Our Future CNY Transportation System

Featuring

Cuse Train & Air Taxis (eVOTLs)

David C. Ashley

10.25.2019

We are being asked to review and do planning on a new transportation plan in the NYS DOT's I-81 Viaduct project DEIS for Syracuse (mostly), but no one has talked about what our future transportation system might be or what we need to provide for it. We may want to conjecture on what may happen in the life span of this project.

Let’s just say it's 30 years and we should try to guess what we may need in the year 2050. Many people who are say now 50 years old now will still be here then and will wonder why we did or didn't do a lot of good or bad things in planning. Maybe a good way to start is to see what we did in the past. Lessons of the past frequently come back to give us insight or to find lost things of value. A quick search turned up an amazing undated map called "Syracuse Trolley Lines." Look at all the rail lines. You could commute from Clyde, NY to Syracuse by Trolley.

It's fascinating to learn that St Johnsbury, Vermont used to have 15 trains a day to Boston from their historic train station! Are there some lessons here? Imagine if we had a light rail system like this today. You could commute from West Camden (see map) on the Hudson River RR, then the Leh Val RR to Oneida then the NY Central RR to Syracuse. Some of those near Syracuse must have been just passenger trolleys for communing to jobs in Syracuse. Some tracks are still there, but are there any remaining passenger lines except the NY Central?

We also know that when the Erie Canal opened in 1825, the time to travel from Albany to Buffalo shrank from 22 days by horse drawn coach, to 5 days on a canal boat. And now, of course, the airplane time is probably a couple of hours. Most of that time is probably getting to and from the two airports. To the left is Clinton Square in 1904

My grandfather, Harvey Keens, was a buggy manufacturer in Sedalia Missouri who sold his last buggy to a country doctor in 1922 because Henry Ford's Model Ts had put him out of business. The Model T started selling in 1908, so it took the better part of 20 years to put the buggy businesses under. The railroads started in the 1850s and the Erie Canal lasted until the 1870s...20 years.

Electric trolleys started in Syracuse around the turn of the century and connected to distant villages. Streets like James Street, Salina Street and Euclid Ave had two sets of trolley tracks running down the center of the street. But by 1924, the bus had begun to rise in prominence, until it finally drove out the last trolley in Syracuse in 1941. Forty-two buses were purchased to bring the Syracuse fleet to 200, and work crews began cutting down unused electric wires the week before.

The trolley system lasted about 50 years. Our current bus system is operated by a public authority, Centro, and provides service in the city to within about a quarter mile and also through most villages, but on a reduced schedule and few residences within the magic 1/4 mile zone and little or no late night or weekend service in most places outside the city. It services about 6 or 7 % of travelers, most of whom are low income or students and cannot afford a car. Many also have to take a transfer creating long travel times. There do not appear to be any proposed changes or improvements to this public transit system in the 15,000 page DEIS other than at pickup spots. The Cuse Train system could markedly improve that situation.

So we should look for what is just starting now as our 2050 future on the roads of Syracuse? We know climate change and vehicle automation is going to change a lot of things, and transportation may be one of the biggest.

Ideally this would be to be a community wide study effort with historians, transportation folks in every field, engineers, visionaries, ordinary folks, school kids. But that does not appear likely to happen, There's really nothing about the future in the DEIS except one very critical thing: a very interesting chart on projected Climate Change in Section 06-4-5, Energy and Climate Change. It projects that in the 2080s, Syracuse could be the same yearly temperatures as Washington DC is now with the temperature going up between 8 and 11.8 degrees by the 2080s. Very little snow except on rare occasions, and hot summers and even more precipitation. But a lot nicer than many other places in the country and by then, with damaging sea level rise occurring at coastal cities, Florida losing its coastal cities and having fresh water supplies flooded with salt water and the south west cities toasted out of existence, Syracuse may be a thriving, growing Climate Change Refuge City for thousands of immigrants. Phoenix has already had days when they couldn't fly because when it's over about 115 degrees, air is so thin that our current planes don't have enough lift to take off. And in a few years that will be common place.

So how do we make our city and transportation system resilient enough to be thriving when those new immigrants and businesses arrive? We know, most importantly, that we basically must stop burning fossil fuels. We have already burned enough ancient prehistoric deposits of plant material--carbon-- in the form of coal, oil and natural gas to probably blow through the dreaded 2 degree C temperature rise (2 C = 3.6F). And, don't say it too loudly, but we already have discovered far more fossil fuel deposits than we can possibly burn without catastrophic climate change leaving many billions of dollars in "stranded assets" in the ground. And the politicians finally seem to get it. Everyone on the 2020 campaign trail is promising we will have a carbon free society by either 2045 or 2050 depending upon who you listen to--except Trump, of course, but he may be gone soon. Unfortunately, we still have some politicians in our country who have taken a political position against the generally accepted position that humans have contributed to global warming thereby slowing or reversing progress to stop it.

The other important part of our combined energy and transportation history is this. By the 1930s, we had a road system and automobiles that were good enough so that folks didn't have to rely just on buses and trolleys to get to work. General Motors saw to that and helped to get rid of our buses and trolleys. Suburbs started and population growth moved out to the country and towns and accelerated after World War II. Unlike European populations, where there was less land, we had plenty of cheap land, good cars, cheap gasoline and so we spread ourselves out all over the countryside and suburbs. And we tore down hundreds of buildings in cities like Syracuse to build highways like I-81 and I-690 and parking lots everywhere in downtown so we could live in the suburbs. My parent did this too. We moved from Brattle Road in Syracuse to Fayetteville in a big new house. (check out App B in the DEIS Demolition Plans from 1955 and see the hundreds? of houses and other buildings that were demolished for I-81). Our Syracuse population went from 220,000 in 1950 down to 143,000 presently, a loss of 77,000 many of whom went to the suburbs where the county population grew by 125,000 over the same period.

All of the blue areas in adjacent map are surface level parking lots that almost all once were buildings before WW II. As many as possible need to be buildings again in our future to redensify us. We need that Redensifcation Plan to assist the builders. We need solutions that will work for what we have. Our new ReZone should feature dense townhouse concepts in the MX zones

So now one of our major energy problems that we need to address is how do we undo what now, in retrospect, seems like a mistake in spreading ourselves out all across the countryside. Europeans--with an equal or greater standard of living, but less land--have a carbon foot print that's half of what we have. Our problem is we can't just tear our suburbs down and move back to the city and send all of our SUVs and light trucks to the junk yard. And the Parade of Homes bravely marches on building more in the Town of Clay, but we need it here in Syracuse.

We also created a major social justice mistake by purposely moving our black residents out of their 15th Ward homes and into crowded, segregated neighborhoods in the south and west of the city when I-81 was constructed 50 years ago. Additionally, doing major Urban Renewal projects in many areas of older, former 3 to 6 story residential buildings in downtown resulted in a highly segregated minority population contributing to our disgracefully high poverty position on a national ranking scale. So is our exciting new Community Grid proposal a chance to make up for any of those previous mistakes? Reconnecting the neighborhoods to the new Almond Street south of Adams down to MLK Blvd will help, but continuing to Brighton Ave. at grade would be much better.

Looking forward to our future plans, we know that we need to transition to a renewable energy society supplied by wind, solar and other renewable sources and our transportation vehicles will have to follow. It’s not as hard as might be imagined. The vehicles are for sale now, scores of fully electric cars and plug in hybrids that are mostly electric. At some point, no one should be allowed to buy a gasoline only car any more and in Norway they can't after 2025. I had a 2017 Prius Prime plug-in that gets 30 miles on the battery and, I used only 3 1/2 tanks of gas by the time I sold it to get a fully electric Tesla 3 (starts at $37K) in June 2019. Electric buses and trucks are available too, but expensive. Tesla is already making a big electric truck that will go 500 miles. And, of course, there are cities outside the US that still have electric buses that hook on to overhead power lines. Might we want those again? Subways are electric, of course.

VWs new ID.3 electric hatchback with 300 mile range.

Plus, there are a proliferation of small electric vehicles, some legal on small roads, some not, like golf cart size, motor bikes, scooters etc, all electric. These are more practical than regular bikes that suffer from our ubiquitous hills everywhere and long winters. I would expect we will see a lot more of these small vehicles in the years to come and so that's something we can plan for now in our DEIS review. Some need "bike" paths, but some don't. Instead of a "Bike Plan," maybe we need a "Personal Renewable Energy Vehicle Plan," PREVs Plan. But they may not come easily if we don't make provisions for them now.

There are electric skate boards with a 15-mile range that will even climb hills. I just saw a man on in business suit downtown riding a tiny one-wheel device zipping along on the sidewalk. A little scary, but he had a smile on his face. And there are electrified rental bikes everywhere now. You leave them at your destination and the company comes and picks them up to recharge. These all fit into the category of "last mile" vehicles and BMW is making an electric scooter to synchronize and charge from a BMW car for the last mile. It's hard to imagine what comes next, but we should try.

Nationally, giant forces are competing. The oil giants and Koch are funding campaigns against electric cars and the installation of recharge stations. Giant electric utilities want to install thousands of plug-in recharge stations, some at taxpayer expense, and the other giant is opposing it. Car dealers hate electric cars because they have virtually none of the expensive to maintain features that gasoline engine cars have. You won't find any electric car ads in your Sunday newspaper car section. All the major car companies are racing to come out with new longer range electric cars like the new 300 mile VW ID.3 at $33K (lousy name). GM is planning to have 20 new electric car models by 2023. All the car companies are racing to catch up now.

At some point in the future in the next couple of decades there's going to be terror in the remaining gasoline car market as the "stranded asset" concept kicks in with constantly increasing carbon taxes, gas stations closing and gasoline car resale values disappearing. Watch out.

Eventually the Democrats will again control both houses of congress and will either pass HR 763, the fee and dividend carbon tax or a version of the Green New Deal. Both will raise the cost of carbon based fuels which already cost a lot more in Europe because of taxes. HR 763 will give all the money back to every individual over 19 years old and rely on market forces to move us away from carbon use. Green New Deal will tax carbon and give some of the money to energy projects, but most of the money will go for social goals and has absolutely no chance of passing a Republican Senate or even with conservative Democrats. Time is of the essence; we should pass HR 763 now. Lower income folks may get a monthly check larger than what it costs them. So who’s really opposed to this...guess who?

Everyone interested in this subject, in addition to the Transportation Section, should review the street plans in the DEIS Appendix A-1-4: Community Grid Alternative – Highway Plans, Profiles and Typical Sections. The DEIS is extremely difficult to navigate because there are no indexes nor page numbers within Sections. I would suggest that NYS DOT, if they could pull the Website down and make some additions, should simply put consecutive page numbers on every sheet say in the top right hand corner because it impossible to reference anything now because it only has page numbers on pages with text.

Regarding our bike plan future, if you look at these NYS DOT street plans, you will find that they are quite detailed with lane widths, sidewalks, bike lanes and filler strips between, all fully dimensioned. One quickly discovers many different bike configurations. Some are separate bike lanes on each side in addition to sidewalks, a few are combined in 10 or 14-foot-wide multi-use sidewalk and bike "trails," some are 5 foot lanes at the side of the driving lanes, (Mike Stanton recently posted an article critical of doing these lanes as unsafe) and a few places where bikes and cars share the same driving lane and there will be big bike symbols painted on the pavement. This happens on N. Salina Street and Evans Street, for example, and the city just did some on South Crouse. We need to decide if we agree with what they have done so far and also how might these future small electric vehicles, PREVs, work on our city streets and our so called bike lanes, and where can they park and recharge? A big question to research and think about. But now is the time.

Concurrently, we already have Uber and Lyft. How do they impact our future road system? Both probably will transition to driverless vehicle mode operating 24/7 in the future which might lower their trip cost (no driver, no tip) enough that people would want to give up their private cars. And some will give up driveways and garages. That cost saving would pay for enough solar panels to make their house net zero electric and if they had electric heat pump heating and cooling, maybe completely net zero which is the goal where our society should be heading.

We don’t have self-driving cars and trucks yet, but they most certainly will be here quite soon maybe even before the project is finished. Here are some of the planning problems we face and they will face. Let's say you want to go to your shop on Warren Street where you work from your house in Fayetteville. You call for a SDV on your cell phone like you would call Uber. The vehicle comes down your street, but your house is on the other side, so you have to wait there. How does the SDV know where to stop? And not in front of a mail box or in winter in front of a snow bank? And maybe if you have given up your personal vehicle, you have no driveway and your garage is now your 5G facilitated office at home. Here are some obvious major design problems to solve. How does it turn around if you live on a long dead end street? Where and what are the designated stop points for the SDV? Back in the days of horse carriages, there were stone platforms, steps and A cast iron hitching post next to the curb.

The vehicle already knows where you are going because you typed that in. It successfully gets to Warren Street, but there are parked cars on both sides near your shop, so where and how does it let you off? Ideally there are periodic reserved drop off and pick up spots designated on Warren Street for SDVs and the SDV takes you to that spot. Hopefully there are no other SDVs there or no light poles or parking meters where your door has to open. Do we determine those spots now in the DEIS? We know it's going to happen. Time to plan for our future now?

How about an Amazon delivery SDV? Surely it's coming. Where does it drop things off or the automated postman drop our mail? Will there be road side drop off boxes? Maybe with pneumatic tubes to the house or building? What do you think? Lots of options to think about. Not hitching posts...but we need some clever inventions.

When it drops you off, then what does the SDV do? Can it wait in that spot until another call? Does it have to go to a recharge station? (for sure, they will be electric) and where are the recharge areas? A Tesla can recharge 80% in twenty minutes and drive 300 miles, but that requires a huge, very expensive battery. These may have smaller cheaper batteries. But maybe not. But maybe it doesn't make sense for the vehicles to go all the way to their home base to recharge during the day; so there will be some recharge stations like we have gas stations now. Maybe where the gas stations are now because we won't need them anymore. A person still needs to plug the vehicle in and unplug it. And we won't need oil change, muffler and repair shops any more.

Then where does the SDV go at night? It needs to be serviced at least once a day, cleaned inside and out, protected from snow, recharged etc.? Ideally it would go to one of the Cuse Train stations like I am proposing. Read about that below.

What about the suburbs we talked about earlier? The McMansions with 2,500 sq ft, three car garages on two acres? It’s one thing to stop building them, but unrealistic to assume we will tear them down simply because in a few years diving big electric cars downtown or to University Hill becomes very expensive or not permitted. Why? Because we need to Redensify. Remember the map above with all the parking lots in blue? We need a Redensification Plan (the city should commission architects to prepare a plan for every blue site showing a couple of code approved schematic building plans that can then be given to every developer and builder in the area) to fill those parking lots back up with buildings. Why? To repeat, Europeans have a carbon foot print about half of what we have. We need walkable communities with high density like Europe or NYC and like we used to have. We need to build net zero energy buildings in those infills. My house has enough solar panels so I am net zero electric for my house and electric car. You can too with a contract with a local solar panel farm.

Filling in those blue parking lots would bring thousands of people back into the city and downtown wiping out the city's $10M tax deficit. The infrastructure is all there and 5G will be soon. The new walkable community that could grow up along the new Almond Street Boulevard (assuming DOT does the community grid solution) from Adams to Fayette could hold up to 3 to 5,000 people alone. It would make sense for NYS DOT to shrink their Almond boulevard ROW from the present almost 200 feet wide to 113 ft, so there can be high rise building sites at least 85 feet deep (70'+ 15' back yard) on the west side. This is already a high rise residential area, zoned MX-5, and 20,000 people work within walking distance of this corridor. By 2050 or before, we need to become a dense, walkable community again like we were in the 1950s before I-81 and I-690.

Cuse Train

So what's a Cuse Train and how does it preserve the suburbs? It's like a high density park and ride system. Some park and ride surface level lots do work, especially if you are well away from the city with cheap land.

So here's the Cuse Train concept. It's a high density transportation system with frequent service in a protected environment. Here's a good example. There could be a Cuse Train Station, one of three for now, in back of Wegmans on Genesee Street in Dewitt. It would be say six stories and hold say 2,500 cars (350'x 370'). It would service four high employment areas in the city where surface level parking lots could be freed up: 1. Syracuse University, 2. The hospitals--(Crouse, Veterans and Upstate), 3. Downtown and 4. Destiny or the Airport. There would be electric bus rapid transit service, BRTs, stopping at several stops at those four locations, no transferring. The BRT vehicles with WiFi might be on a 2 to 3-minute schedule during morning rush hour from an enclosed heated lobby that also has coffee, snacks and newspaper service. Most folks would be dropped right at their door or property line. (See map and route description) What could be more convenient? Wegmans has not been consulted on the use of this location, but would probably favor the added traffic it brings.

Most of the riders who work at those four places, except Destiny, currently have to pay for parking and often have to ride a scuttle bus, so this way they can drive from the outer suburbs, park in a sheltered garage with electric recharge outlets and ride right to their front door on a BRT doing their email etc. Leave the driving to us as the saying goes. The large employers could help facilitate this happening. Upstate alone has 20,000 employees. They would have the added incentive that employees would have done part of their private email before they got to work and, of course, that there could be thousands of cars not parking close to their facilities freeing up valuable land for expansion, other purposes and redensification. For most commuters, this would cut their driving distance in say half and noticeably reduce traffic on the rest of the route by the number of cars eliminated from the road.

Just with the initial station at Wegmans maybe there would be two thousand or more less cars in the morning and also the evening on the very crowded new I-81 (old I-481) and I-690. The east branch of Cuse Train in the future might add a station at the back of Fayetteville Mall and maybe in back of the Stickley factory in Manlius. This eastern branch of Cuse Train might ultimately be say 4 to 5,000 vehicles.

The rest of the initial Cuse Train system is envisioned to include two other 2,500 vehicle (expandable to say 5,000) stations, one at the NYS Fair near the Amphitheater (No 2). and one on the Syracuse Air Port (No 3) access road.

The electric Bus Rapid Transit vehicles would go through their prescribed route in let’s say an hour ending up mostly empty at one of the other three Cuse Stations. This would maximize efficiency. Some would turn around at the Loretto complex and come back.

Cuse Train Map below:

Cuse Train System

The new transport system envisioned to "save the suburbs", redensify downtown and areas around institutions and lastly to help facilitate our transition to renewable electricity, is envisioned to have three initial 2,500 vehicle Cuse Train Stations (expandable to 5,000), No. 1 in back of Dewitt Wegmans, No. 2 at the NY State Fair and No. 3 at the Syracuse Airport.

Cuse Train Routes

The route would be as follows. From Cuse Train Station No 1 at Wegman's, go south on new 81 (old 481), get off at Business Loop 81 (BL-81) (old 81), come up to the new E. Glen Ave interchange and stop at Loretto complex and continue north on BL-81 picking up passengers at south side stops at Brighton (hopefully), Colvin, MLK. Then get off at stop Van Buren, turn east up the hill on Van Buren and turn north on Irving Ave, stop immediately for SUNY ESF and Syracuse University; continue north on Irving, stop VA Hospital, continue north, stop Couse Hospital, right turn west on Harrison and loop around to front entrance of stop Upstate Hospital and back on Harrison, stop County Office Building, Civic Center and Everson Museum, loop around, stop, Centro Bus Hub and turn north on Salina Street with stops, turn east on E Washington, loop around, stop Syracuse City Hall and get on I-690 west to stop State Fair Cuse Trane Station No 2 near the Amphitheater.

Every other Cuse Train BRT would be on BL-81, (instead of 690) and get off at stop Destiny USA and then continue back to BL-81 up to I-81 and get off at Col Eileen Collins Blvd (Syracuse Airport) stop Cuse Train Station No 3.

Because there are three stations, each electric BRT would alternate ending at one station, (ones coming from No 1 would alternate ending between No 2 and No 3) alternating between one or the other. This would require some vehicles to turn around and come back at Loretto. But all vehicles would retrace their opposite route (when they are fully recharged) for all other stops so they would start fully loaded from one of three Cuse Stations.

Based on the station's 2,500 vehicle size, each station would need to be on a 2 to 3-minute schedule during 2 hour morning rush hour. This would require up to 25 electric BRTs per station if one guesses that the time from station to station is say an hour including say a five or ten-minute loading layover at the stations. There is no transferring for passengers except those coming from a Centro local route that might connect to one of the stations. Studying how this interfaces with the existing Centro system is another whole study task. Regional Centro buses going to other small cities and villages like Oswego and Manlius, for example, might benefit by terminating at a Cuse Train Station.

As mentioned, this system would cover the whole meds and eds area and downtown representing many thousands of suburban commuters and area small cities and villages plus students with a gross capacity of 7,500 vehicles. The number of passengers could be more once people who walk, bike or get dropped off or transfer from out of town Centro buses are counted. The last leg of their trip would be in an electric vehicle helping with that overall goal of transitioning to renewable electricity. And it would help reverse the damage of the past when we built all of those parking lots now allowing all those spaces to be available to redensify our core areas with apartment, office and commercial buildings creating a building boom and returning us toward a more walkable, pleasant community ready for the coming century.

The route proposed includes several individual stops on Syracuse's south side intentionally included to service a social justice need of making better job transportation available for the working poor.

It might become a national prototype for saving our spread out suburbs in our future carbon free society. And for a rebirth of our hollowed out cities so they could redensify in the freed up parking areas near institutions and downtowns moving us back toward our root solution of vital, dense, walkable cities we need for our sustainable future. Hundreds of billions of dollars in construction and employment could be created by new buildings on what had been parking lots for suburbanites.

Who would own, operate and pay for a Cuse Train system? It's not clear what the best option would be, but it's probably financed by government money. Centro most probably would operate it. But let’s say at $20K per parking space, the behind Wegmans 2,500 vehicle Cuse Train station would cost $50M and say 25 electric BRTs at $700K, $19M, say total $90M with startup costs.

But it would reduce traffic count on new I-81 (old I-481) and I-690 and on BL-81 by say 4 to 5,000 trips per rush hour. Could that be a mitigating cost in the DEIS for the impact of the new I-81 on the Town of Dewitt? NYS DOT hasn't offered any other mitigating proposal measures for the additional overcrowding that may occur when the new through I-81 traffic is added to the old I-481 or how our Centro bus system of public transit could be improved. Would we still need an extra lane on new the 81 (old 481), for example? Would we still need to widen 81 north from 690 to Bear Street and tear down and rebuild the three "new" bridges which will cost hundreds of millions? So is there a way NYS DOT could support the Cuse Train project?
Self-Driving Vehicles

The other exciting function of the Cuse Train station garages could be the home for the self driving vehicles. If you assume that there would probably be only one franchised company supplying the driverless vehicles--maybe Uber or Lyft--for passenger use, they would need a "home" for the vehicles where they can come to be serviced, cleaned and recharged at least once a day and for most of the middle of the night. The Cuse Train stations would be wired so that every parking space had the wiring for electric recharge plug installation now or in the future. An area of the garage could accommodate the driverless vehicle company's professional maintenance and cleaning services.

Waymo's Self-driving Vehicles

Other areas in the Cuse Train Stations could have parking and recharge for the smaller type vehicles, electric bikes, scooters, golf carts etc. There's no sense having these tiny vehicles use full car spaces. But we need to promote their use. There could be ROW sidewalks to service residents within walking distance and bike/last mile vehicles lanes. Having reliably available recharge capabilities would promote the use of electric vehicles and reduce the dreaded range anxiety. Someone from Cazenovia would feel safe driving their electric car here and plugging in so there was enough charge to get home. Mid-rise apartments might grow up around the stations, town zoning permitting. The NYS Fair Station No. 2, could promote year around activity at the State Fair and maybe addition of some mid or high rise apartment buildings nearby.

A recent article from the National Association of City Transportation Officials, NACTO, says planning for a future where everyone gets transported right to their workplace door by driverless vehicles would be a terrible mistake because it would crowd our city streets with driverless vehicles. The Cuse Train system solves this problem by copying big city commuter train type system, keeping the cars at home or at the Cuse Train station. In fact, much like its big city counterparts, it would encourage two car family to give up one car and take the now cheaper Uber or Lyft driverless vehicles to the station or walk or bike or get a lift from the spouse.

Both will benefit if Cuse Train and the driverless vehicles develop a symbiotic relationship. It will increase the capacity of the system because those commuters will not occupy a space in the stations and it will reduce the costs for the driverless vehicle company because the vehicles can "sleep" overnight as close to one of their major customer groups as possible. And because all the vehicles will be electric, it will accelerate our needed transition to becoming a renewable electric society.

A driverless vehicle transportation system in a city is going to require close cooperation with the company and the city. The company will use software systems that have maps showing the location of every vehicle on the screen and the company will have voice contact with each vehicle for concerns that arise such as breakdowns and emergencies. The company and the DPW, police and fire departments will need to be on the same page with instant information on street conditions, closures, accidents, breakdowns and, in winter, where plows are and which streets are rated "passable" on a minute by minute basis. Our coming 5G system in the city will undoubtedly help facilitate this required cooperation. The city already has a system like this, so there is a head start.

Electric Bus Rapid Transit, BRT

The city and the company will have to cooperate and work closely together on approved parking, loading and waiting curb side locations. DPW can't have trash barrels in vehicle zones and police can notify the company if cars violate a zone, for example. The fact that all the vehicles will probably be electric will help us in our quest to be carbon neutral. As mentioned, presumably the ride cost without a driver and tip will be less than traditional vehicles services like Uber and Lyft charge now and thereby encourage more people to give up a personal car altogether. There obviously will be a mix of various options for some time especially since having a personal vehicle, whether electric or gas, will remain a powerfully guarded option cherished by many folks.

The self-driving vehicle industry has already stated that they are going to be rolling out systems in non-snow cities first. A couple of years’ delay for snow cities is what I heard. But they need a snow city to do extensive testing. Blizzards don't happen very often in Phoenix. And Pittsburgh, where Uber is testing their self-driving vehicles now, gets only 28" of annual snow fall compared to Syracuse's 123.8". A consortium of the self-driving industry in concert with a Syracuse team of the Syracuse city departments, Syracuse University and SUNY ESF and the Center of Excellence should be proposed for federal, state or industry funding. What better city to be the Winter Test Research City for Autonomous Vehicles?

Public Transit

Centro Map below:

Centro

What about other public transit? Centro has a good system that manages to get folks around town and even from far flung towns and villages. But, as mentioned, it is used almost largely by poor people and students and service to suburbs falls off rapidly because of low density. And if you have to transfer to get to your destination, trip time can become onerous. SMTC has a proposal for a rapid transit system in the city called SMART 1, but the Website is not currently active. There is some guidance from planning organizations and USGBC, in their LEED program, which gives credits for buildings located within 1/4 mile of two bus lines or 1/2 mile of a light rail or subway stop. Centro does meet the 1/4 mile criteria in most areas of the city, but if you don't work downtown, transfer time may be prohibitive.

To be successful, a rapid transit bus system like SMART 1, which basically is a large X across the city, would need to have small enclosed semi heated waiting lobbies like light rail systems have and meet the 1/2 mile criteria for its customer numbers. If you can attract enough people--like the Cuse Train--you can afford to have very frequent service which a system like this requires to be successful.

Ideally, Centro would be free--paid for by taxes--and busses would come twice as often and service hours would be extended especially on weekends. If you know you are paying for it, you will want to use it. My guess is that ridership would jump many fold quite quickly if this were to happen. How much would that cost in added taxes? Maybe less than owing a car, but it might encounter considerable resistance.

Making surface level parking--which is now cheap in Syracuse--more expensive, say double what it is now and comparable to large cities, would certainly facilitate better public transit facilities and the Cuse Train concept. Can the city do that?

eVTOL Air Taxi Service

Uber is already demonstrating air taxi service in a couple of places like San Francisco, Dallas and Melbourne using small electric vertical take-off planes that can carry a pilot and four passengers at 160 mph for distances of up to 60 miles or more. They expect some commercial demonstration operations to start in 2020. Through various methods they can take off vertically and then, since they also have fixed wings, fly like a regular airplane. They fly between a 1,000 and 5,000 feet and--unlike helicopters-- are extremely quiet and can operate close to residential neighborhoods.

Uber has a detailed White Paper describing all aspects of the issues involved in this advanced form of transportation available on the internet. https://www.uber.com/elevate.pdf/er.

Certainly for the purposes of this study of our future CNY transpiration systems, we should be paying very special attention and planning accordingly when the opportunity presents itself.

From what they say and hope, it will become widespread and one of the critical planning issues right now is to identify potential sites for the required veriports and veristops. A veriport would be a facility with at two or more landing circles and storage/charging areas for even more eVTOLs, maybe in a covered area plus the support facilities you might expect in a very small airport including security and maintenance. But they say this can be accomplished in a space as small as an acre or two. They need to be 500 feet from higher objects like tall buildings. A veristop is more like a present heliport with space for landing and entrance/waiting/security office. The veristops` might be widely scattered at say corporate headquarters, on top of office buildings or even a private residences assuming they met all requirements. But as many as possible and we should be looking for candidate locations now. A popular site for veriports is on top of parking garages. In our case, I am going to suggest that we use the top of the Cuse Train stations. Veriports are not cheap, however. Just the electric charging stations for a veriport could be well over a million dollars.

"The greatest operational barrier to deploying a VTOL fleet in cities is a lack of sufficient locations to place landing spots. Even if VTOLs were certified to fly today, cities simply don’t have the necessary takeoff and landing sites for the vehicles to operate at fleet scaling. A small number of cities already have multiple heliports and might have enough capacity to offer a limited initial VTOL service, provided these are in the right locations, are readily accessible from street level, and have space available to add charging stations. But if VTOLs are going to achieve anything approaching their potential, infrastructure will need to be added."

Just imagine the opportunity to connect all of our small cities without major airports together for business purposes. Distances from our Syracuse Airport (a veriport site) are as follows: (air flight distances might be 1/8 to 1/4 less) Cortland 45 miles, Watertown 65m, Rome 44m, Utica 55m, Ithaca 55m, Oswego 40m. Those trips would take about 15 minutes in an eVTOL air taxi compared to over an hour by car in many cases.

Uber expects passenger costs to ultimately be cheaper than owning a car. Maybe in large, dense metro areas, but not so soon elsewhere, like CNY, without very proactive planning. In their White Paper, they say the following:

"Our analysis shows that in the long-term autonomous case, direct costs per vehicle mile will approach 50 cents per mile (equivalent to 35 cents per ground mile). We can expect that the price for a 45-mile pool VTOL, which would replace a 60-mile automobile trip, could approach as low as $21 for the 15 minute journey."

Uber might benefit from the wonderful 50-mile test corridor that has be established and funded for drone research between Syracuse and Rome. Companies like Nuair and many others are already actively involved in testing.

The other advantage, of course, is that we must transition in the next 20 years--some (like me) say as soon as possible-- to renewably supplied electricity and away from fossil fuels originating from oil, coal or natural gas. Getting our electricity from renewables is a whole another issue that we should be pressing ourselves, utilities and government to get going on. I would suggest a CNY Renewable Energy Authority.

The other thing which Syracuse is doing, which will help, is changing its zoning to allow more mixed uses, greater density and reduced parking requirements. This is happening in our new ReZone which is currently almost ready to be rolled out. The more work places located close to residential, the more people can walk to work...and stay healthy. But the Common Council needs to act on ReZone soon. Villages and towns could also encourage their future growth within walking distance of Cuse Train stations and facilitate sidewalks (at least 5 feet away from the curb) and cross walk lights. ReZone needs to add denser Town Houses to their mix of types and zones.

Those are some ideas on what our future transportation system could look like in 2050. We have an opportunity to start a national trend to "Save our suburbs" and rebuild our cities and promote electrification of our vehicles and create a home for self-driving vehicles by starting the Cuse Train concept which also promotes the necessary Redensification of our cities into dense, more walkable, bike friendly pleasant places to live and work.

Having an advanced, sustainable transportation system is also in keeping with the concept of becoming a Climate Change Refuge City.

To take your first trip in an Uber eVTOL air taxi, copy and paste in your browser:
https://video.search.yahoo.com/search/video?fr=ymyy-t-999&p=uber+air+taxi+video#id=5&vid=53d978431c56389c0823a2cb9ffc091c&action=click

David C. Ashley
10.25.2019
davidcashley@gmail.com,
101 Bradford Ln, Syracuse, NY 13224

===============================================================

A Proposal for Our Future CNY Transportation System

By David C Ashley 6.6.2019

NOTE: This is an earlier version of the above post

For DEIS Transportation Study Group, Dave Mankiewicz, Chair

This is really scary; we are being asked to review and do planning on a new transportation plan in the NYSDOT's DEIS for Syracuse (mostly) but no one has talked about what our future transportation system might be or what we need to provide for it. We may want to conjecture on what may happen in the life span of this project. Let’s just say it's 51 years and we should try to guess what we may need in the year 2070. Many people who are say now 45 years old now will still be here then and will wonder why we did or didn't do a lot of good or bad things.

Maybe a good way to start is to see what we did in the past. Lessons of the past frequently come back to give us insight or to find lost things of value. I Googled "Syracuse Trolley Lines" and found this amazing map with no description, just the map. Look at all the rail lines.

It's sort of mind boggling. I remember being in St Johnsbury Vermont looking at their historic train station and I think I remember hearing that they used to have 25 trains a day to Boston (maybe it was only 12, can't remember exactly). Wow! Are there some lessons here? Imagine if we had a light rail system like this today. You could commute from West Camden (see map) on the Hudson River RR, then the Leh Val RR to Oneida then the NY Central RR to Syracuse. Some of those near Syracuse must have been just passenger trolleys for communing to jobs in Syracuse. Some tracks are still there, but are there any passenger lines except the NY Central?

We also know that when the Erie Canal opened in 1825, the time to travel from Albany to Buffalo shrank from 22 days by horse drawn coach, to 5 days on a canal boat. And now, of course, the airplane time is probably a couple of hours. Most of the time is probably getting to and from the two airports.

My grandfather was a buggy manufacturer in Sedalia MO who sold his last buggy to a country doctor in 1922 because Henry Ford's Model Ts put him out of business. The Model T started selling in 1908, so it took the better part of 20 years to put the buggy businesses under. The railroads started in the 1850s and the Erie Canal lasted until the 1870s...20 years. So we should look for what is just starting now as our 2040 future on the roads of Syracuse? We know climate change is going to change a lot of thing, and transportation may be one of the biggest.

So this probably needs to be a community wide effort-historians, transportation folks in every field, visionaries, ordinary folks, school kids. There's really nothing about the future in the DEIS except one very critical thing: a very interesting chart on projected Climate Change. Below is the Climate Change chart in the DEIS Section 06-4-5 Energy and Climate Change. In the 2080s, Syracuse could be the same yearly temperatures as Washington DC is now. (look at the top line across where our temperature could go up by 11.8 degrees by the 2080s). No more snow except on rare occasions, and hot summers and even more precipitation. But a lot nicer than many other places in the country and by then, with damaging sea level rise at coastal cities and the south west cities toasted out of existence, Syracuse may be a thriving, growing Climate Change Refuge City for thousands of immigrants. So how do we make our city and transportation system resilient enough to be thriving when those new immigrants arrive?

Related to that, we know that we basically have to stop burning fossil fuels. We have already burned enough ancient prehistoric deposits of plant material--carbon-- in the form of coal, oil and natural gas to probably blow through the 2 degree C temperature rise as you can see from the chart above (2 C = 3.6F). And the politicians finally seem to get it. Everyone on the 2020 campaign trail is promising we will have a carbon free society by either 2040 or 2050 depending upon who you listen to--except Trump, of course, but he will be gone soon.

The other important part of our combined energy and transportation history is this. By the 1930s, we had a road system and automobiles that were good enough so that folks didn't have to just rely on buses and trolleys to get to work. General Motors saw to that and helped to get rid of our buses. Suburbs started and population growth moved out to the country and towns. Unlike European populations, where there was less land, we had plenty of cheap land, good cars, cheap gasoline and so we spread ourselves out all over the country side and suburbs. And we tore down hundreds of buildings in cities like Syracuse to build highways like 81 and 690 and parking lots everywhere in downtown so we could live in the suburbs. (check out App B in the DEIS Demolition Plans from 1955 and see the hundreds? of houses and other buildings that were demolished for 81). Our Syracuse population went from 220,000 in 1950 down to 143,000 presently, a loss of 77,000 many of whom went to the suburbs where the county population grew by 125,000 over the same period.

See Fig 1-1 below and check out all the blue parking lots that used to be buildings and, ideally, could be again in our new transportation future if we redensify using the same infrastructure.

So that's enough background for the moment. Here's a first crack at our future transportation system over the next 50 years or so.

We will have to transition as quickly as we can to a renewable electric society--electricity supplied by wind, solar and other renewable sources--and our transportation vehicles will have to follow. It's not as hard as you think. The vehicles are for sale now, scores of fully electric cars and the plug in hybrids that are mostly electric, for example. (No one should be allowed to buy a gasoline only car any more). I have a 2017 Prius Prime plug-in that gets 30 miles on the battery and so far, I have used only 3 1/2 tanks of gas. Electric buses and trucks are available too, but expensive. Tesla is already making a big electric truck that will go 500 miles. And, of course, there are cities outside the US that still have electric buses that hook on to overhead power lines. Might we want those?

Plus, there are a proliferation of small electric vehicles, some legal on small roads, some not, like golf cart size, motor bikes, scooters etc, all electric. These are more practical than regular bikes that suffer from our ubiquitous hills everywhere and long winters. I would expect we will see a lot more of these small vehicles in the years to come and so that's something we can plan for now in our DEIS review. Some need "bike" paths, but some don't. Instead or "Bike Plan," maybe we need a "Personal Renewable Energy Vehicle Plan," PREVs Plan. But they may not come easily if we don't make provisions for them now.

Everyone interested in this subject, in addition to the Transportation Section, should review the street plans in the DEIS Appendix A-1-4: Community Grid Alternative – Highway Plans, Profiles and Typical Sections. The DEIS is extremely difficult to navigate because there are no indexes nor page numbers within Sections. I would strongly suggest that NYSDOT, if they could pull the Website down and make some additions, should simply put consecutive page numbers on every sheet say in the top right hand corner because it impossible to reference anything now because it only has page numbers on pages with text.

If you look at these NYSDOT street plans, you will find that they are quite detailed with lane widths, sidewalks, bike lanes and filler strips between, all fully dimensioned. One quickly discovers many different bike configurations. Some are separate bike lanes on each side in addition to sidewalks, a few are combined in 10 or 14-foot-wide multi-use trails, some are 5 foot lanes at the side of the driving lanes, (Mike Stanton recently posted an article critical of doing these lanes as unsafe) and a few places where bikes and cars share the same driving lane and there will be big bike symbols painted on the pavement. This happens on N Salina Street and Evan Street, for example. We need to decide if we agree with what they have done so far and also how might these future small electric vehicles, PREVs, work on our city streets and our so called bike lanes, and where can they park and recharge? A big question to research and think about. But now is the time.

Concurrently, we already have Uber and Lyft. How do they impact our future road system? Both may transition to driverless vehicle mode in the future which might lower their trip cost (no driver, no tip) enough that people would want to give up their private cars. And give up driveways and garages. That cost saving would pay for enough solar panels to make their house net zero electric and if they had electric heat pump heating and cooling, maybe completely net zero which is the goal where our society should be heading.

We don’t have self-driving cars and trucks yet, but they most certainly will be here quite soon maybe even before the project is finished. Let’s take a hypothetical trip in a self-driving vehicle, SDV, to illustrate some of the planning problems we face and it will face. Let's say you want to go to your shop on Warren Street where you work from your house in Fayetteville. You call for a SDV on your cell phone like you would call Uber. The vehicle comes down your street, but your house is on the other side, so you have to wait there. How does the SDV know where to stop? And not in front of a mail box or in winter in front of a snow bank? And maybe if you have given up your personal vehicle, you have no driveway and your garage is now your 5G facilitated office at home. The vehicle already knows where you are going because you typed that in, but how does it turn around if you live on a long dead end street? It successfully gets to Warren Street, but there are parked cars on both sides near your shop, so where and how does it let you off? Ideally there are periodic reserved drop off and pick up spots designated on Warren Street for SDVs and the SDV takes you to that spot. Hopefully there are no other SDVs there or no light poles or parking meters where your door has to open. Do we determine those spots now in the DEIS? We know it's going to happen. Time to plan for our future now?

How about an Amazon delivery SDV? Where does it drop things off or the automated postman drop our mail? Will there be road side drop off boxes? Maybe with Pneumatic tubes to the house or building? What'daya think?

When it drops you off, then what does the SDV do? Can it wait in that spot until another call? Does it have to go to a recharge station? (for sure, they will be electric) and where are the recharge areas? A Tesla can recharge 80% in twenty minutes and drive 300 miles, but that requires a huge, very expensive battery. These will probably have smaller cheaper batteries. But it doesn't make sense for the vehicles to go all the way to their home base to recharge during the day; so there will be some recharge stations like we have gas stations now. Maybe where the gas stations are now because we won't need them anymore.

Then where does it go at night? It needs to be serviced at least once a day, cleaned inside and out, protected from snow, recharged etc? Ideally it would go to a Cuse Train Stations like I am proposing. Read about that below.

What about the suburbs we talked about earlier? The McMansions with 2,500 sq ft, three car garages on two acres? It’s one thing to stop building them, but unrealistic to assume we will tear them down simply because in a few years diving big electric cars downtown or to University Hill becomes very expensive or not permitted. Why? Because we need to Redensify. Remember the map above with all the parking lots in blue? We need a Redensification Plan (the city should commission architectural experts to prepare this plan for every blue site showing a couple of code approved schematic building plans that can then be given to every developer and builder in the area) to fill those parking lots back up with buildings. Why? Europeans have a carbon foot print about half of what we have. We need walkable communities with high density like Europe or NYC. We need to build net zero energy buildings in those infills. My house has enough solar panels so I am net zero electric for my house and electric car. You can too with a contract with a local solar farm.

Filling in those blue parking lots would bring thousands of people back into the city and downtown wiping out our $20M tax deficit in the city. The infrastructure is all there and 5G will be soon. The new walkable community that could grow up along the new Almont Street Boulevard from Adams to Fayette could hold up to 5,000 people alone. (we need to tell, not ask, NYSDOT we want them to shrink their boulevard ROW from the present almost 200 feet wide to 112 ft, so there can be high rise building sites at least 85 feet deep on the west side). This is already a high rise residential area, zoned MX-5, and 20,000 people work within walking distance of this corridor. By 2050, we need to become a dense walkable community again like we were in the 1950s before 81 and 690.

So what's a Cuse Train and how does it preserve the suburbs? It's like a high density park and ride system. Some park and ride surface level lots do work especially if you are well away from the city with cheap land.

But here's the Cuse Train concept. It's a high density transportation system with frequent service in a protected environment. Here's a good example. There could be a Cuse Train Station, one of many, in back of Wegmans on Genesee Street in Dewitt. It would be say six stories and hold say 2,500 cars (350'x 370'). It would service four high employment areas in the city where surface level parking lots could be freed up: 1. Syracuse University, 2. The hospitals--(Crouse, Veterans and Upstate), 3. Downtown and 4. Destiny. There would electric bus rapid transit service, BRTs, stopping at those four locations, no transferring, on BRT vehicles with WiFi on a say 12-minute schedule from an enclosed heated lobby that also has coffee, snacks and newspaper service. Most folks would be dropped right at their door or property line. What could be more convenient? Wegmans has not been consulted on the use of this location, but would probably favor the added traffic it brings.

The Cuse Train system could expand to the other sides of town with additional stations and the east branch might add one at the back of Fayetteville Mall and maybe in back of the Stickley factory in Manlius. And on the west side at the State Fair and in back of Northern Lights Shopping Center and more as the need grew. It might become a national prototype for saving our suburbs in our future carbon free society.

The other function of the Cuse Station garages could be the home for the driverless vehicles. If you assume that there would probably be one, maybe two franchised companies supplying the driverless vehicles for passenger use, they would need a "home" for the vehicles where they can come to be serviced, cleaned and recharged at least once a day and for most of the middle of the night. The building would be wired so that every parking space had the wiring for electric recharge plug installation now or in the future. An area of the garage could accommodate the driverless vehicle company with professional maintenance and cleaning services.

Other areas in the Cuse Train Stations could have parking and recharge for the smaller type vehicles, electric bikes, scooters, golf carts etc. There's no sense having these tiny vehicles use full car spaces. But we need to promote their use. There could be ROW sidewalks to service residents within walking distance. Having reliably available recharge capabilities would promote the use of electric vehicles and reduce the dreaded range anxiety. Someone from Cazenovia would feel safe driving their electric car here and plugging in so there was enough charge to get home. Mid-rise apartments might grow up around the stations, town zoning permitting.

From a social justice standpoint, transportation to the outer suburbs for jobs would be improved by reverse travel for inner city folks. Right now, the last bus from Manlius I think is 7:30 at night and maybe none on Sunday?

A driverless vehicle transportation system in a city is going to require close cooperation with the company and the city. The company will use software systems that have maps showing the location of every vehicle on the screen and the company will have voice contact with each vehicle for concerns that arise such as breakdowns and emergencies. The company and the DPW, police and fire departments will need to be on the same page with instant information on street conditions, closures, accidents, breakdowns and, in winter, where plows are and which streets are rated "passable." Our coming 5G system in the city will undoubtedly help facilitate this required cooperation.

The city and the company(s) will have to cooperate and work closely together on approved parking, loading and waiting curb side locations. DPW can't have trash barrels in vehicle zones and police can notify the company if cars violate a zone, for example. The fact that all the vehicles will be electric will help us in our quest to be carbon neutral. As mentioned, presumably the ride cost will be less than traditional vehicles services like Uber and Lyft and thereby encourage more people to give up a personal car altogether.

Who would own, operate and pay for a Cuse Train system? Good question for others to work on. But let’s say at $20K per space, the Wegmans 2,500 vehicle Cuse Train station would cost $50M and say 12 electric BRTs at $600K, $7M, say total $60M startup costs. But it would reduce traffic count on 81 and 690 by say 4 to 5,000 trips per day. Could that be a mitigating cost in the DIES for the impact of the new 81 on the Town of Dewitt?

What about other public transit? Cento has a good system that manages to get folks around town and even from far flung towns and villages. But it is used almost exclusive by poor people and students and service to suburbs falls off rapidly because of low density. And if you have to transfer to get to your destination, trip time can become onerous. SMTC has a proposal for a rapid transit system in the city called SMART 1, but the Website is not active. There is some guidance from planning organizations and USGBC in their LEED program gives credit for buildings located within 1/4 mile of two bus stops or 1/2 mile of a light rail or subway stop. Centro does meet the 1/4 mile criteria in most areas of the city, but if you don't work downtown, transfer time may be prohibitive.

To be successful, a rapid transit bus system like SMART 1, which basically is a large X across the city, would need to have small enclosed semi heated waiting lobbies like light rail systems have and meet the 1/2 mile criteria for its customer numbers. If you can attract enough people you can afford to have very frequent service which a system like this requires to be successful.

Ideally, Centro would be free--paid for by taxes--and busses would come twice as often and service hours would be extended especially on weekends. If you know you are paying for it, you will want to use it. My wild guess is that ridership would jump many fold quite quickly if this were to happen. How much would that cost in added taxes? Less than owing a car.

Making surface level parking--which is now cheap in Syracuse--more expensive, say double what it is now, would greatly facilitate better public transit facilities. Can the city do that?

The other thing which Syracuse is doing, which will help, is changing its zoning to allow more mixed uses. This is happening in our new ReZONE which is currently ready to be rolled out. The more work places located close to residential, the more people can walk to work...and stay healthy.

Those are some ideas on what our future transportation system could look like in 2050. Others should add on to this and start a dialogue.

=====================================================================

CNY GREEN OFFICE

CNY - The Green Center of the Country

A Proposal for the Half Billion NYS Contest

By David C Ashley 2.2.2015

Recently there was an op-ed article in the Post Standard by Steve Kamatian suggesting that central New York should rebrand itself as a national center for green technology like silicone Valley is for computer technology. He mentioned some of our organizations like SUNY ESF, Syracuse Center of Excellence, and other organizations in Syracuse.

That’s a great idea and we could do that if we wanted to. Wanted to means taking it seriously which means establishing a funded organization to coordinate doing what he suggested. Lets call it CNY Green Office. That organization would have an executive director, employees, grant writers, and, of course, a budget to pay for salaries, overhead, holding conventions, advertising nationally, going to conventions with a booth and of course coordinating and promoting all of our local organizations, colleges, manufacturers, research projects, design professionals and other related professions needed to establish ourselves as the green center of the country.

The goal would be to attract as many green related organizations, researchers, manufactures and, of course, employees as possible. Set goals in the Business Plan. The bottom line is if we were willing to put some green on the table, we could do what Steve suggested. Otherwise, forget it. But look at it this way; the Onondaga County budget last year was $1.2 billion. Lets say the CNY Green Office had a budget of $6 million a year. That would only ½ of 1% of the County budget.

If the Governor were willing to come up with half the cost or more in his half billion-dollar contest, we should be able to at least match it. NYSERDA would also be interested.

Not willing to pay the cost of doing that? Then forget the whole idea. But if you were willing to do that, then we could do what Steve was suggesting. The Green Office would need to put together a business plan to show the actual organizational needs and costs. And, importantly, the plan should set out actual yearly goals in number of new businesses and number of jobs. The governor said it’s all about jobs, jobs, jobs.

However, there was recently some very disappointing news in the Sierra Club magazine, which holds an annual reporting of the top 10 Green College and University campuses. For central New York it was extremely dismal; every college and university is invited to submit their credentials, but only Cornell University, SUNY ESF and St. Lawrence University submitted. Out of the 173 submittals, Cornell was 16, SUNY ESF a disappointing 111, and St. Lawrence 118. Missing were Syracuse University is, OCC, LeMoyne, and all of the other local SUNY colleges and universities. They apparently didn’t submit. Syracuse Center of Excellence is part of Syracuse University, but they are still in the process of completing their labs—maybe that could be part of the submittal—to complete their labs. The biggest bright spot that we have is the annual SUNY ESF Green conference, which attracts national speakers in sustainability and green design.

The new Green Office could assist and facilitate this rather involved and onerous submittal and follow up process for our local colleges, and, of course, publicize the results. And the Green Office could coordinate and facilitate a comprehensive green education program spread out in those colleges.

I’m not sure if anyone has a legitimate list of technical firms, manufacturers and professionals in central New York who are involved in green affairs and what they are doing, but that would be one of the primary first goals of the CNY Green Office I mentioned above. If you go to the County website and look for a green page, when you click on the tab, it sends you to the one page City green website page. Not much there. If we were to have a legitimate green initiative, our CNY Green Office would probably have its own website with 10 to 20 pages and links to maybe hundreds organizations locally that are involved in creating design, research and manufacturing and what they are doing. They would have a Facebook page, Twitter account and have a weekly newsletter. Maybe job postings and want ads for green jobs as well.

We could have at least one national conference and trade show every year like the Northeast Sustainable Energy Association, NESEA, does that attracts thousands to Boston every year and maybe ultimately as big as the US Green building Council yearly Expo that attracts tens of thousands and has speakers like Bill Clinton, and Bishop Desmond Tutu for example.

We have Rick Fedrizzi, President and CEO of the US Green Building Council who was one of USGBC’s founders living right here in our western suburbs. He would undoubtedly be interested in helping or at least being a resource.

Assuming when the Route 81 Viaduct comes down, a new beautiful boulevard is constructed, the six acres of extra NYSDOT land available and the countless ugly existing parking lots now in the shadows of 81 could become a renaissance green office park building, with the Syracuse Center of Excellence as a starting anchor, housing scores of new green businesses and their employees in a walkable green community. This is within the distance from SUNY Upstate to also qualify for the StartUpNY program.

There are also empty office buildings in downtown that I would recommend giving away to new businesses.

I would vote for that.

Search This Blog

David C. Ashley

ENVIRONMENTALIST

A Proposal for Our Future CNY Transportation System

CNY - The Green Center of the Country

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog