More Than a Streetcar Named Desire

By Jeffrey Goodman

Since 1835, when the first train chugged uptown along St. Charles Avenue, New Orleanians have relied on public transit to get from neighborhood to neighborhood and from the Mississippi River to Lake Pontchartrain. While the last century saw New Orleans's transit service diversify, consolidate, reorganize, and privatize, the devastation of the city's bus Meet during Hurricane Katrina began a new era in its relationship with transportation.

In 2017, after years of operating without a strategic vision, the New Orleans Regional Transit Authority launched a year-long effort to develop a Strategic Mobility Plan, one that would guide the system for the next 20 years. Divided into multiple sections — Listening & Learning, Exploring Opportunities, Visioning, Evaluating Options, and finally, Developing the Plan — the Strategic Mobility Plan hopes to be a comprehensive blueprint for New Orleans transit, from fare schedules to enhanced corridors to workforce linkages. Supporting all these moves is a philosophical shift: The RTA has started thinking of itself not as a transit agency, but as a mobility agency.

What Is the Strategic Mobility Plan?

The Regional Transit Authority is finishing a plan that will establish the vision, goals, and road map for public transportation in the city and region for the next 20 years. The five-step process includes extensive feedback gathering. The plan is part of the RTA's larger commitment to equity and access for all, as well as excellent service and performance.

Source: The Regional Transit Authority

David Fields, AICP, a consultant with San Francisco-based Nelson/Nygaard, who is helping the RTA create the plan, told The Times-Picayune, "While RTA specifically is a transit agency, more and more we're seeing new types of mobility coming in that play a really big part in the mobility picture." Fields cited ride-hailing services, bike share, and smartphone-based services as new modes that need to be folded into a broader transit ecosystem.

At press time, the plan, which wrapped its last public meetings last November, was scheduled to be released in mid-December. Should the plan be adopted by the RTA board, certain elements could be implemented as soon as late 2018.

Back to basics

But for all the futurism built into a 20-year plan, stakeholder surveys showed New Orleanians had more prosaic concerns: access to destinations and reliability. More than 2,000 frequent, occasional, and infrequent riders were in universal agreement that these two items should be the key values that the RTA embodies, not affordability, efficiency, or even comfort. When asked to come up with big ideas for the future of transit in New Orleans, respondents kept it simple, wishing the RTA would just improve existing services and better communicate information on services, schedules, and delays.

Riders' desire for the RTA to do a better job at the fundamentals stems not from lack of imagination but rather from frustration at the agency's recent history, and the perception of a disconnect between the RTA's emphasis and community needs.

An analysis of 2015 trip data by RIDE New Orleans, the local transit advocacy group, found that while the RTA's streetcar lines — which are generally viewed by locals as catering to tourists — had surpassed pre-Katrina ridership levels, the transit authority had restored just 35 percent of bus service, leaving "many neighborhoods across the city with poor-quality transportation choice." (The RTA disputed this interpretation.)

Like many cities' transit agencies, the RTA has faced criticism that streetcar expansion, though splashy, has come at the detriment of local riders. While the RTA touted the new $75 million Loyola/ Rampart line, which runs from the central business district to the edge of the Marigny, the consolidation and elimination of bus service to accommodate the streetcar resulted in longer trips with more transfers, according to RIDE New Orleans's executive director Alex Posorske. By contrast, rerouting a bus from Central City to Canal Street — a change that Posorske noted cost "almost nothing" — put thousands more jobs within 30-minute travel times to some of the city's poorest neighborhoods.

And though he praised the RTA's long-term strategic planning effort, Posorske worried that, "a lot of transit riders can't wait for a future [that's] two decades down the road. We need to create our transit future now."

Transport for all

This question about prioritization — between tourists and locals, fixed rail and buses — is heightened by the RTA's peculiar internal structure. Officially, the New Orleans Regional Transit Authority, which delivers more than 50,000 trips daily, has precisely one employee: a secretary who takes notes at board meetings. All other positions, including the drivers, planning staff, and management, are under contract to Transdev, a Paris-based logistics company, which in turn has a contract from the RTA board.

Before Katrina, the RTA had a complicated organizational history. Chartered by the state in 1979, the RTA is governed by a volunteer board appointed by the mayor of New Orleans and the head of adjoining Jefferson Parish. It was designed to be a shell around a transit operator, the Transit Management of Southeast Louisiana, an RTA-created public benefits corporation with a staff of 1,300 in charge of everything from route planning to bus driving and customer service.

In the same way that many private companies took over other devastated and moribund institutions in the wake of Katrina, the RTA opened transit operations to public bid in 2008. TMSEL bid but lost to Transdev, then called Veolia. Under Transdev, the RTA increased annual ridership from 11.4 million in 2008 to nearly 23 million in 2012 while cutting the operating cost of a revenue service hour from $247 in 2006 to $135 in 2014. However, neither service hours nor ridership have eclipsed pre-Katrina numbers despite the city's population recovery.

The relationship between the return of transit service and the return of devastated neighborhoods was a constant source of tension. The famous Desire line — Blanche DuBois's streetcar had long been replaced by a bus — stopped running with the hurricane, forcing residents to walk a mile to catch a bus downtown. To neighborhood leaders like Katherine Prevost of the Bunny Friend Neighborhood Association in the Ninth Ward, lack of transit handicapped reinvestment and repopulation in poorer neighborhoods.

"You took the bus away from them, but kept it for people in other parts of the city. ... There's no equity in the Desire or the middle Upper Ninth Ward," she told The Times-Picayune in 2014.

Justin Augustine III, Transdev's vice president, countered: "When the Ninth Ward was slow to repopulate, it's not efficient to put those buses back out there. You'd just have empty buses running around."

In 2014, the RTA board renewed Transdev's five-year contract. While that contract was being renegotiated, RIDE New Orleans and other groups put pressure on the operator to develop a new vision for transit in the city. After the storm, the systems (routes, capital budget, and oversight) had been framed around rebuilding, however halting and difficult. But with a decade past and the city's population stabilizing, the narrative needed to shift from "one of reconstruction to one of equity," says planner Fred Neal Jr., AICP. He added that New Orleans's transit future cannot just plan for "a single bike lane or bus stop but for a whole network and street grid."

Little victories

As the city looks to the future, rather than focusing on specific lines, the new Strategic Mobility Plan takes a broader view of anticipated transit demand. Looking at block-level population density and neighborhood-level job locations, the plan uses a "composite transit index" to identify areas where current demand and service are well matched, as well as to find the places that lack access to quality transit.

As New Orleans works through an update of its 2010 Master Plan, the mobility plan can help focus future development patterns. In a city with limited budgets, the plan "is going to help us understand where we need to put our resources," says Transdev's chief strategy officer Adelee Le Grand. "It's not a plan that [simply recommends that] we ... get another plan."

A key piece of the Strategic Mobility Plan is for the RTA to hire its second employee: an executive director to oversee the contract with Transdev.

In advance of the 2019 contract negotiation, when transit advocates will push for the RTA to "take back" the strategic planning staff from the private operator, Transdev wants to show that New Orleanians can trust their transit company, that it hears their concerns, and that it is looking to the future. The RTA may not be able to deliver on all its goals, but even small victories count; after residents organized in 2014, the Desire line reopened and once again runs through the Ninth Ward to downtown.

Jeffrey Goodman is a planner and designer based in New Orleans. His research focuses on short-term rental policy, regulating the sharing economy, and public history.