Final Tuesday - AU07 IS OVER!

Well, minutes from my last final, I take a few minutes to recap the quarter. I do this to hopefully decompress my mind from all of the stuff rattling around up there.


LIGHT RAIL IN COLUMBUS? - a GIS project

For the past four days, I've spent a combined 30 to 40 hours in a computer lab trying to finish a way to ambitious ArcGIS analysis of where to site a fixed-guideway transit project in Columbus. It was crazy because I was dealing with a parcel map for Franklin County with over 100,000 parcels connected to database file with over 20 attributes and I attempted to spatially join these into a census block map. After I figured out how to do this without crashing the lab PC I was using (which took about 3 or 4 hours), I finally was able to get the simplified map for analysis - this lab was like six in one. The worst part was that it was due last Friday and I just turned it in today! I am so freaking numb from days of starring into a computer monitor.

The project result is the product of really rough research but it basically favored adding transit to dense, cheap and blighted neighborhoods near downtown. This will help them gentrify, be rehabilitated with pockets of large scale, dense redevelopment around station sites. The concept driving the proposal was a desire to increase the efficiency of people moving between office jobs and the entertainment and commerce opportunities downtown. Though a percent of the housing could be subsidized, such a proposal would likely raise the cost of living in Columbus as a whole and further marginalize and isolate the city's poor to neighborhoods that were in decline or are already blighted. This isn't an okay side-effect however, if enough areas are available for redevelopment, banks will probably not drop enough credit into the market to facilitate the massive gentrification effects that could force the displacement of tens of thousands in the city. Phasing may help reduce the sudden jolt on the cost of living, specifically rent, in the areas serviced by the system.

The increase in efficiency and walkability would hopefully reduce the need and cost of automobile ownership, saving people as well as the city, state, and federal government money in maintaining and expanding automobile infrastructure. Housing and transportation usually account for 50% of one's expenses so paying more for housing in an area that is walkable and connected to mass transit may be preferable to some. In most cities, it wouldn't necessarily cost a lot but because Columbus has such a low density, the success of Light Rail, Streetcar, or BRT service would be dependent upon creating pockets of high density residential and commercial activity near station sites — an expensive proposition on top of the $1B investment of the first phase of a Light Rail transit system. But in the tradition of land speculation and speculative development, a possible development for the future of Columbus.