by Barry Henderson

In spite of the lack of a fair hearing to gain broad public input, Knoxville Area Transit and Mayor Bill Haslam seem utterly determined to shift KAT’s downtown bus transfer point to Main Avenue in front of the City County Building next week.

It’s a horrible location for bus riders, motorists, and for people working at or using the City County Building or the Knox County Courthouse or U.S. District Courthouse that line Main in that block. Rush-hour traffic could cause gridlock worthy of New York or Washington.

The temporary move could be in effect for a couple of years, we’re told. It was necessitated by the construction of a parking garage on Walnut Street, closing part of that thoroughfare where the transfer point has been for several years. But the Main Avenue site is expected to be used beyond that construction closing until the city’s new federally funded transit center on State Street and its link to Gay Street are completed.

The city and KAT are disregarding objections by members of the federal courthouse security force that the concentration of buses on Main will give them more headaches. The reservations of ordinary government workers are also going unheeded, as are the protestations of a number of KAT riders themselves.

The mayor has said repeatedly that other downtown locations for the transfer point were considered and rejected. The Knoxville Transit Authority Board voted for Main Avenue at a meeting last month, but the decision was made without sufficient notice to allow for objections to be aired.

Among the sites that were rejected was the trolley stop alongside the Civic Coliseum parking garage on Clinch Avenue just across the viaduct from downtown proper. It was thought to be too far from the center of downtown. That despite the fact that a large percentage of KAT transfer point users are simply transferring from bus to bus, not taking advantage of the downtown itself. Nor did the availability and frequency (and the possibility of broadening and expanding) the free trolley service from the coliseum garage to downtown points make any difference, it seems.

As a shorter-term temporary location, the 300 block of Central Street, adjacent to the State Street site where the transit center is to be built, would seem preferable to the much busier Main Avenue block, at least until the new center’s construction gets underway.

Knoxville has a KAT system that is well developed, in terms of equipment and routes. The buses are relatively new; the trolleys are functional and handy; the employees are friendly and helpful.

In fiscal year 2004, KAT provided 3.2 million bus rides, a huge increase in just the last couple of years. More people are riding the bus in Knoxville today than at any time in the last 20 years.

As a result of those and other developments, including clean-fuels initiatives, this summer KAT received the Outstanding Achievement award from the American Public Transportation Association, for cities with a ridership of 1 to 4 million rides per year.

The system is virtually assured of growth and continued improvement once the transit center is in place, even if gasoline prices don’t double again in the meantime.

Why KAT and the city fathers would want to jeopardize the system’s usefulness and put the safety of Main Avenue at risk and the tempers of its regular users on edge by jamming it with buses, exacerbating the traffic problems that those valued transportation options are meant to prevent, is a mystery that’s difficult to fathom.

Hubert Smith, a former KAT board member who now serves on KAT’s Community Advisory Committee, was quoted as saying: “This may be one of the worst decisions this administration will make.”

It may well be.

The city anticipates a review of the issue in December, when any problems with the Main Avenue transfer point will be addressed. Here’s betting the issue won’t wait until December.

By the Book or By the Board

By the time this reaches our racks and website, Knox County’s revenue and budget dilemma will have had another round of debate, with Commission members considering the embattled wheel tax, a potential property tax increase, challenges to their own leadership and, possibly, the on-again, off-again movement to bring a new main library to Knoxville’s downtown.

Just in case the library hasn’t come up for air, or even if it has, let’s start taking its need seriously. The Lawson McGhee Library building on Clinch Avenue is overcrowded, inexpandable and stretched beyond its once-considerable capabilities.

The library’s staff and users are at wit’s end to make the available space adapt to the demands of the 21st century. Their efforts aren’t working. This city must have a central library sufficient to allow the library system to serve the whole community well. We live in a time when the sort of knowledge that a library can help impart is at a premium worldwide. A new library is a well-established, well-documented need. If we sit back and wait, we lose. If the commissioners haven’t acted to do so, let’s get the planning process started—or restarted—now.

September 9, 2004 • Vol. 14, No. 37 © 2004 Metro Pulse