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Transit Tangents
The Podcast where we discuss all things transit. Join us as we dive into transit systems across the US, bring you interviews with experts and advocates, and engage in some fun and exciting challenges along the way.
Transit Tangents
Columbus's $8 Billion Transit Revolution
Columbus, Ohio is undertaking an ambitious $8 billion transit plan known as LinkUS that will transform mobility across the region through 2050. We explore this voter-approved initiative that focuses on BRT corridors, active transportation, and transit-oriented development rather than light rail.
• Three major BRT corridors forming the backbone of the system with plans for more
• Most corridors will feature dedicated bus lanes, off-board fare payment, and signal priority
• 500+ miles of new sidewalks and bikeways planned throughout Columbus
• Focus on transit-oriented development and creating more walkable neighborhoods
• Strong emphasis on equity, with corridors connecting neighborhoods in persistent poverty to essential services
• West Broad Street corridor serves 7 grocery stores, 12 pharmacies, 9 schools, 20 daycares, and 4 hospitals
• East Main Street corridor has 11 of 13 miles in dedicated busways
• All three initial corridors expected to be operational by the early 2030's
• Construction beginning as early as 2026 on the first corridor
If you're in Columbus, visit the LinkUS website to learn more about upcoming public meetings and provide feedback on the plans. You can even experience augmented reality visualizations of the proposed corridors.
Today we focus on Central Ohio to explore the $8 billion voter-approved LinkUS plan. This transit vision will bring new sidewalks, bike lanes, brt lines and more to the Columbus area. Stick around and learn all about it on this episode of Transit Tangents. Hey everybody, and welcome back to this episode of Transit Tangents. My name's Chris and I'm Lewis, and today we are diving into a city that we really haven't talked about in the past on the podcast Columbus Ohio.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and this has been. We've had some requests in the comments over the last year or so. Occasionally Columbus will come up. I see articles about different urbanism type movements and whatnot going on in Columbus, so excited to dive in a little bit more on some interesting transportation projects they've got going on.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I haven't heard much about Columbus lately and really what's happening there? So we did a little bit of a deep dive and turns out Columbus does have a lot going on. They have recently passed an eight billion dollar transit transportation plan yeah, and the election was back in 2024. Four okay, yeah, it's very recent. This is the last election 2024.
Speaker 1:um, and a vote passed overwhelmingly to uh bump the existing sales tax that would go towards transportation type projects from a half a cent up to a full cent. Yep, um, and it passed overwhelmingly, with something like 56% of the vote 57%.
Speaker 2:Yeah, 57% of the vote voted in favor of this. This is COTA's transit tax. As you said, it goes from 0.5 to 1 cent. Cota is the Central Ohio Transit Authority. This is the organization who's responsible for all of the public transit in the Columbus metropolitan area. This is a huge investment for Central Ohio Again, $8 billion and to put that in perspective, in Austin we're spending $7 billion to build our light rail. I feel like Columbus is getting I mean, we're getting a lot out of our $7 billion light rail. I feel like Columbus is getting, I mean, we're getting a lot out of our $7 billion, but Columbus will get a lot for many, many years out of theirs. And similar in comparison to the cities. Columbus is also sort of a similar size to Austin, so I'd be really curious to see how all this plays out as they continue to develop.
Speaker 1:Totally and they're taking a different strategy. So amongst this $8 billion in spending I believe this has spread out over about 10 years in spending as well there is no dollars going towards like a light rail or a subway or anything like that, whereas in Austin we're kind of spending a lot of that money on the light rail. We are getting some BRT light projects, two lines that just opened Exactly two lines that just opened. There will be more coming down the line as well. Down the line, there'll be more coming down the line as well. Down the line, um. But instead columbus is focusing most of their resources on some of these, like what I would call more real brt dedicated lanes, all this sort of stuff which we'll get into as well as improvements and things like sidewalks and bike lanes, um, to just give more people more options other than the one that is most present in most american cities, which is driving from everywhere to everywhere.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, yeah, and the bulk of the spending is going to happen, kind of like you said, in that first 10 years, but this is really a project that's going to span all the way to 2050, which I say that thinking like God. That's a long way away, but it's really not that far away.
Speaker 1:I mean it is and it isn't. I guess I don't know. It's like 25 years, 25 years.
Speaker 2:In the transit world. I don't feel like it's that far away, right right, Especially in America.
Speaker 1:We don't. I mean, that's light year speed in the United States as far as building transit projects.
Speaker 2:unfortunately, I'm going to be 60 years old.
Speaker 1:Oh God, I've never thought about that. I guess I'll be 56. The gray hair is coming in. I actually do have a couple gray hairs now, which scares me. My mom made fun of me for it recently. She can't talk though. All her hair is gray now Sorry, mom when she sees those?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so this transit plan again shows us the 2050. As you said, they're focusing really heavily on BRT lines. There's sort of three primary corridors that we're going to get into a little bit later and what those look like. They're also expanding what they call active transit corridors, which is some of the systems that they already have in place, but this also includes sidewalks and bike lanes and things like that. They're working to develop over 500 miles of sidewalks and bikeways.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's a really important step that so many I feel like so many cities forget that that can be a major solution. Even just in the last few years living here in Austin, I've seen major. Obviously you have two major improvements in the bike infrastructure and sidewalks, which famously the sidewalks in a lot of parts of town here are non-existent literally. But in those areas where you've seen that investment happen, it is visually noticeable that more people are walking, more people are biking, more people are riding their bikes to local businesses and you'll see businesses with bike racks full in the areas where that investment has come. So it's nice to see that that is included in this broader plan as well.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely Very excited to see that there's also going to be more trails and more focus on sort of walkable neighborhoods and on the walkable neighborhoods. A significant part of this is also going towards promoting transit-oriented developments and really trying to encourage sort of that. I want to say it's like the 15-minute city model that we've talked about in the past, but they're really trying to promote. How do we make these neighborhoods a little more dense, a little more walkable?
Speaker 1:Right, yeah, and before the 15-minute city conspiracy theorists jump on it, we did an episode about that a long time ago, actually talking about 15-minute cities. But it's just the concept of being able to, yeah, walk to a grocery store, walk to a school, walk to a restaurant, walk to a coffee shop, whatever it may be, and having these little kind of neighborhood centers spread around throughout your city so that you don't all have to drive to a giant shopping center somewhere to be able to go do all your errands. But if you need to get one or two quick things, you can hop on your bike or walk a couple blocks to go do it. And that focus on the transit-oriented development in Columbus here is so important as it is everywhere.
Speaker 1:We've talked extensively about the importance of housing and transit and how they go hand-in-hand together. Your transit system you can build it out as great as you want, it's never going to be effective if people don't live near the stations. So you know, doing a little bit of transit-oriented development and then also I forget who said this recently in one of our episodes doing a bit of development-oriented transit too. Oh, yeah, you know, like you know, trying to build your transit to the areas where there's already development, but also doing it in reverse. It's like, OK, the transit is going to go through this area, there is some underutilized space, old industrial space or strip malls that are kind of going out of business and whatnot. Let's utilize the areas around there.
Speaker 2:That's sort of more of a if you build it, they will come mentality probably. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So a little bit of everything and, uh, the, the last sort of pillar of this plan which we're talking about, the conspiracy theory, is coming out. So now they're really going to come out when I say the dirty words, oh god, um, one of the, uh, the last pillars here, is really this is really uh focusing on and promoting uh equity and sustainability?
Speaker 1:yep, dun, dun, dun, right, yeah, yeah yeah, if there, if anyone's control effing the transcript here, we just got canceled yeah.
Speaker 1:But they are taking some efforts to make sure that this transit project, this whole initiative that goes through 2050, that it will serve underserved communities and try to bridge that gap where these communities have sort of been left behind Right, and that's again an important step that a lot of cities that are doing this the right way are taking Making sure that the right amount of you know it's really easy for some of these new developments to just be exclusively luxury apartments that get very expensive. But putting the emphasis on making sure that affordable units are included, but also just understanding the reality that when you build a lot more apartments and housing Austin is a great example of that the price of rent goes down, turns out. Supply and demand with housing is a thing. It's a thing so good to see that these elements included as well.
Speaker 1:Now we're going to focus in a little bit more on the BRT elements of this, the bus rapid transit corridors. So initially there will be three corridors that we'll kind of dive into in a second. Here there are studies being done for fourth and fifth in the kind of short term extensions to the BRT system and then many more than that kind of listed as future extensions. But in general the Columbus BRT plan includes quite a bit of actual dedicated transit infrastructure where you're kind of seeing the top tier of BRT, where you've got real dedicated lanes center running. You've got off board fare payment. I always get that off board fare.
Speaker 2:Off board fare.
Speaker 1:Yeah, off board fare, just feels it sounds wrong to me every time I say it.
Speaker 1:Anytime we've talked about BRT, I always hesitate at that Signal prioritization, all the things that essentially help speed up the process of riding the bus. If you ride the bus, you know this, but if you don't, anytime a bus pulls up to a stop in most cities across the United States right now and around the world, you get on the bus and you pay on the bus, and if you've got five people walking on, sometimes the payment doesn't work right away and the bus is just sitting there waiting. So off-board fare payment is really important, because people can pay at the platform and then, when the bus pulls up, everyone just walks on, the doors close the bus, drives away.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think that's ideal. What we have seen lately is that a lot of cities are really starting to look at BRT as the alternative to light rail. I don't love that. I prefer light rail because we always say the bus isn't sexy, but I do think you can make a sexy BRT and if you're doing it the right way, I think you will get the ridership that you need to sustain it.
Speaker 1:And we'll kind of get into in a little bit like the timelines for some of this stuff, like hypothetically, and it's like not that much faster for whatever reason. But yeah, you know the idea with BRTs you should be able to get them done cheaper and faster and have a little bit more flexibility. A lot of the systems, including here, are not necessarily beating out that much on speed or what should be, but we have proven in the United States that we're incredibly slow at doing these things. We can look at past episodes. We've talked about the purple line in Maryland. That's kind of acting as a bit of a ring route in DC. I mean that project has been delayed and delayed and delayed and delayed costs overruns.
Speaker 1:You can look at several other light rail projects across the country and it's not hard to find the issues in doing that. So seeing BRT as an alternative, saving money and and this is can be a good thing. But you run into the risk of brt creep, which we've talked about before, where your brt system might start out as kind of a top tier brt system and then, as the budgets start to dwindle and time goes on and pushback may come later, it turns into just kind of a bus with less stops on it so, yeah, as we see in houston yeah, yes, houston's a good example of that, which I know, we said this before we really turns into just kind of a bus with less stops on it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, as we've seen in Houston. Yeah, yes, houston's a good example of that, which I know. We've said this before. We really need to do a deep dive on all the things that have happened in Houston. Also, the last piece of the BRT element here is that the goal is to have zero emission buses as well. I don't know where that falls in the proposal, if that's a later addition, what they're investing in electric buses, if that's a later addition, what they're investing in electric buses but that is one of the primary goals of their BRT system is to have zero emissions Right and I think that's a noble goal to have.
Speaker 1:However, like there are a lot of including here in Austin where we've tried to do zero emission or electric buses and it has led to delays and issues with kind of implementation. So if it ends up getting to a point where it's like diesel bus can get this done faster, then like you should do it as fast as you can Like. Having a diesel bus running versus people going in personal vehicles is already better than an electric bus. If we can do the electric bus and the technology continues to get better, that's great. But I get worried sometimes when that is like a primary focus of some of these things and I'm not saying that it's a primary focus here. It's a good goal to have, but something to consider when thinking about that sort of thing.
Speaker 2:You heard it first Lewis hates electrification of vehicles. No, no, no.
Speaker 1:It's not true. It's not true, but it's just like it can. Sometimes it can cause more harm than good, especially in the short term, while the technology is still being developed. But with that, let's kind of dive into a few of the specific corridors. So, starting first, we're going to have the West Broad Street corridor. We're going to jump right back into this episode in just a second, but first, if you have not liked this video, go ahead and do so. Also, leave a comment. We love reading all of them and respond to as many as we can, and be sure that you are subscribed so that you catch every episode as they come out.
Speaker 2:please share this with your friends, and if you don't have time to watch youtube videos in the future, you can catch us on any of the podcast platforms that are out there. Just be sure to leave us a rating and give us a comment. So the west broad street corridor is going to be one of the first brt lines that we're really seeing construction starting on. This is going to be a 9.3 mile corridor going from Columbus out to Rockbrook Crossing Avenue. Thank you, I could not get that out for some reason. Rockbrook Crossing Avenue this is going to include 17 stations in total.
Speaker 1:Also, about 5.2 miles of this entire stretch is going to be on dedicated guideway Right and that dedicated guideway essentially starts right in downtown Columbus and then is heading out. The last four or so miles of it is running in a bit of kind of like mixed traffic. You'll probably have some areas where you might have a dedicated lanes or whatever near the stops, but it will be sharing lanes with traffic and it kind of peters out. This rockbrook crossing avenue, um, is, uh, definitely an area where they could do a little bit of transit oriented development if they wanted to. But it's starting to enter like where the suburbs turn more rural. Maybe we'll see some sort of park and ride situation. But there is also a kroger grocery store right at the station and it's not the only grocery store that is served by this line yeah, this line actually has really good connectivity to a lot of amenities.
Speaker 2:In total, there are seven grocery stores that are within walking distance of the line. There are 12 pharmacies, there are nine K through 12 schools 20 daycare facilities 20 daycare facilities.
Speaker 1:And four hospitals, which is really like important. It sounds like basic stuff and you even, like you describe those amenities. I think that those are almost more like necessities, oh sure uh community necessities, yeah, yeah, but I would say, though, that they are in the united states. I feel like they're not normal to have all these things necessarily easily served by a quick bus ride or something, so it it's nice to see all of these kind of major destinations that people can actually utilize on their day-to-day.
Speaker 2:Well, and it's places that people absolutely need to be. There are. If we're looking at the demographics of the area, 76% of the population that lives sort of on this corridor is in I guess what they would call living in perpetual poverty. So this is a vital link for these services, these necessities to get these people to daycare, to get these people to the hospital, to get these people to a grocery store and do it in a way that is better than exists now.
Speaker 1:right, I'm sure there is existing bus service in this area, but this is improving the day-to-day lives for folks who will be able to have a more reliable, more frequent bus trip to get to their daily needs. Essentially, there's also a lot of potential along this corridor. I mean just like scrolling through on Satellite View and looking quite a few strip malls, some actual malls along this corridor, and those are areas where you know, in a world where housing costs are going up, you can build more housing along this corridor without disrupting existing neighborhoods, which is, you run into the people who are like oh you know, you can't redo my area, blah, blah, blah, blah. Well, when you have a kind of a dying mall, there's a lot less pushback when you're trying to redevelop a dying mall than there is doing something near a single family you know home in a neighborhood and that sort of thing.
Speaker 2:so lots of potential for this corridor, for sure yeah, and as far as timeline goes, um, it looks like construction is going to begin in early 2026, so we're looking at next year, uh, and then service will be commencing in 2028, okay, so yeah, it's actually not.
Speaker 1:That's not too bad, it's moving along which is good to see um.
Speaker 2:Also, as far as ridership goes um, in 2024 they were estimating approximately 1.27 million uh linked trips through this corridor. By 2045 they are projecting uh 2.4 sorry, 2.14 million so I mean.
Speaker 1:Even the 1.27 million annual trips through there is impressive, like that's a. That's a high number, especially for a bus line, so good to see that. Moving on though, our next corridor is the northwest corridor.
Speaker 2:The northwest corridor is approximately eight and a half miles of BRT that's going to run from Columbus to the Bethel Road Park and Ride which we were looking at the map.
Speaker 2:I don't think that that exists just yet, yeah, it'll go to Bethel Road, though yeah, this was there was a locally preferred alternative that was introduced in their initial plan. That's what was actually chosen for this route, and it's an interesting route when the last one seemed like it was connecting a lot of residential areas. This one, it seems like it's going through a lot of sort of the university. It's going through some corporate areas.
Speaker 1:It's connecting stadiums.
Speaker 2:It's like five of the largest sports entertainment venues in the area will be on this corridor. Yeah, so a little bit different.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean it still leaves, like as with like any of these kind of like sports and entertainment-y areas. I feel like in the US there is room to also do some new things with the land if you are going to introduce better transit through the area that people might take advantage of. So there's definitely space to do more with the area. But yeah, looking at it just from above it does it feels funny, but it it makes a lot of sense that it would be an easy place to to actually put this brt um, almost 75 of it is running, uh, in dedicated lanes and when you look at the alignment on the roads from above, it's really clear how they're able to do that. It's really wide roads already in areas where the setbacks of businesses and buildings are really far back anyway so, and it's following an existing road alignment you said it was the 315.
Speaker 1:It's sort of already a major corridor, it follows like a highway out of town which is 315, and then it veers off and I'm going to butcher this name so you guys can make fun of me Olentangy, allentangy River Road, the Oldentangy River, oldentangy I know that that is very wrong.
Speaker 1:I'm sorry, but we could look it up, but I've already committed to it at this point, so yeah, but this is another one. It seems like there's potential for more to happen along this route, and there's already connecting alongside the Ohio State University and all this sort of stuff is definitely a win.
Speaker 2:So a little bit further behind as far as the timeline goes. On this one though, yeah, it looks like it'll start around 2028, but commence service somewhere between 2031 and 2033.
Speaker 1:Gotcha, it's kind of the target Gotcha, so a little bit further behind than the first corridor we talked about, but nevertheless making some progress towards it, and the last of the initial corridors is the east main street corridor. Uh, this one spans 13 miles from columbus out to what was it? Reynoldsburg, reynoldsburg, thank you. From columbus out to reynoldsburg, um this one, 11 of the 13 miles are in dedicated busways it's really amazing to see.
Speaker 1:Yeah, this corridor is. It looks a little less dense than the others, but maybe I'm wrong on this. This is just from satellite view. This is one of the busiest corridors in the city presently for transit. It is kind of a commercial corridor with a lot of kind of like smaller car oriented commercial along the main street and then it looks like mostly single family homes kind of flanking either side of the road. But there is a potential for additional development along this line as well. You still do end up with some larger strip malls and whatnot, with big parking lots that could make for some good transit oriented development down the line yep and similarly to the west broad street corridor, this is also connecting a lot of community necessities.
Speaker 2:You have two hospitals, 24 grocery stores, 17 K through 12 schools. Yeah, there's a lot, that is a lot. A lot of daycare facilities, 15 pharmacies. So this again busy corridor, a lot of things that are here that you can connect folks to. Over 60% of the residents that are within walking distance to these stations are again classified as living in persistent poverty. So another vital corridor to connecting these communities.
Speaker 1:Totally. And you know, beyond these three corridors that we're going to talk about today, there are plans for two more kind of being studied in the short term and several more than that for the long term, and these would be kind of the bones of what could potentially become a much larger BRT system. And when you stack that on top of the other investments that we talked about at the beginning of the episode, with the active transit investments for better bike lanes and trails and sidewalks and all this sort of stuff, it really bodes well for the future of Columbus. And while it may not be some fancy rail projects, they're doing it their own way with BRT and I hope that in a few years we get to see the fruits of the labor.
Speaker 2:yeah, I hope so paying off. Yeah, I will say one last thing on the east main street corridor is that construction should begin around beginning of 2027, with the BRT service starting in 2029. Okay, okay, so also think they're moving, they're coming up, I mean we'll have three.
Speaker 1:Correct me if I'm wrong on this. Three of these will be operational by 2030.
Speaker 2:Roughly yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:So I mean I'm going to knock on wood for Columbusites. What do they call themselves For folks from Columbus?
Speaker 2:I'm going to knock on wood for folks from. Columbus Columbacinians, columbacites. Yes, I don't know what. Do you call yourself, columbacites? I don't know what the denonym is for it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, but anyway I would love to make it to Columbus at some point. In a previous episode we talked about how I really liked we were talking about ice cream places in Austin and I think this is where we got some of the columbus comments and I was like I don't know if it's local, but I love jenny's ice cream. And I got some flack from both chris and uh our my friend bumsy, who was in the episode with us uh for for liking jenny's more than amy's, which is the austin chain, and then I found out that jenny's is from ohio.
Speaker 2:So um well, jenny can stay in ohio. That's all I gotta say. I'm an amy, stand through jenny, jenny's in my, my belly.
Speaker 1:I live near one here and I frequent it often, although it hurts my wallet every time I go because they're a little pricey, but um, anyway, uh, hopefully we'll make it to columbus and we'll convert chris to your, to your ways with ice cream, but we'll see um, if you are in the columbus area and you want to learn more about what is happening in your city, this is all being done sort of under the banner of link us, which I was trying to figure out.
Speaker 2:What was the us? I thought it'd be like link oh for Ohio or something. I didn't realize that Columbus has a lot of marketing around the us at the end so clever. So link us is clever. I do like it a lot. You can go on their website. There are a lot of public meetings scheduled. There's still a lot of discussion happening about how the alignments are going to work, what the stations are going to look like, all of this stuff. They also have spent a lot of time and effort into trying to show you exactly what the corridors look like. If you browse through the website, there's a lot of really great renderings that show you what the dedicated bus lanes look like. But they also have done something unique that I haven't really seen transit agencies do, where they're introducing augmented reality so you can go to these areas, I think, and actually hold up your phone and see what it's going to look like, which is pretty cool no, totally, you know I would say, use the money on the transit, but you know?
Speaker 1:yeah for sure. But I'd also say, like, getting involved in some of these meetings is kind of a fun thing to do. Um, we've had the chance to go to some of the Project Connect meetings or, you know, going in and getting involved and meet some of your local leaders and whatnot. They really are in these community engagement sessions, like looking for your feedback. They want to hear it. So, and if there's things that you think they're doing right or wrong, go and tell them, because there will be people who may oppose these sorts of projects, who have the time to go show up at these sorts of things. So, definitely important to get involved.
Speaker 1:But, um, if you like this video, please consider giving it a thumbs up. We appreciate it. It helps us out quite a bit. Giving it a thumbs up, giving it a like that was a weird way of saying the same thing. Like buttons, you can also leave a comment down below, uh, or subscribe. If you want to support the show directly, you can do so via our patreon or checking out the merch down below. But, but without further ado, thank you all. So much for watching and enjoy the rest of your Transit. Tangents Tuesday.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'm saving that dough. Public transit's where it's at, watch me go.