Rowan can’t afford to miss what’s coming down the tracks.

"People get ready, there's a train a comin'…

All you need is faith to hear the diesels hummin'…"

Curtis Mayfield and the Impressions

Rowan has been blessed by the transit gods.  In as soon as 5 years Rowan's very own transit station will be dropped from transit heaven onto campus and land on the railroad tracks between t parking lot A and Triad.  This is a once in a century opportunity and a major windfall for Rowan.  It has the potential to enhance our campus in a manner worthy of the Rowan that we have the potential to become in the coming decades.  But we will only get this opportunity once and we therefore have one best shot to design the station and the land around it right. The Rowan station should be the heart of a campus academic transit village that is a model of sustainable campus design.

But will Rowan's new Business and Engineering buildings currently under design be properly integrated with the coming rail station or will they disregard the importance of what's coming down the tracks and squander the opportunity that such a rail stop can bring?  So far the evidence points to the latter.  Sadly, there has been no serious dialog regarding a transit-oriented land use plan for the new business and engineering buildings.

Trains and Universities – perfect together

When service begins for the Glassboro-Camden Line in 2019, Rowan will be joining the other prominent New Jersey universities such as Princeton, Rutgers and Montclair who have their own transit stops.   But unlike these other institutions that have leveraged their own transit stops into major focal assets of their campus, Rowan has not embraced this windfall in any substantive way in the planning of the new buildings.  And down the line, the impact of the light rail will have far longer implications for the future of the University and the region than the building of these two buildings.

The Glassboro-Camden light rail line will connect the Gloucester County's top two employers (Underwood Hospital and Rowan University) with the core of Gloucester County's population as well as with the greater metropolitan region.  The benefits of the line will be transformative.  Not only are Underwood and Rowan destinations for employees, perhaps more importantly, they are major destinations for the public to access medical care and higher education.  The G-C Line will offer a very viable alternative for automobile travel through the heart of the county and will connect the county’s core communities to Philly, NYC and the entire northeast corridor.

The Driveshaft of the Economic Engine

If Rowan lives up to President's Houshmand's vision for the university to be one of the main "economic engines" of South Jersey in the coming century then the light rail line should be thought of as the economic  "driveshaft."  The majority of economic development that will take place in Gloucester County in the next 50 years is likely to occur along the G-C corridor.  But when an engine’s linkage to a driveshaft is weak, the ability for the vehicle to carry a load or travel at a rapid speed will be significantly reduced.  The coming Rowan transit stop and the surrounding land use will be our link which will determine how strong and how rapidly Rowan can help drive the South Jersey economy.

Transit Oriented Development

So what does it mean to have a strong land use link to a transit system? Over the past couple of decades there has been a major trend toward transit oriented development (TOD) across the country.  TOD is land use intentionally designed to maximize the potential of what can be reasonably walked to from a station.  The walkable radius becomes the "golden zone" where multiple destinations should be placed.  In order to maximize efficiency in the golden zone,TOD land use design incorporates mixed-uses, high-density land use, pedestrian-friendly infrastructure and a land use design that creates a "sense of place" or a "transit village."

The golden pedestrian zone (from 1,500 to 2,500 feet radius around a transit station) is the critical real estate in which a transit village can be functional.  People will only use public transportation if it provides a viable means of reaching their intended destination.  If you can't walk from where the train drops you off to where you want to go, then you are not likely to choose that mode of transportation.  If people have to make a connection to a second link in travel in order to reach their destination such as a shuttle bus, taxi, or another train, ridership drops by more than half for each subsequent connection.

Therefore the number and variety of destinations that are built within the walkable golden zone is a critical factor in determining how viable the transit system will be.  It follows that every square inch of the golden zone around the train station should be seen as sacred ground.  It is a gift from the transit gods and should be designed to be used to its maximum potential.

Many studies have documented the benefits of Transit Oriented Development some of which  include:

·         Reduced auto vehicle miles traveled and increases walking and biking activity

·         Provision of transportation choices

·         Reduced traffic congestion, air pollution and GHG emissions

·         Spurring of economic development and redevelopment

·         Reduction of infrastructure and operations costs

·         Assists in conserving resource lands and open space

·         Creates a smaller environmental footprint

Transit Village Designation

In New Jersey we've expanded the concept of TOD into the Transit Village program.  Transit Village designation is granted by the NJ Department of Transportation to towns that demonstrate "a commitment to revitalizing and redeveloping the area around their transit facilities into compact, mixed-use neighborhoods with a strong residential component."

In order to receive Transit Village designation, a municipality must adopt a transit-oriented development (TOD/ redevelopment plan that includes transit-supportive site design guidelines, architectural design guidelines and transit-supportive parking guidelines.  Other criteria include "place-making" efforts near train stations.

Communities that qualify for Transit Village designation receive substantial benefits including:

·         Committed support from the state Transit Village Task Force

·         Coordination among state agencies to support development plans around the station

·         Priority funding from some state agencies

·         Technical assistance from some state agencies

·         Eligibility for grants from the NJ Department of Transportation (NJDOT)

To date, New Jersey has 28 designated transit villages.  One notable example with which many Rowan employees will be familiar is Collingswood.  The Borough of Collingswood has worked with the Delaware River Port Authority who runs the PATCO High Speed Line to create a Transit Village Plan for the area around the Collingswood station.  One phase of the plan transforms the large surface parking lots into structured parking and mixed use development. The Collingswood plan gives just one visual of how we might design the land around our pending Rowan station stop to take maximum advantage of the golden zone.

Aerial image of Collingswood's PATCO station
and currently existing surface parking.

Collingswood's Transit Village plan for the site (Alberto Associates). 

The PATCO surface parking lots will be transformed into a vibrant mixed-use
transit village with structured parking tucked behind.  (rendering: Alberto Associates)

Another example is the Rutgers Gateway Transit Village in New Brunswick.  The Gateway Transit Village entails a compact, multi-use land use plan that directly links Rutgers to the station with its own pedestrian bridge spanning from the campus bookstore to the train platform.  The plan won Rutgers and New Brunswick a New Jersey Smart Growth Award in 2012.  Rowan has great potential for creating an even better campus transit village.

The Rutgers New Brunswick Gateway Transit Village is a mixed-use plan anchored by the
Rutgers Bookstore which features a pedestrian bridge with cafe tables (visible under the awnings) .
The bridge creates a promenade that directly connects to the train platform (orange building visible
behind the tree).

A Rowan Campus Transit Village

Rowan and Glassboro should emulate the town-gown approach of Rutgers and New Brunswick to developing an academic Transit Village plan for the western flank of the Glassboro campus.  This would entail much more than simply building a train platform to get off and on.  A Rowan Campus Transit Village would carefully plan and design the land use around the station to maximize its potential for benefiting Rowan as well as Rowan's potential for benefiting the rail line.  A campus transit village would create a grand gateway experience for people arriving at our university.

Parking Lot A –The Perfect Transit Village Real Estate

Fortunately much of the land around the proposed Rowan station stop has great potential for developing into a transit village.  Parking Lot A is currently a sea of surface parking - the lowest level of land use and the easiest to develop.  Land with surface parking has already been environmentally degraded.  A parking lot is already impervious surface preventing ground aquifers to be recharged.  A parking lot already had its trees cut down and topsoil sterilized.  So surface parking can be developed with virtually no increased environmental impact than has already occurred.  In fact development of surface parking presents an opportunity to improve the environmental performance of a site since a building can be designed with green roofs, environmental infrastructure and landscaping amenities that can improve water quality and provide habitat.

The Golden Pedestrian Zone (a 5 minute walk) from Rowan's future transit stop
should be thoughtfully planned to become an academic transit village.  Both the new
business and engineering building sites are within this golden zone but there is little
indication that they are being considered as part of a transit village. 

Parking Lot A and the parking lots around Triad present the ideal canvas for creating a university academic transit village land use design right in the heart of that golden 5 minute walk zone.  But it's important to get the ingredients right.  The golden transit zone must be developed at a level of intensity and design detail to achieve a critical mass of uses and activities.  This means having as much built activity space as is reasonably possible (within an acceptable balance appropriate for the community- more on this in the next post).

Missing the Train

To date Rowan has not had any serious dialog about planning for the coming train.  In spite of repeated attempts to bring the topic up in public forums as well as in conversations with administrative officials, there has only been platitudes and head nodding without any substantial consideration for how to coordinate the campus master planning with the coming light rail system.  Granted that the administration has many other priorities to worry about and the rail is at least 5 years from opening.  But the consideration of the rail connection has direct implications the administrations top priorities of the business and engineering building because they will be consuming significant chunks of land in the golden zone.  If the business building is built in a manner that locks in a myopic land use pattern that wastes the real estate of Parking Lot A, we will have a significantly reduced capability of creating a viable campus transit village.

Of course its difficult to know what actually is being planned.  The bit that trickles out from the administration seems to change every couple of weeks.  Few outside of the inner circle actually know what is being planned since there has been very little public disclosure to date of the design process and siting of the new buildings.  While I applaud President Houshmand’s public statements of shared governance and open process and his offer to give up his personal parking space if there is a parking problem, I am disappointed that there was no substantive information given about any details of these major building projects.

And frankly I am skeptical that there will be no parking problems involved with simultaneously closing two of Rowan’s largest parking lots next year.  From a planner's perspective, closing one let alone two major parking lots is a substantial logistical challenge and will require a major cultural shift that is bound to have many devils in the details and unforeseen consequences.  I much rather would have the president say that he will make the parking study publicly available to review than to park in the president’s reserved lot. (I do, after all ride a bike on most days).

I conclude this post with the following suggested action points which I’ll dig into in greater detail in subsequent posts.  I welcome your posted feedback.

1. Rowan should develop a plan for a campus Transit Village in the area of the pending train station BEFORE the business and engineering building designs and their locations are locked into place (stay tuned for some examples of Transit Village concept plans created by our planning students  this past semester). 
2. Rowan should work with Glassboro in attaining Transit Village designation from the NJ DOT. 
3. Rowan should leverage the Transit Village status to assist in campus development actives.
4. Rowan should develop the Transit Village plan to qualify for LEED for Neighborhood Development certification.
5. Rowan should open up a serious and meaningful channel for shared governance for campus master planning as stipulated in the Sasaki Master Plan.
6. Rowan should provide any and all consultant’s reports regarding master planning and building activities to the university senate with an opportunity to weigh in before decisions are made.
7. Specifically – Rowan should provide the consultant’s report regarding the parking reconfiguration plan and associated impacts of developing the business and engineering buildings on Lots A and M.
8. Rowan should seriously consider moving the location of the new Business Building from Parking Lot A to the site of Linden Hall so that Parking Lot A can remain functional until it can be properly planned as the heart of a Rowan Campus Transit Village.

Why Does Bunce Hall Face the Wrong Way?

and other past Rowan planning question marks.

The orientation of Bunce is one of many questions about Rowan's campus building pattern that I often hear from our planning students once they begin to view land use and how it functions (or not) from a planner’s perspective.  Other questions include; "why do campus walkways suddenly end?" and "why is Memorial Hall so difficult to navigate?" and "why are the relatively newly built Townhouses having problems with settling foundations?"  The student’s developing skill to identify many campus land use problems and dysfunctions often trace the root causes to short-sighted past planning decisions.

Backsides tend to be less flattering than front-sides.  Nonetheless, Bunce's rear,
north-facing facade is the view most people get of Rowan's signature building.

Most people know Bunce by its north-facing façade since that is what is visible from route 322 which has become the main thoroughfare into campus and to downtown Glassboro.  This "backside" of Bunce does not make for the most flattering image of our quintessential campus building since it prominently features a two story air conditioning unit and electrical transformer behind the backstage equipment room of Towhill auditorium.  The front-side of Bunce Hall and the view of its majestic green is mostly enjoyed by only a handful of students and a few locals from the adjacent neighborhood.  That is except, of course, for once every May when it becomes the our iconic setting for tens of thousands to gather commencement (well at least until this year). 

Bunce Hall under construction in 1923.  The front of the building faced the
train station - the major mode of access to the campus for five decades.

But the title of this post is really a trick question.  Bunce Hall was actually facing the right way when it was built in 1923.  For its first 50 years there was regular passenger train service to Glassboro that ran until 1971.  Students, faculty and staff would arrive by train and enter Glassboro State College through the gate that opens to the college green and view the majestic front façade of Bunce Hall.  The founders of the college actually got it right.  When it was built, Bunce logically faced the entrance that connected Glassboro to the region.  Route 322 at the time was an infrequently used rural road that ran through farmland.  Parking lot A was an asparagus field and the land where Savitz Hall is located was a peach orchard.  Bunce Hall was facing the right way and that planning decision lasted for half a century.  Since that time, many subsequent planning decisions were far less long lasting than five decades.

Memorial Hall 

One less than prudent decision was to renovate Memorial Hall rather than to tear it down when it had reached the end of its useful life in the late 1990’s.  Memorial Hall was actually several different buildings used for various purposes including the campus cafeteria that were connected by ramps and hallways .  The sprawling conglomerate single story structure spreads out like an octopus consuming a large and prominent land site at the heart of campus but it actually providing relatively little actual usable building floor area.  In planner speak this is called a low Floor Area Ratio (FAR).  Low FAR means that buildings are inefficiently using land, less energy efficient and create more impervious surface which impacts water quality.

Furthermore, portions of Memorial Hall are actually below the grade of ground level which results in the building being prone to flooding during major rain events.  This does not make for the best environment for electronic equipment.  Nevertheless, a cost-saving planning decision was made by a previous administration to renovate Memorial Hall rather than tear it down and rebuild it.  It was decided that the renovated Memorial would house the backbone of Rowan's computing infrastructure.  This cost-saving planning decision has subsequently wound up costing millions of dollars in computer flood damage.  We are still working with engineers today to mitigate the flooding risk of Memorial.  In hindsight, rebuilding on the Memorial site could have been an opportunity to enhance the core of campus with much more efficient and aesthetically worthy building deserving of that prominent campus location.

Memorial Hall, a collection of separate buildings linked by ramps including the old GSC cafeteria,
was long past it's useful life in the late 1990's when it was renovated rather than rebuilt. 

The Townhouses

Another example of short-sighted campus planning is the Townhouse complex.  In 2003 Rowan had an urgent need for additional student housing to meet the increasing demand for residential students.  The university’s first attempt to provide the needed student housing was to purchase the Campus Crossings.  The 18 acre 328 unit apartment complex was on sale for $24 million.   But when issues of mold were uncovered - the administration quickly backed out of the purchase agreement in part because of the negative PR surrounding the perception of mold problems. 

Instead the university opted for a plan to build new townhouses on an 11 acre patch of oak forest that the biology department had used as a study area for decades.  Many of the trees were over 200 years old The administration developed the plans for the townhouses with little input from the campus community and placed an unattainable deadline.  Dozens of trees were clear cut and rather than at least receive lumber value for the wood, the university paid a contractor to have the wood hauled away. (I've been told that the lumber value could have been as much as $500K).  In an attempt to make the unrealistic deadline, the townhouse units were built off-site and trucked in as a time saving strategy.  Foundations were rushed.

The Rowan Townhouse plan was to build 110 units and a parking garage at a projected cost $34M but in the end the tab grew to over $60M with cost overruns and lawsuit settlements.  Architecturally the townhouses were also myopic, turning their backs (with air-conditioning units) to Rt 322 and engineering a now trash-laden retention basin as their most visible feature.  In the decade since they were built, the townhouses have had multiple issues including settling foundations and cracking walls.  In hindsight it becomes clear that rushing this project was a costly misadventure.  The university should have stuck with the Campus Crossings purchase.  If we did, we would have added 328 housing units as well as 18 acres to Rowan's campus assets for a cost of $24M plus whatever the cost of mold remediation would have been (let's generously say 1 or 2 million).  But through less-than-prudent planning decisions, we actually spent over $60M to clear cut dozens of climax oak trees on property that we already owned to get 110 housing units and a parking garage.  With four beds per unit, that comes to a cost of $160,000 per bed and parking space.  The shoddy workmanship on the rushed townhouses, by the way, has resulted in mold issues.

 

The Rowan Townhouses were built in a formerly wooded area of campus under an unrealistically short deadline.  The rushed project wound up not making its deadline and nearly doubling its original cost estimation.

Of course hindsight is 20/20.  It’s easy to criticize these land use blunders of past administrations.  No university president sets out to make bad land use decisions.  But seeds of poor outcomes can be traced, in part, to a less than comprehensive approach to planning, to over confidence by decision makers in their own ideas at the disregard of alternate points of view, to closed-door decision making, and to lack of substantive stakeholder input.  The Townhouse story highlighted many of these weak points that can occur in university land use decision making.

The Most Powerful Land Use Position in America

It's interesting to note how a public university president is in one of the most powerful positions for land use decision-making with some of the fewest checks and balances or oversight.  As a public entity, a university has the ability to publicly bond financing.  It has the legal power to employ eminent domain for acquiring land from unwilling sellers.  A public university in New Jersey does not have to abide by local zoning regulations.  A public university is tax-exempt and thus does not have to pay taxes on the property value of its real estate. And, other than compliance to safety regulations of the NJ Division of Community Affairs, public universities have few other mechanism of oversight or review for land use decisions by which they must abide.

Yes administrations usually hire expensive consultants to expedite plans for university projects that they put forward but consultants generally don't offer critical oversight to ill-conceived planning initiatives but instead provide whatever it is they will be paid to produce.  A university administration has the ultimate power to generally do what they want as long as they can sell it to the board of trustees with no requirement to have public hearings.  In the past this has resulted in pushing through shortsighted projects that at the time may have seemed well-conceived at the time but in the end wind up being costly and resulting in dysfunctional land use patterns of our campus today.

I’m hopeful that President Houshmand will be following a different course in campus planning than past administrations.  One important sign that he may is the initiative to add a Storm Water Management and Landscape element to the Sasaki master plan. This plan will help to mitigate some of the past planning errors that have resulted in the major flooding events that have become a monthly occurrence on campus.  The fact that the Houshmand administration is beginning our new development phase with a first planning initiative to protect the environment is the right way to start so that we don’t repeat the environmental mistakes of past planning examples.  But it remains to be seen if this administration will be will be fully embracing the language, spirit and intent of the Sasaki master plan that was developed as a balance to poor previous planning missteps.

The Townhouse Silver Lining – the Sasaki Master Plan

Going back to the townhouses, the final costs in dollars, environmental impact, squandered land use potential as well as lost confidence in the administration by the campus community is still reverberating today in expanded debt service and cynicism of campus stakeholders.  Fortunately one of the positive outcomes of the Townhouse fiasco was the initiation of a campus master planning process in order to plan of the long range future development of campus and avoid the costly mistakes of the Townhouses.  The process was open.  A campus master planning committee with broad representation from across the entire university community was established and ultimately the Sasaki planning firm was hired at the cost of $2.5 million to create a nationally worthy campus master plan .

A number of campus master planning subcommittees with broad campus representation were formed and worked with Sasaki for over a year and a half.  More than 9 months alone was spent on the Guiding Principles which were created as a guide for gauging future planning decisions.  The Guiding Principles were central to the plan because it was realized that circumstances and the map would change in unpredictable ways but as long as the principles endured, the best outcomes would be achieved.

The Sasaki Master Plan Guiding Principles (p. 86 Appendix A) are the collective voice of the Rowan community and should continue to be the primary gauge by which current planning initiative are gauged.  The Guiding Principles call for a Campus Master Planning Committee to be maintain to steer campus development away from myopic land use decisions that result in dysfunctional land use outcome and toward more comprehensive smart growth patterns that function well for decades.  I am hopeful that our current administration will stay true to the Guiding Principles of the Sasaki Master Plan, re-initiate an open master planning process and avoid land use decisions that result in regretful future dysfunctional land use outcomes.

Dysfunctional versus Functional Land Use

What do I mean by functional versus dysfunctional land use?  It goes back to the adage that “form follow's function."  As an analogy, lets look to the human body and its' elegant design so classically captured by Leonardo da Vinci's sketch of the Universal Man (below left).  For the human body to be functional it requires that things are in the right location, at the right scale, and properly connected to the right systems in the right proportions.  Imagine how well the human body would function if it did not have the right form, scale, and connections (below center).  Likewise, the development of land in a haphazard piecemeal fashion where things are in the wrong place at the wrong scale and poorly coordinated results in a land use pattern that is not very functional.

Form and function are directly related to one another as illustrated by the da Vinci's illustration of the Universal Man (left).  Imagine how well the human body would function if it was put together in a manner similar to many examples of haphazard sprawling land development (center).  Which pattern does Rowan's campus land use (right) most closely emulate? 

Looking at Rowan campus from above I leave it to the reader to decide which da Vinci sketch Rowan campus is more like and how functional the resulting campus land use is.  Hopefully, the pending development growth of campus will take a longer-term perspective and strive toward a more functional outcome that can last and be improved for decades to come.  Bunce Hall faced the right way for five decades before Rowan’s growth and the prominence of the automobile changed the equation.  Let’s emulate the planning integrity of Bunce's architects and strive to make land use decisions that last for at least 5 decades.

In the next blog post I’ll be looking at the coming light rail station and the imperative for Rowan to get the comprehensive planning for the station right.  For it would be ironic if Rowan's oldest building, Bunce Hall faces a train station that no longer functions while one of Rowan's new business building is built on Parking Lot A with its backside being the view that one is met with as one steps off our new station to come.