The Great Reset: What Will It Mean for Jacksonville?

Integrating Jacksonville into a True Regional Community



The second of these necessary transformations, the heart of the current reset process as Florida suggests, is creating the new transportation infrastructure to link Jacksonville’s more densely populated urban centers with its suburban hinterland.  As he points out again and again (see Chapter 21 for the specific details), the connectivity of public transit is absolutely vital to restructuring of our post-crash way of life, and we had best get on with the business of doing this as quickly as we can.  Building still more roads – and the proposed Outer Beltway boondoggle is the absolute, howling antithesis of everything that Florida is writing about – and pouring yet more public funds into a failed and increasingly dysfunctional paradigm will do nothing to make Jacksonville a better or more economically productive place to live in.  Beginning to connect the pieces of our own small region into a more vital and functionally integrated whole will ensure our place in the future, if we have the courage to insist on it.  Quoting Florida once again,  

“It’s time to start thinking of transit and infrastructure projects less in political terms [as we are currently doing here in Cowford] and more as a set of strategic investments, as fundamental to the speed and scope of our economic recovery as they are to the emerging shape of the economy, society, and communities of the future.  Critics point out the high cost of high-speed rail [or light rail and trolley-based transit systems] and believe that we’ll never see a return on the investment.  But strict cost-benefit calculations miss the broader economic benefits that come from new infrastructure.  Past investments in railroad lines and highways [as observed in the prior great resets] spurred development of real estate and of industries that far outstripped anything we could imagine at the time.”  (p. 170, emphasis added)

   

The irony – and hopefully not the tragedy – of Jacksonville’s situation is that we already have both the means and most of the necessary funding already largely in place to accomplish this kind of fundamentally necessary transformation.  This applies not only to linking together the disconnected pieces of our downtown, but building the light rail lines that will, as Florida proposes, make us more productive and sustainable in the long run.  As he restates this part of his thesis, “To ensure a true, lasting recovery, we’ll need to mobilize and guide these shifting forces so that they come together into a workable system.  A new spatial fix – a new [transportation-based] geography of working and living – will be our only path back to renewed economic growth, confidence, and prosperity.” (p. 107)