crater because you have to climb a mountain and then descend into a little crater surrounded by highways, rail and wetlands.  The speaker envisioned "a couple hundred thousand square feet of office" and then in the same sentence called it a future employment center.

But he described a Halcyon like development without telling us how he would do the following:

1. Get rid of the Walmart (or at least work with Walmart to partner with a bigger time developer to incorporate into a higher density development)
2. Talk to the recent buyer of the other retail center and vacant land (which has some of the vacant land up for sale right now)
3. Get rid of the brand new suburban gated garden apartments and suburban townhomes just built to incorporate all of that land into a high density, walkable TOD style development

That sounds odd. It sounds like they're talking about this site as it was over a decade ago instead of what it is now. I also don't understand where they think the demand for several hundred thousand square feet of office space is coming from. Downtown is having a hard time building more now, why would so much more of that space go to the suburbs?

On that note, I actually heard about this through NEFBA.  I am a member and part of a subcommittee there that is actually looking at the TOD bill.  I will say, the members from the development community within NEFBA are different from forum contributors on this website, or members of ULI.  There is a woeful ignorance towards transit, urban infill for the most part, or TOD type stuff.  But we are looking at the TOD bill in this subcommittee, and the head of the subcommittee works for a local real estate company that has real estate right basically there at Avenues Walk and I know for a fact that JTA has not had any discussions with his company about their big plans for the area there.  I find that hilarious.

Someone else asked if JTA were going to work with whatever other agencies to ensure sidewalks are put in around Southside Blvd there because otherwise how do you use the station and walk around over there.

JTA is the one saying that this rail system is going to take a decade to build (because they're slow-rolling it in favor of projects they're more interested in). I'm sure you're well aware that the market isn't going to wait that long if it doesn't have to. But yeah, good luck getting FDOT to agree to slow down Phillips Hwy and Southside Blvd in order to support walkability in that area.

No discussion about St Johns County or St Augustine, just focused on Duval (3 stops including Prime Osborn).

I asked if they had considered light rail at all, and the speaker basically said "I don't know, maybe there are other potentially better systems out there but we only focused on the commuter rail."  For solid deeper questions, as there were a few, the speaker basically said "I don't know."

And with all of the BS "studies" and presentations we are overloaded with in this town, they asked us to put different color stickers for "good, ok, bad" opinions on the presentation boards in the back.

To be fair, yesterday's session was specifically dedicated to Duval County's stations, not St. Johns County's. That's today. This TOD study is specifically about station sites for commuter rail along the FEC, the federal funding for it stipulates that. It's annoying that it doesn't sound like they have the technical side for anything about the actual rail system, but that's because they haven't seriously engaged in that because they're spending millions on "Testing and Learning" instead.

My "hot take" here is that there's really nothing keeping the city from building its own transit lines that it owns and simply allowing JTA to operate them. Philadelphia used to do it and might even do so again with their proposed Roosevelt Boulevard Subway. Use CIP and TPO funds to do the studies, use the LOGT or other taxes to fund the local share of construction, and simply sign an operating agreement with JTA when all is said and done. No nonsense schemes, no clout-gathering for authority executives, just a completed transit line they put drivers on.

As far as light rail, probably the most helpful thing in the short term would be to push for light rail to be included on the Long Range Transportation Plan update next year. I think a lot of these corridors are already currently included as BRT, but they'll need to be updated anyway to account for current and proposed transportation patterns. A focus on land use/zoning should help make the case for heavier transit. If the TPO can avoid doing the nonsense they did in 2019 and making half the LRTP about autonomous vehicles then there's a lot of room to make a real transportation plan that doesn't spend 94% of its funds on road expansion.

[Charles Hunter]

Regarding the thought of including Light Rail, and not U2C, in the upcoming Long Range Transportation Plan, the TPO just held the first meeting of the citizens Steering Committee to guide the LRTP. This group will meet about a half-dozen times over the year-long process, and review information provided by the consultant (Atkins). It sure would be great if some of the smart people from here would get involved.
Contact Marci Larson: mlarson@northfloridatpo.com   [pet peeve, government agency using "com" instead of "gov" but I digress]

[iMarvin]

I assume the focus on commuter rail over any other mode is because the tracks are already there but I definitely think it'd be worth looking into light rail and automated light metro.

Commuter rail (which really should be all day regional rail) with a few stops to St Augustine makes sense, but a more local service terminating at Avenues has a market as well imo. I wish JTA was prioritizing this over the U2C...

[thelakelander]

I don't know where to start....

1. I've long said that Jax would be better off working with Amtrak or Brightline for an intercity passenger rail connection, instead of JTA doing commuter rail. JTA has no experience, our zoning is a mess, people here don't even know what true TOD is, and commuter rail will generate low ridership. Go intercity and coordinate such a project to have a few additional NE Florida stops included. Locally, it will cost taxpayers less while still offering similar commuting and economic development benefits. The big difference will likely be not having a need for an additional tax revenue stream locally (that JTA will likely want to control).

2. The U2C really clouds the local discussion around investing in a starter streetcar or LRT line. Both of which can be accomplished with the same local money we're spending on the U2C. They also serve different roles, yet we're positioning autonomous vehicles to serve the role of streetcar/LRT, etc. Grave mistake that we should have learned from our Skyway experience. From this perspective, there's no reason to blame FDOT or some outside agency. We have to resources to get this started locally. We just don't have the political will power.

3. Regarding any type of fixed transit investment in NE Florida, we've finally entered a period of time where political allyship may be feasible between local and federal priorities. This is a general window where Jax should strike while the planets are aligned. If we force this U2C thing over having these discussions, we're likely living a generational mistake in the making.

4. Oh yeah......what's the point of studying TOD again? What has changed since 2008 about TOD that makes it any different than what its been since the late 19th century?

[marcuscnelson]

1. I've long said that Jax would be better off working with Amtrak or Brightline for an intercity passenger rail connection, instead of JTA doing commuter rail. JTA has no experience, our zoning is a mess, people here don't even know what true TOD is, and commuter rail will generate low ridership. Go intercity and coordinate such a project to have a few additional NE Florida stops included. Locally, it will cost taxpayers less while still offering similar commuting and economic development benefits. The big difference will likely be not having a need for an additional tax revenue stream locally (that JTA will likely want to control).

As I've said before, I don't disagree at this point. This remains really a leadership challenge in terms of being able to set our own transportation policy. If Donna Deegan and Ron Salem came out tomorrow and said that they wanted to bring Brightline to Jacksonville "before this decade is out," that would be a little ambitious but absolutely doable. It would mean investing in getting the JRTC station built and likely helping Brightline get the required corridor development work done, and potentially seeking a federal grant of some kind for the likely $1 billion+ that reconstructing the FEC from Cocoa to Jacksonville would cost, but the money is absolutely there, as you've said it's the decision-making that isn't.

Likewise with Amtrak and the A-Line corridor we can decide tomorrow to get the local governments into a room and propose an interlocal agreement to split the cost of a few trainsets for a corridor service. It would be hard, and FDOT would almost certainly push back, but the decision-making isn't even there to try.

2. The U2C really clouds the local discussion around investing in a starter streetcar or LRT line. Both of which can be accomplished with the same local money we're spending on the U2C. They also serve different roles, yet we're positioning autonomous vehicles to serve the role of streetcar/LRT, etc. Grave mistake that we should have learned from our Skyway experience. From this perspective, there's no reason to blame FDOT or some outside agency. We have to resources to get this started locally. We just don't have the political will power.

It's been said before here that one of the many central problems with the U2C as a project is that it wasn't undertaken as a transportation project in order to solve a mobility need, but instead as an innovation project in order to heap credibility and praise upon its backers for their providence. This op-ed from two years ago was a demonstration of what they think will come of this. We have a problem already created by a previous generation of JTA leadership chasing a non-optimal technology for personal glory, and this generation has chosen to repeat that mistake and call us delusional for pointing that out.

3. Regarding any type of fixed transit investment in NE Florida, we've finally entered a period of time where political allyship may be feasible between local and federal priorities. This is a general window where Jax should strike while the planets are aligned. If we force this U2C thing over having these discussions, we're likely living a generational mistake in the making.

Pretty much. Similarly to downtown development, we're currently watching the opportunity pass by because we can't get our crap together enough to seize it.

4. Oh yeah......what's the point of studying TOD again? What has changed since 2008 about TOD that makes it any different than what its been since the late 19th century?

I would understand if this was work that directly contributed to uniquely enabling TOD where it wasn't possible before, either by marketing to developers or guiding the policy changes to support TOD, but these studies never actually seem to do that. And it's unclear why we need to spend like $2 million in order to explain to our own city council why they shouldn't mandate car-only development around a train station they would be funding. St. Augustine didn't need a $2 million study to create their Mobility Oriented Development zoning (although they did late in the process add some unnecessary limitations for aesthetic purposes). And it was a developer realizing they had a property with high potential who pushed for that zoning to exist in the first place. I can't say I understand.

[simms3]

4. Oh yeah......what's the point of studying TOD again? What has changed since 2008 about TOD that makes it any different than what its been since the late 19th century?

I would understand if this was work that directly contributed to uniquely enabling TOD where it wasn't possible before, either by marketing to developers or guiding the policy changes to support TOD, but these studies never actually seem to do that. And it's unclear why we need to spend like $2 million in order to explain to our own city council why they shouldn't mandate car-only development around a train station they would be funding. St. Augustine didn't need a $2 million study to create their Mobility Oriented Development zoning (although they did late in the process add some unnecessary limitations for aesthetic purposes). And it was a developer realizing they had a property with high potential who pushed for that zoning to exist in the first place. I can't say I understand.

What I like about the story is that the property owner (Broudy) is really someone who's latched on to the idea and helped spearhead the whole thing, including the new zoning category (which is created *just* for his property, at this point).  What I like even more is that he's a multi-generational native who takes pride in his hometown and wants to contribute to its greatness.  I'll make a plug for my own roots and family history in the area, but we had the ice plant  which is now quite a destination, and I hope someday I'll get to try to use that clout to push through one of my own plans, God willing.

More on Broudy's development partner:
https://www.jaxdailyrecord.com/news/2023/apr/12/nineoaks-development-is-making-its-mark-as-a-multiservice-developer/

I think they have a best-in-class team that includes the best attorney to hire to do anything in St. Augustine, etc.

I can't find where St. Augustine paid $2M for a study to create the new zoning category and push this deal, however, I wouldn't be surprised if they did something.  I know they latched on to the JTA study as language from that study was woven into basically all PR surrounding this.

What these "studies" do is arm the "defense", which in this case is Broudy, his team, and St. Augustine commissioners who are for this proposal, "against" the rest of the constituents, who are crabby patties beyond all crabbiness.  It's like the mandatory traffic studies that areas, particularly St. Johns County, require to the utmost degree to even have a chance at approvals.



Don't hate the messenger here, and I'm beating a dead horse with this, but Marcus a lot of your gripes are really against an overall NIMBY attitude across the region and especially in St. Augustine.  It's partially ignorance and apathy that requires this sort of stupid education about what seems to be commonsense and is common practice in most other large cities/metros, but a lot of it really is an animosity towards anything that could be construed as growth, densification, "metro" / regional connectivity as in any "metro area".  Especially in St. Augustine where people go to retire, they don't want "big city" Jacksonville growth overtaking the "quaint feel" of the area, and they hate the tourists now, who butter the whole area's bread.

Just read Steve Cottrill's columns in the St. Augustine Record.  It's a disaster, but that's the prevailing attitude.  I think he's even had one on this very plan.

There will be only one spot, at this spot, for the MOD, nevertheless, the citizens of St. Augustine are fighting this thing pretty hard because his proposal will rise to 70', which is outrageous to the locals (90% of whom are transplants in the last 3 decades with average age of 65+).

There is a deal somewhere else in the city under way that wanted 4 stories and a variance.  My understanding is that even the best of attorneys focused on St. Augustine would not take it on because of the insane political challenges to exceed 3 stories.  So they are making do with 3 stories.


35' is the strictly enforced height limit not only in St. Augustine Beach (where they no longer want hotels because they claim the Embassy Suites was a bait and switch that ruined the whole area  it's like the only nice hotel there), but it is enforced in St. Augustine proper as well, which is why nearly all of the new hotels are 3 stories and despite insane demand to cater to tourism there, everything is still pretty low-scale.

It's so insane.  The people that I know working on the deal are from out of town and due to my familiarity with them, they have imparted some thoughts on our area to me that in some ways align with the dead horse I always beat on these boards.

[thelakelander]

1. I've long said that Jax would be better off working with Amtrak or Brightline for an intercity passenger rail connection, instead of JTA doing commuter rail. JTA has no experience, our zoning is a mess, people here don't even know what true TOD is, and commuter rail will generate low ridership. Go intercity and coordinate such a project to have a few additional NE Florida stops included. Locally, it will cost taxpayers less while still offering similar commuting and economic development benefits. The big difference will likely be not having a need for an additional tax revenue stream locally (that JTA will likely want to control).

As I've said before, I don't disagree at this point. This remains really a leadership challenge in terms of being able to set our own transportation policy. If Donna Deegan and Ron Salem came out tomorrow and said that they wanted to bring Brightline to Jacksonville "before this decade is out," that would be a little ambitious but absolutely doable. It would mean investing in getting the JRTC station built and likely helping Brightline get the required corridor development work done, and potentially seeking a federal grant of some kind for the likely $1 billion+ that reconstructing the FEC from Cocoa to Jacksonville would cost, but the money is absolutely there, as you've said it's the decision-making that isn't.

Likewise with Amtrak and the A-Line corridor we can decide tomorrow to get the local governments into a room and propose an interlocal agreement to split the cost of a few trainsets for a corridor service. It would be hard, and FDOT would almost certainly push back, but the decision-making isn't even there to try.

My recommendation would be to start small. We'd need to take the initiative to invest in ourselves for the future we want to see. What we'd do at the local level is assist in (or fund 100%) moving the Amtrak station back downtown (or have the station opened downtown as a second station). That immediately introduces intercity rail back to downtown (adjacent to the JRTC) and we don't have to come up with billions to do that. Many cities across the state have already done this. So the precedence is there.

The connectivity with the JRTC also immediately helps boost all other local transit services in the region......even as far as Palatka. By the same token, we should go ahead and replace the raggedy Skyway rolling stock and open that Brooklyn station, JTA claimed it would do years ago. Try piling all our "TOD" opportunities around our existing fixed transit stations for a change, instead of continuing to waste money studying to the oblivion. These are the little things that make local mass transit more efficient and effective, that help build local support for larger projects.

When the time comes for intercity rail expansion, locally our role would be to become aggressive supporters (like Miami, Orlando and Tampa were in the early 2000s with high speed rail.....while we were playing with legos in St. Augustine) and lobby for additional regional station sites and service times that can also align with our regional commuting characteristics, regardless of whether it's Amtrak or Brightline. In the end, we'd be served by intercity rail that also doubles as a regional commuter rail option (which is essentially corridor services that Amtrak currently offers in various regions across the country.

[Pottsburg]

Brightline seems to be the only viable option in my opinion. They own the rights to make it happen already. Let them get their full operation up and running next year, and then they can have a serious conversation with FEC. Start with three major stops and then revisit with future stop options like they did with Boca and Aventura. Crossing the bridge is a major hurdle, that thing isn't getting any younger. Brightline is going to want housing attached (like WPB and Miami) to its stations in St Aug and I could see a San Marco station. If BL does go forward, this won't be TriRail, it'll be a fancier more premium train, if you haven't rode it yet, it's an awesome experience.  FEC has a lot of land in San Marco and St Augustine. The newer CE O of FEC wants more track and high speeds, if BL wants to pay for it, I'm sure Mexico will be more than willing. Perfect scenario is when Orlando is finished BL buys FEC back from Grupo.

[thelakelander]

^BL is a major reason if I'm COJ, I wouldn't give up Prime Osborn land for a UF campus or anything else. That large piece of rail frontage is a TOD real estate nugget. We don't need a JTA study to tell us that or lay it out.

[marcuscnelson]

My recommendation would be to start small. We'd need to take the initiative to invest in ourselves for the future we want to see. What we'd do at the local level is assist in (or fund 100%) moving the Amtrak station back downtown (or have the station opened downtown as a second station). That immediately introduces intercity rail back to downtown (adjacent to the JRTC) and we don't have to come up with billions to do that. Many cities across the state have already done this. So the precedence is there.

The connectivity with the JRTC also immediately helps boost all other local transit services in the region......even as far as Palatka. By the same token, we should go ahead and replace the raggedy Skyway rolling stock and open that Brooklyn station, JTA claimed it would do years ago. Try piling all our "TOD" opportunities around our existing fixed transit stations for a change, instead of continuing to waste money studying to the oblivion. These are the little things that make local mass transit more efficient and effective, that help build local support for larger projects.

When the time comes for intercity rail expansion, locally our role would be to become aggressive supporters (like Miami, Orlando and Tampa were in the early 2000s with high speed rail.....while we were playing with legos in St. Augustine) and lobby for additional regional station sites and service times that can also align with our regional commuting characteristics, regardless of whether it's Amtrak or Brightline. In the end, we'd be served by intercity rail that also doubles as a regional commuter rail option (which is essentially corridor services that Amtrak currently offers in various regions across the country.

You can start small while having big goals, especially when the big goals require that small start anyway. No matter what the JRTC rail station needs to be built, which would need to be built to accommodate Brightline in the future anyway, and the TOD focus is a policy change more than a construction change. You can make your goal Brightline Jacksonville while knowing that there are a lot of building blocks to make that happen. That does assume one is actually serious about making those changes though.

Also from a PR standpoint it sounds better to say we plan to have Brightline in 7 years compared to JTA's proposal taking maybe 10(?) years. If the city can spend over $130 million on a hotel that wasn't officially a Four Seasons until a few weeks ago, it can invest in supporting a rail project that likely only has one potential intercity user.

Unfortunately it seems anything with JTA is going to require some form of showdown, whether that's unilaterally reallocating the LOGT funding to the city's transportation priorities or demanding resignations and a board that will formally move on. I don't know what the appetite is for that. JTA's board members themselves (Ari Jolly if I recall) have proclaimed that they're deep in sunk cost fallacy. I worry somewhat recalling that Ron Salem was one of those who explicitly said we had to simply trust that Nat Ford would figure things out.

If we are willing to make that choice, then it should be pretty straightforward from there to re-assess the obviously sandbagged and pretty much speculative Technology Options memo, pick a technology that works and apply the funds we already have available to it, which can of course include new vehicles and connecting to Brooklyn. It'll be a shame that this is being done six years after it should have been, but alas.

Brightline seems to be the only viable option in my opinion. They own the rights to make it happen already. Let them get their full operation up and running next year, and then they can have a serious conversation with FEC. Start with three major stops and then revisit with future stop options like they did with Boca and Aventura. Crossing the bridge is a major hurdle, that thing isn't getting any younger. Brightline is going to want housing attached (like WPB and Miami) to its stations in St Aug and I could see a San Marco station. If BL does go forward, this won't be TriRail, it'll be a fancier more premium train, if you haven't rode it yet, it's an awesome experience.  FEC has a lot of land in San Marco and St Augustine. The newer CE O of FEC wants more track and high speeds, if BL wants to pay for it, I'm sure Mexico will be more than willing. Perfect scenario is when Orlando is finished BL buys FEC back from Grupo.

At the end of the day Brightline is arguably more straightforward than Amtrak, because they already have all the agreements and plenty of practice in terms of what needs to be done to make a corridor service happen in FL. I would argue that there's not much of anything foreclosing us from approaching them and figuring out what is needed to get the ball rolling. We already know some of the pieces right now, and odds are their answers aren't going to be things that are unheard of (e.g. RAISE and CRISI support, environmental review work, LRTP inclusion, perhaps Corridor ID, etc).

Within a few weeks service to Orlando should be open, and by the end of this year they have a good chance of breaking ground in Vegas, followed by the completion of their environmental updates for Tampa, which FDOT expects to lead to a Federal State Partnership application next year, which means that by around 2027, they should be close to wrapping construction out west and well underway to Tampa, which is exactly when we should be poised to make our own FSP request and potentially start construction on the FEC either late that year or the following. That might not mean that we exactly complete things by 2030, but it'd have been close enough to have made the enterprise worthwhile. Although if, say, we've already started work on the JRTC station by 2025/6, and all St. Augustine needs is a platform, that becomes even simpler.

^BL is a major reason if I'm COJ, I wouldn't give up Prime Osborn land for a UF campus or anything else. That large piece of rail frontage is a TOD real estate nugget. We don't need a JTA study to tell us that or lay it out.

It would be an all-time unforced error to let go of that site for anything but an incentive. Ironically I think we actually get two TOD studies on that site at this point (U2C and this), plus the LaVilla master plan.

[marcuscnelson]

Anyway, it looks like they uploaded both the Duval and St. Johns presentations to the study website. Did anyone here attend the St. Johns session?

My first impression is definitely that this gives very little thought to the already-extant plants for most of these areas. Other than basically completely giving up on stuff like the Broudy site in St. Augustine (because it's basically out of the authority's hands, of course), it feels almost haphazard.

[Charles Hunter]

As part of the effort to bring BrightLine here, besides working with the North Florida TPO on board, we also need to get the Daytona Beach ("River to Sea") TPO on board. The R2S TPO actually touches the NFTPO at the St. Johns/Flagler County Line. A coalition of MPO/TPOs in SE Florida worked to bring BrightLine to fruition.

[thelakelander]

^Good point. A few years ago, they were on board and excited at the prospect of being tied to Jax and Miami by BrightLine, Amtrak and anything else. I haven't followed them recently though.

[thelakelander]

Anyway, it looks like they uploaded both the Duval and St. Johns presentations to the study website. Did anyone here attend the St. Johns session?

Thanks for sharing! This basically answers why most commuter rail related technical and/or timeline questions can't be answered. Outside of having updated graphics, I'm not sure what this really accomplishes. Since there's no real plan or timeline for implementation, no one should expect an adjacent property owner to commit to redeveloping anything illustrated in that particular fashion.

[simms3]

Anyway, it looks like they uploaded both the Duval and St. Johns presentations to the study website. Did anyone here attend the St. Johns session?

Thanks for sharing! This basically answers why most commuter rail related technical and/or timeline questions can't be answered. Outside of having updated graphics, I'm not sure what this really accomplishes. Since there's no real plan or timeline for implementation, no one should expect an adjacent property owner to commit to redeveloping anything illustrated in that particular fashion.

In looking at that master plan, which is what they presented at the JRTC - THAT's what cost $2M?  I saw another master plan for an area of town, and I think that one cost either $400K or $600K.  It was actually a little more robust than this one in that it included artist's renderings done for the plan, not done previously by the client and thrown in for inclusion.

We are all in the wrong line of work...

Not to diminish other people's work - there were some graphics in there that I could tell whoever was tasked with doing them, it was a bit tedious.  But this study is basically:

A recent aerial picture of LaVilla and Avenues Walk apartments - $500 or so
A picture gathering trip to Atlanta (or maybe hiring Atl photographer there) - $1,000
Google Earth - free
Renderings/pictures found on the web -  free, maybe some required artistic use purchases, so call it $2,500
Graphic designer + high end graphic design tools - $100K?  I don't know, more?  Less?
Travel + time for interviews of various parties - $10K?
Salary of the people involved in writing the study - $100K x 2?

And this assumes this is the only study/product the graphic designer and two people do in a year, but in reality they are probably doing many for many clients, and they probably borrow plenty of language from other studies if it fits the bill for this one too.

I just don't understand how these things balloon to $2M, and who is pocketing that??  We all need to figure this out for our own good...