Scenario Would Create Streetcar System on Fayetteville’s College Avenue

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In the design center’s scenario, the Wilson Park Viaduct would bridge steep grades while creating an on-grade pedestrian connection between two historic districts otherwise served by College Avenue in Fayetteville. (Image courtesy of the Community Design Center)

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. – The University of Arkansas Community Design Center has completed a 2030 Transit City Scenario Plan that envisions how Fayetteville might create walkable, mixed-use neighborhoods with centrally located housing served by an urban streetcar system. The center’s plan, funded by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, considers what Fayetteville could look like if 80 percent of the new growth over the next 20 years were to be located around a streetcar system proposed for College Avenue, the city’s main north-south axis and commercial corridor, between downtown and the Northwest Arkansas Mall.

Fayetteville’s current population of 73,580 is projected to grow to 125,000 by 2030, entailing an additional 28,000 housing starts. (The city currently has 32,000 housing units.) “Since close to 50 percent of the built environment projected for Fayetteville has not yet been built, an opportunity exists now to plan an even more intelligent future,” said Stephen Luoni, design center director. The award-winning center is an outreach program of the Fay Jones School of Architecture, where Luoni is a Distinguished Professor and the Steven L. Anderson Chair in Architecture and Urban Studies.

In the past decade, the most prolific and ongoing area of growth occurred west of Interstate 540, with much less happening on the city’s east side. Since the economic downturn, that has slowed dramatically. “Our goals are to try to slow down some of that exterior growth, which has been converting farm land to low-density housing, because it’s not cost-effective,” said Jesse Fulcher, a planner for the city. Instead, planners are trying to spark more housing development in the city’s interior through urban infill and to discourage suburban sprawl.

The center’s scenario would convert College Avenue into a landscaped boulevard with new facilities for pedestrians, cyclists and streetcars, while maintaining automobile traffic. The plan addresses a common problem in urban environments: the decline of aging commercial corridors dominated by underused or abandoned strip retail centers, oversized parking lots, and other low-rent land uses. Luoni likens the design approach to “sprawl repair” in which auto-oriented environments are reconfigured into neighborhoods with clear centers and edges, and with interconnected street networks that support pedestrian traffic and public transit.

“Since most commercial corridors are radically underutilized and adjacent to desirable urban neighborhoods – such as the Washington-Willow Historic District, the Wilson Park neighborhood, Rolling Hills, and the emerging University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences campus – they offer ready opportunities to accommodate growth through high-quality infill development without adding new infrastructure,” Luoni said.

The 2030 Transit City Scenario for Fayetteville envisions a traffic circle instead of a partial cloverleaf on the north end of town. Traffic circles and trails are examples of multi-modal transportation formats. (Image courtesy of the Community Design Center)

Streetcar environments attract commercial uses, housing of all market grades and types, entertainment, and employment centers, which allow residents to access services without using automobiles, according to Luoni. The plan aligns public infrastructure investments with market demand among baby boomers and young professionals for urban housing in mixed-use settings, he added.

Unlike light rail, which requires a dedicated right-of-way at the regional scale, streetcars are scaled within a corridor and simply entail the retrofitting of streets. Unlike buses, streetcar investments can change priorities and decision-making environments in the development community, Luoni said. Currently, more than 100 U.S. cities are planning or constructing streetcar systems.

If Fayetteville continues its current development trends, new growth will require 300 miles of new roads at a cost of about $600 million by the year 2030, Luoni said. The center’s proposed Transit City Scenario replaces that with a streetcar system that would cost about $100 million.

In addition to creating a signature six-mile boulevard that transforms languid development into vibrant mixed-use neighborhoods, the proposed plan could build prosperity. According to a regional report from the Center for Neighborhood Technologies, a typical Northwest Arkansas household spent 29 percent of its annual income on transportation in 2000, far above the national average of 19 percent. The Transit City Scenario aims to reduce that, since an average household in rail transit cities spends less than 16 percent of its annual income on transportation.

Commuting isn’t the only cause of traffic congestion, Fulcher said. Much of it actually comes from all of those other trips – to the grocery store, pharmacy, schools. “The farther you live from the city center and the services, the more you have to put toward transportation,” he said, “leaving less money for living expenses and quality of life. There’s ultimately a cost benefit to being near services.”

New design standards in Fayetteville’s downtown master plan make mixed-use development easier. New commercial zoning districts along College Avenue allow residential uses and also offer economic incentives. In addition, maintaining the existing urban infrastructure is cheaper than building and maintaining new roads, Fulcher said.

Scenario planning helps communities envision alternative but plausible planning possibilities that would not have emerged from charrettes and other consensus-based processes favoring incremental decision-making, Luoni said. The city joined the design center in applying for the NEA grant, and city planners provided their research to the design center as a resource. The 2030 Transit City Scenario Plan was among six unbuilt project finalists in the 2011 World Architecture News Awards Urban Design Sector. Images from the center’s plan can be viewed on the World Architecture News website.