The automobile is still king of the road in Northwest Arkansas, rolling through the vast majority of state and federal money dedicated to transportation improvements.
The situation isn’t likely to change given the lack of options, lack of money and pull of tradition, experts said.
The advent of laptops, cellphones and Wi-Fi hot spots has made working from home or remote locations viable options. Every little bit helps in diverting traffic and in spreading out traffic on the same infrastructure into different times of the day, said David Schrank, a researcher for the Texas A&M Transportation Institute.
Daniel Martin, a software designer who lives in Fayetteville, works for a company based in Massachusetts with a satellite office in Bentonville. He sometimes works from the cab of his pickup on the family farm in Madison County.
“I’m spread out over three counties, so I telecommute whenever possible to avoid going up and down I-49,” Martin said.
But telecommuting is unusual in Northwest Arkansas, U.S. Census Bureau figures show.
The percentage of people spending at least one day out of the workweek working at home in the Fayetteville-Springdale-Rogers Metropolitan Area was 3.4 percent in 2010. The figure is barely an increase from 2000 and has been on the decline since 2005.
The national average in 2010 was 9.5 percent, figures show.
Some Northwest Arkansas employers, including Tyson Foods, offer some employees options such as flexible hours, which allow workers to go in later or earlier; compressed workweeks, in which workers can turn in 40 hours in less than five working days; and telecommuting.
Worth Sparkman, a spokesman at Tyson, said the company has some employees who work from home and some who have flexible schedules for office hours.
“Decisions about these working arrangements are typically left up to their manager,” he said in an email.
But Schrank said “the reality is that there are only so many types of jobs that can be done from home. Retail employees have to go to their complexes, and doctors have to see patients.”
ON THE BUS
Public transit using buses is an alternative to driving in Northwest Arkansas, whether on Ozark Regional Transit or its sister service, University of Arkansas Razorback Transit.
Joel Gardner, executive director at Ozark Regional Transit, said the region cannot build its way out of traffic congestion problems by adding lanes to I-49 and other roads.
“There’s only so far on a road we can go before we eat the sidewalk and the front porch,” Gardner said. “We can only go so wide.”
Planners predict 800,000 people will live in the metropolitan area by 2040. Gardner said public transit is one way to reduce traffic congestion and accidents.
“It’s my hope that we will be able to get ourselves to a point where we’re an alternative to using cars through our parkand-ride programs along the I-49 corridor,” Gardner said. Ozark Regional Transit has several park-and-ride locations in operation.
Gardner said Ozark Regional Transit’s route between the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville and Northwest Arkansas Community College in Bentonville moves about 30,000 people a year. The “express” service is hourly and free for the college’s students.
Razorback Transit runs routes primarily around the university campus but also has several routes through Fayetteville. The system provided about 2 million rides in 2014 and a similar number last year, according to Gary Smith, transit director.
Ozark Regional Transit provides some 320,000 individual trips a year, according to Gardner.
Gardner said he would eventually like to see buses leaving each end of the Bentonville-to-Fayetteville corridor in 15- to 20-minute intervals with regular stops along the way.
“That would make a significant impact on the traffic that’s on the I-49 corridor,” he said.
ON THE TRAIL
A key to the region’s alternative transportation system is the Razorback Greenway. The paved, multiuse trail stretches 36 miles from south Fayetteville north to Bella Vista. The cost to build the greenway, which was completed in May, was about $38 million.
Most of the money for the greenway and other trail projects came from private donations. Planners included a transportation element in their applications for federal money, and people use the system for more than exercise and recreation, said John McLarty of the Northwest Arkansas Regional Planning Commission.
A recent study by Alta Planning+Design, which designed the greenway, shows that some areas along the greenway average more than 800 pedestrians and more than 700 cyclists each day. The busiest areas were downtown Fayetteville and Bentonville for pedestrians and north Fayetteville for cyclists, according to a map that accompanied the study.
Roughly 150,000 people live or work within half a mile of the greenway. Still, the study found the vast majority of trail use in Northwest Arkansas is for recreation.
Northwest Arkansas’ urban corridor had about 30 miles of paved trails in 2010, and now there’s more than 100 miles, according to Misty Murphy, former Trails Coordinator for the Northwest Arkansas Council.
State highway officials are updating the Arkansas Statewide Bicycle and Pedestrian Transportation Plan but say there’s little money available to spend on a statewide network for bicycle and pedestrian transportation.
LIGHT-RAIL ALTERNATIVES
Regional planners received a study in 2014 that shows that while commuter light rail could work in the Northwest Arkansas corridor, finding the money to pay for the project will likely keep it idle on a siding.
The study, a prerequisite for federal assistance, examined two options for rail: light rail on a new right of way roughly parallel to I-49 from Greenland to Bella Vista, and rail using the existing Arkansas & Missouri Railroad right of way wherever possible.
Light rail in a new right of way along I-49 would be the most expensive of the alternatives, according to Keith Jones, an engineer and vice president of URS Corp., the consulting firm that did the study.
“I think it would be $2.2 [billion] or $2.3 billion for the capital costs of building a separate light-rail line,” Jones said. “That’s sort of the big thing to swallow.”