Before Capital Gains spotted
Eric Schertzing at a
session on transportation innovation at the recent
Creative Cities Summit in Detroit, it never really crossed our minds to talk to the Ingham County Treasurer and
Land Bank chairman about transportation issues.
But the more we understood about him, and recognized his impressive grasp of the fundamental connection between mobility and economy—i.e., if a person can’t afford a car and doesn’t live by a bus stop, they can’t get to work—the more it made sense that he’d be tackling Lansing’s transportation challenge.
So Capital Gain’s managing editor, Ivy Hughes, sat down with Schertzing for a tough talk about a cranking a big key to Lansing’s economic future: transit.
Capital Gains: How do you create transportation alternatives in cities built around sprawl?Eric Schertzing: Milwaukee is probably one of the shining examples of a city that’s done this. In the last 20 years, they took three highway systems out of existence. Nobody else has done that.
There’s ways to do it, if we have leadership. This stuff is a lot of work. If it was easy, someone would have done it.
Business people who are trying to make money and make the market work aren’t talking to what I think is a major economic development and community development partnership:
CATA. I’m not sure CATA thinks of themselves that way.
I go around the country and look at the things a land bank authority should be doing, and transportation comes up time and time again. When you’re developing, you have to have a conversation with CATA.
[Let’s say] you’re putting in housing, you’re putting in retail, you’re adding employees. Have you thought about how your minimum wage employees are going to get back and forth from work?
The
Stadium District should have been a
transportation oriented design, but there weren’t any conversations with CATA. It’s doing a lot of the same things—there’s a bus stop right there—but it wasn’t a part of the marketing leading up to the plan.
We’re sometimes so close to where we want to be, but we miss it by a mile.
CG: What do you mean when you say CATA should think about itself as a transportation system for mobility rather than a bus company?
ES: They’re a really good bus system operator because that’s what they’re focused on. But that’s very static.
We have a great transportation hub downtown and that’s great, but the limited transportation service that we have doesn’t tie into
Amtrak’s. There’s no integration.
We need to have big ideas coming out of transportation. I suppose it could be
Tri-County Regional Planning, but they think mainly about road systems. Maybe it’s not CATA that should be the bigger thinker around mobility, but who is it going to be? Why not CATA?
I know it’s hard to run a bus company—and they’re a good one. They’re
nationally recognized for quality of services. But we just need to think about it more.
CG: Who will lead the mass transit effort in Lansing?ES: The largest factor that hit the U.S. in the last year was the price of fuel. That did more than maybe any of the rest of us ever will.
We have a major opportunity because of the
$6 million in federal housing money that just came in. How are we going to spend that?
I’m advancing the idea that one of the layers we need to look at when acquiring properties is if they’re a block or two from a bus stop. It doesn’t mean you buy only those properties, but you have higher quality of property around a bus stop.
There are incremental steps you can make that make a big difference. I’m going to do what I can to make sure the priorities and policies of the Land Bank look at transportation.
I hope with this funding we’ll be able to do a signature project around a bus stop so we have something to point to. It’s good for businesses, it’s good for the environment and it’s good for the people who will end up living on these properties.
CG: Will the housing crisis change the way we look at transportation?ES: I think folks are really going to have to pay more attention to how they spend their money.
Transportation is a wonderfully large expenditure in a family budget. For a long while people thought, if they could get a nice big house out in the distant suburbs, “Who cares if I have to drive half an hour here or two hours to an urban center?”
People will re-look at that.
CG: What incentives need to be removed to encourage people and businesses to look at their transportation options?ES: The ones to eliminate are the subsidies we provide to sprawl. We’re still adding some highways and some interstate when we have crumbling ones. We need to take care of the infrastructure that we have.
We have some people doing that—they like to talk about it—but it probably means there needs to be some adjustment to the gas tax. Maybe it’s incremental; maybe it’s a little bit more. The money has to come from somewhere and I think they’re getting closer to a consensus on some increase.
$4 gas is probably the best way I have seen in the marketplace to alter people’s perspectives on how they live their lives.
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Eric Schertzing is the Ingham County Treasurer and chairman of the Ingham County Land Bank. He started following transit issues as a transportation appropriations aid for former
U.S. Congressman Bob Carr. While spending time in the East Coast, Schertzing couldn’t help compare the vibrant Eastern transportation system to the nearly nonexistent one in the Midwest.
Ivy Hughes is the managing editor of Capital Gains and a new bus rider.
Dave Trumpie is the managing photographer for Capital Gains. He is a freelance photographer and owner of Trumpie Photography.
All Photographs © Dave Trumpie