TARC LINC: What Louisvillians Want From Transit (And You Can Help!)
Updated: Nov 21, 2020
Articulo en Español disponible aqui!
This is one of a series by Jody Dahmer of Beargrass Thunder on ways make a more livable Kentucky , regardless of access to a motor vehicle.
Update : We'd like to thank one of our fans for pointing out that there IS an impound lot still operational in Louisville, at the 1400 block of Frankfort Avenue, it is just at capacity. Read more about this here
TARC LINC has an online map to which anyone can add routes and transit stops. They must have had enough data, because they are not taking any new responses!
We examined the crowdsourced map available at tarclinc.com and compared it to existing TARC routes. The results display a vastly different map than currently exists in Louisville, and a road map to a better transit system in Greater Louisville.
Why now?
If your car died today, would you be able to get from your house to work or to the grocery store without a motor vehicle?
If you have heard of the new plan by the Transit Authority of River City.
Louisville's TARC has a problem. The current routes just don't cut it.
We have more and more seniors deciding to retire in Kentucky, older Kentuckians from rural areas moving to cities with better healthcare access, and younger generations not wanting a McMansion in the suburbs .
Increasing Rates of Senior Suicide
The lack of ways to get around the city are especially hard for the Kentuckians that cannot drive : children and the elderly. Without a vehicle, the suburbs can be very lonely and isolating.
https://www.npr.org/2019/07/27/745017374/isolated-and-struggling-many-seniors-are-turning-to-suicide
I remember growing up in Fisherville, a forested exurb right on the border between Jefferson and Shelby County. Our nearest neighbor was about a quarter mile away, with the entrance of our subdivision over a mile from our house.
If seniors decide to keep waiting for property values to increase, what happens if they age out of driving before that happens? Do retirees need to spend their life savings on a Tesla in order to maintain quality of life?
Safety
How many times have you seen someone texting while driving 80 miles an hour on the interstate? The real problem with our highways is that they only work as long as someone doesn't get into a wreck. With many Boomers becoming more and more elderly, this is a ticking time bomb.
On a bus, you can text without the risk of killing anyone AND not cause the interstate to shut down if you have an accident. for the rest of the tens of thousands of people using a shared resource.
No Impound Lot
With the recent construction of the Waterfront Botanical Gardens, the city still has no impound lot, meaning that cars illegally parked (Bardstown Road!~) have no place to be moved. This is terrible for trying to get traffic through our roads!
Status Quo = Status No
As someone who has grown up in the East End suburbs, transit was a last-resort option growing up for three reasons.
One: There is no way to get between suburbs without going downtown first.
Two: All the grocery stores,schools, and places of interest have a parking lot. If you know there is free parking at the destination, why go through the trouble of transit?
Three: The bus stops, 4600 in total, are stretched so thin on TARC's current budget that most of them are just metal sticks in the ground with no shade or seating.
Four: There are so many stops to cover and traffic lights to wait at that it is usually takes at least two to three times as long to take the bus to a destination as a car.
Here is the current route map for TARC.
Here is the user-generated map for possible TARC routes.
So What Changed between the two maps?
Key Changes
1. Transit Between Suburbs
The red dots represent a transit stop. The darker the color, the more buses would be dedicated to those routes. This means more buses and shorter wait times
Look at all of the proposed transit routes and stations from J-Town
