Experts around the city say the November 2024 presidential election is the ideal time for Nashville to join 46 of the top 50 cities in the country in having dedicated funding for transit. But it will take a lot of work for Mayor Freddie O’Connell’s administration to make that deadline.
Nashville’s transit struggles have proliferated over the years, and a recent study by Forbes labeled the city the worst place to commute in the country. While former Mayor John Cooper took some incremental steps toward fixing the problem, most experts agree that significant action is needed to make a real dent in the problem. There’s only one way to make that level of change happen in Nashville: a transit referendum. And while Nashville’s failed 2018 transit referendum still casts a shadow, a new study from a Tennessee think tank shows that dedicated funding is the key to improving transit.
“There’s four [top 50] cities without dedicated funding: Orlando, Nashville, Memphis, and Hartford, Connecticut,” Erin Hafkenschiel, president of Think Tennessee, told the Banner. “There’s really only four left, and I think that helps sort of change the narrative that it’s not if we should pass dedicated funding, it’s when are we going to.”
In 2017, Gov. Bill Haslam passed the Improve Act, allowing local governments to bring transit projects straight to voters through a referendum rather than going through the state legislature. Despite some minor differences, cities around the country have fairly similar processes for securing funding for major transit projects. And there’s another common theme all across the country.
“More often than not, a city fails once or even twice before its referendum passes,” said Hafkenschiel.
In 2020, Austin passed a transit referendum after multiple attempts. Not only did that happen two years after Nashville’s 2018 failure, but Austin’s $7 billion plan looked eerily similar to the one that more than 65 percent of Nashvillians voted down in 2018.
The 2018 Campaign
There are many reasons why people argue the Let’s Move Nashville plan failed in 2018. With a $5.4 billion price tag, tunnels under downtown and an extensive light rail network, many believe it was too much for voters to stomach. O’Connell has already indicated that he does not believe the city needs a light rail network as extensive as what was proposed in that plan, telling reporters that a single line to and from the airport might be more feasible.
These problems were all compounded by a successful anti-transit movement funded by a dark money 501(c)(4) group. Then, of course, there was the scandal that cut then-mayor Megan Barry’s term short. As the face of the transit plan, many consider her subsequent resignation just months before the referendum to be the final stamp of death on Let’s Move Nashville.
While Hafkenschiel acknowledges many theories about why the 2018 referendum failed, she again points to the inevitability of referendums nationwide and chalks that failure up to one central issue: Nashvillians weren’t ready.
“Sometimes these ballot referendums don’t pass the first time because you haven’t had the time to do all the engineering you need to do and educate the public on the value of transit and how important it is to a city’s well-being,” she said.
When a city brings voters a transit referendum in Tennessee, there are guidelines: First, it must have a detailed plan that lays out the project with the cost; second, it has to explain the funding. The Improve Act outlines several different taxes that cities can appropriate to put towards a transit project should voters support it.
It’s a complicated web to string together, and a successful transit referendum often comes down to messaging and timing. Across the country, some cities have failed referendums only to come back years later with a nearly identical plan and have it pass. Seattle, for example, brought voters a transit plan in the 1970s. That plan would have received most of its funding from federal grants but lost at the ballot box. Decades later, after multiple referendums, Seattle is implementing a transit system almost identical to the one proposed in the 70s.
Seattle’s story illustrates that a failed transit referendum is not a rejection of mass transit but a setback for necessary transit upgrades. Another failed referendum could mean years more setbacks. Had the 2018 referendum succeeded, Nashville would be reaping many of the benefits already today.
“Right away, people would already see extended [bus] services,” said Nashville Department of Transportation Director Diana Alarcon. “That was your low-hanging fruit.”
By 2022 there would have been four new park-and-ride facilities. By 2023, four bus rapid transit lines would open on Dickerson Pike, Hillsboro Pike, West End and through Bordeaux. And in 2026, the first light rail route would have opened along Gallatin Pike.
“The last referendum looked at many different things,” said Alarcon. “And I think what really got missed in the conversation is they included improvements to mobility and conductivity. But no one ever talked about that, all anyone ever saw was the tunnel under Broadway.”
As NDOT director, Alarcon will work closely with WeGo to develop a plan for Nashville should a referendum happen. Aside from aspects of the Let’s Move Nashville Plan that can carry over, she believes some opportunities were missed in 2018. One idea she has is implementing real-time traffic signals that could improve traffic flow for both buses and cars.
“I’ve done several referendums in the past and I really feel that it needs to have some flexibility because the landscape of our community is changing so drastically,” said Alarcon. “I think there were some opportunities that maybe weren’t captured in the last one that we could capture if we were to do one in November of next year.”
O’Connell has not yet confirmed that it will pursue a transit referendum in 2024, but signs point to it. On the night of the mayoral runoff in September, after a long campaign primarily built around the city’s transit woes, he announced the creation of a Transition Committee tasked with developing guiding principles and policy recommendations for his administration. The committee was split into three subcommittees and one of them, which Hafkenschiel sat on, was specifically tasked with examining transit in Nashville. Most of its recommendations centered around one thing: if Nashville is going to succeed in a transit referendum anytime soon, November 2024 is the time to do it.
In the November 2020 presidential election, 312,113 Nashvillians showed up to vote for president, about 65 percent of registered voters. By contrast, the May 2018 election had only 125,108 Nashvillians show up to vote on the transit referendum, just 31 percent of registered voters. When looking at examples nationwide, many of the most successful referendums came in elections with high voter turnout.
Of course, while voter turnout matters, it’s not a single silver bullet.
If the O’Connell administration wants to succeed, a referendum will not only need to bring voters a plan that addresses the transit-oriented problems of Nashville, but it will also need to build trust and educate voters on why the city needs that plan. Good transit isn’t just about commute times — New York City fared better than Nashville in the Forbes study despite having longer average commute times. That’s because commute times are not the only thing considered when examining commuting difficulty. Health, safety, convenience, access to cars and a long list of factors improved by mass transit are also examined. In Nashville, where a lacking bus system is the only form of public transit and bike lanes are few and far between, it’s nearly impossible to survive without a car.
Need and Cost Grow
As Nashville has grown rapidly throughout the past decade, its transit troubles have become increasingly apparent. Pedestrian and traffic deaths continue to go up every year. Travel to the airport, projected to grow exponentially in coming years, can be a nightmare on a good day. To top it all off, developing the East Bank as a new central neighborhood in Nashville will undoubtedly increase traffic in the city’s core.
The transition committee acknowledged several other steps it will need to take to be successful. Building Nashvillians’ trust in the current transit system will be vital. To understand what the city needs, residents first need to understand what the city has.
O’Connell also can’t be the only face of a new transit referendum. The 2018 plan involved a broad coalition of business leaders, community organizers and politicians. Of course, in the end, even that proved to be insufficient. To succeed, a new transit referendum will likely need to rest on the shoulders of the mayor, councilmembers, and other local leaders who are invested in getting the community involved.
The price tag on a transit plan is often its biggest detractor. But Hafkenschiel pointed out that the alternative, which is adding more lanes for cars, can be just as pricey. Highway expansions can cost billions of dollars, and data shows that one highway lane moves people far less efficiently than a lane of public transit. Hafkenschiel said that one lane for cars maxes out at moving around 1,600 cars per hour. Meanwhile, bus rapid transit can move 10,000 people per hour. And light rail, which can easily fit into spaces previously allotted to BRT, can move 35,000 people per hour.
“It’s sort of unfortunate that this voter referendum is this hurdle that we have to get past because this is just the way that we as a country have decided how we fund transit,” said Hafkenschiel. “Yet billions of dollars flow into our road and highway systems every year, and we don’t even think twice about it.”
There is also lots of federal funding for transit to go around, but in order to get that money, cities and states must first show a willingness to spend their own money. The Think Tennessee study found “The average state collected $206 million from the Federal Transit Administration (FTA) between 2005-2021, while Tennessee collected only $86.1 million during the same period.”
Additionally, aside from the cost and efficiency, Alarcon explained that the type of transit in place dictates how a city grows. In a time when Nashville is experiencing rapid growth, another lane for cars versus another lane for transit could seriously affect how the city develops.
“When you add a lane for cars, you improve capacity on your roadway, which signifies to builders that there’s an opportunity for further growth,” said Alarcon.
This mentality leads to the phenomenon of sprawl. Planners begin building neighborhoods further outside of the city, which then leads to longer further commutes between work and home.
“Sprawling is really kind of what creates traffic, because people then are forced to commute to get to their workplace,” said Alarcon. Good transit systems mean fewer cars on the road, allowing for denser city planning and opening up a variety of opportunities, such as increasing affordable housing along busy corridors, another thing Nashville desperately needs.
“It’s not about ‘is transit valuable and should it be a part of our city?’ It’s about ‘absolutely it should, it’s just a matter of what format and how big?’” said Hafkenschiel.