Tag: downtown

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Who do the city councilors represent?

On By jamesinclair

Last week, the Fresno City Council voted to support a proposal for a new medical college. The problem is, the proposed campus isn’t actually in Fresno, or even really near it – it’s 20 miles away from downtown, in an area currently used for farming and recreation.

Granville, the housing development company behind the medical college, owns large tracts of land by the lake, and wants to use it to build thousands and thousands of new suburban homes. They plan on using the medical university as an anchor, and what I see as bait to get public opinion to support the plan.

Many in the community have naturally been outraged. The area is home to beautiful natural scenery, and thousands of new cookie-cutter homes will destroy that. Worse, the area will be 100% auto-dependent. There are no services, stores, or jobs there. Meaning every time a home is built, multiple car trips will be added as people drive 10-25 miles to get to jobs in Fresno. Of course, the area already has some of the worst air pollution in the country, and this will just make things much worse. Click to read more!

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Federal budget includes more money for Fresno BRT

On By jamesinclair

Part of the recent release of the 2014 federal budget included a list of what the FTA will fund as part of their “small starts” program. That budget includes another piece of the Fresno BRT (bus rapid transit) funding puzzle – another $10 million. The Fresno Bee last reported on the initial $17.8m grant over two years ago. No money was handed out in the 2013 budget.

BRT in Fresno is supposed to improve bus service along Blackstone and Kings Canyon, via downtown (and eventually the high speed rail station). Those are currently the corridors with highest bus ridership.

Unfortunately, Fresno isn’t getting real BRT. Very few bus lanes, street-level boarding and really nothing more than you’d find on what other cities might label an express route or special route. Regardless of the lack of features, the project is expensive – almost $50 million. Some of those costs are for new articulated buses. A little more goes towards improving bus stops and shelters. But the meat of the funding will go towards….well, this is Fresno, so you know the answer. Road widening. Even though Blackstone and Kings Canyon already are very wide (6 lanes + parking + turn lanes), that apparently isn’t enough to paint a bus lane. The laughably small 20% of the project that will involve exclusive lanes revolves mostly along wider roads. Oh, and new traffic signals. Click to read more!

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Downtown vacancy rate not so bad

On By jamesinclair

Last week the Bee ran an interesting graphic showing office vacancies around the city. One would expect that with all the doom-and-gloom surrounding downtown, that the vacancies there would be much higher than elsewhere.

Surprisingly, that is not the case.

For the entire city:

The vacancy rate at the end of the year was 13.01% compared
to 13.03% at the end of 2011, the report said. That means about 2.7
million square feet of office space out of the 25 million square feet of
office space in the market, which includes government-owned offices, is
empty.

Downtown, the vacancy was 11.66% – or below the city average. East Shaw had the absolute worse vacancy rate, at 20.48%, with West Shaw not far behind.

It’s relevant to note that while the city wants to destroy the Fulton Mall to “bring back business”, the very auto-focused Shaw has the highest vacancies in the area, well above the pedestrian oriented downtown. It’s no surprise that Clovis got a grant to attempt to revitalize their portion of Shaw, and that the feedback given was to make the area friendlier to non-automobile users. Click to read more!

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What Fresno can learn from Oklahoma City

On By jamesinclair

Streetsblog recently ran an interesting series of articles about Oklahoma City and the changes implemented by their current mayor to make the city a more attractive, more liveable and healthier place. The lessons for Fresno are extremely relevant.

Cornett’s zeal to make Oklahoma City a healthier city led him to take
a hard look at the built environment. He realized that car-centric,
pedestrian-unfriendly streets weren’t just costing residents their
health, they were costing brainpower — too many of Oklahoma City’s
talented young people were leaving. Businesses didn’t want to locate
there because their employees didn’t want to live there. Click to read more!