Survey of New vs. Old Champaign Central 1.5 mile radius.
In the comments, Bambenek states, "The transportation numbers that everyone keeps saying are going to cost hundreds of thousands of dollars are complete junk. Not partial junk, not kinda junk, absolutely worthless junk. It makes the assumption that 0 students live within 1.5 miles. Look at a map, that's obviously not true."
Student Density from Unit 4 Website
While I am sure you may find some school children within the 1.5 mile radius, it does not take much effort to see that the bulk of students are going to be located outside this radius. While the radius of the current school includes much of the community, the radius of the new site does not have a significant population density. Based on my mapping, 1.5 miles does not reach Bradley Avenue.
Bambenek goes on to chastise residents saying, "I can't for the life of me understand why in a town of so many educated people treats the idea that moving one high school (when the other high school and 3 middle schools are also served by MTD) would entail increasing costs by 400%. It's absurd on its face."
Maybe it won't be 400%, but it is likely to increase significantly as the number of students within 1.5 miles of the school goes down significantly. That number is probably not zero. Is that number significantly huge? I don't think so. I encourage Mr. Bambenek to provide how many 8th graders and under are enrolled in the rough 1.5 circle below. Folks, I guarantee you that there are a significantly more currently inside the current 1.5 zone of Central.
At least one commenter presented a link to a 2012 scholarly study, by Holly Nelson which outlined increased costs for the Interstate Drive location. http://www.champaignschools.org/sites/default/files/transportation_impact_study.pdf She also stated that almost no one would be able to bike to the location.
Mapping programs can give an indication of the population of a roughly 1.5 mile radius. It should be noted that much of the Interstate drive is populated by fields and shopping. I have mapped the roughly middle of the new high school property and the middle of the current Central High School to give a rough indication of the 1.5 mile line for the need to bus.
New Central Proposed Location
Current Champaign Central Location
Students who are currently using the buses are already subjected to being late several times a week and crowded buses. With further to travel and more students using the buses, students will have to start earlier and may experience more delays with traffic that plagues up north.
If you travel anywhere in the vicinity of Champaign Central, you will see students walking and riding bicycles to school. This is likely to stop with the new location.
Bambenek states that, "Under no circumstance whatsoever will Unit 4 ever pay an amount of busing for one high school worth of students that is well above the cost of buying annual bus passes for all 10,000 of our students, their siblings and their parents."
Unfortunately, if you buy 10,000 passes at $72 a pass, assuming no discounts, and were able to increase frequency and availability of service with no additional money, you are looking at $720,000. With Bambenek's number of $230,000 currently spent, an increase of a little over 213 percent but of course not the 400 others have claimed.
This still does not address students being stranded out there past time when buses pick-up students. Currently my daughter, a middle school student at Franklin Middle School, plays Jazz band. She has to be a school at 7am for practice. Currently, Unit 4 does not provide transportation for her at that time. Neither does it after her after school meetings for sports or organizations. Does Unit 4 have a plan to do so after the move out there?
Practices, late night basketball games, football, band events, theatre. Is someone going to provide transportation to low incoming students after an away game? Is Unit 4 going to provide transportation for all of them or will it fall on the shoulders of the parents who currently bear the brunt of it. My guess is that it will fall on the parents. Traffic which is already a mess, will get worse. Use of cars will rise and use of pedestrian and bicycle traffic will decrease.
No one denies that an increase in seats is needed. However, this location continues to be a barrier to providing those seats.
Mr. Spinner, nice to see someone else blogging about Unit 4. :)
ReplyDeletePersonally, I believe there is a shortage of sound data on how exactly transportation patterns will be affected. I appreciate the hard work done by Holly Nelson via her Central Relocation Study (blog) which supplements the report you quoted from DeJong-Richter. Even with the adhoc survey done by Unit 4 on how HS students get to school, all we can really do is make educated guesses.
I think a key element to this puzzle is how many students will end up taking a bus, or even carpooling, versus driving or being driven by their parents? It would be nice to have a comprehensive study that asked students not only how they get to school now, but how they would get to a school on Interstate Drive.
Based on my own experiences with Traffic Impact Analysis, I think they provide a somewhat decent guestimate of how traffic patterns might change, but they are by no means a guarantee of what the future looks like. Much like weather forecasts. *grin*
All that to say we don't know, with certainty, how much traffic will really suck if we have a school out there. Sure, I am totally with you in that the horrible mess of north Prospect would certainly not get better. Sure, it seems like more students would have the possibility of walking/biking if a school were closer to a denser area, but I get the impression not many do even now. Why not? The kid I mentor lives 6 blocks from Centennial, but he gets a ride.
Here is where I am at in this whole thing. Let the voters pick where the highschool will be sited. Do they want to go up to Interstate Drive and pay the cheaper price? Or do they want a potentially more expensive location south of I-74? We can quibble and bicker ... no, rather, we have already done that. :) We need more facts and more truth, and allow the tax payers to explore via town hall meetings and charettes how they are going to spend their money.
Without that, I fear we will always have an "us vs them" mentality.
I think a big part of the reason many kids get rides to Central and Centennial is that the schools are on the way to a parent's job. I know a lot of people who drop kids off on their way to work. That's going to be MUCH more difficult on Interstate Drive, meaning we're either going to need more buses, or we're going to have more students driving. Neither is a good option.
DeleteTodd, thanks for providing these maps! They're a great way to visualize the relative density of the sites.