KIPDA's nine county service area - image from kipda.org

What is KIPDA?

KIPDA is a government organisation that marshals counties around these parts. Of particular interest is the Transportation Division, which does regional transportation planning for Louisville and four surrounding counties. KIPDA headquarters host regular meetings where citizens come to learn about their transportation system, and work with the government to build a regional plan. The transportation planning division of KIPDA is what's called an "MPO" - Metropolitan Planning Organisation.

Opportunity Knocks

KIPDA could achieve great things for the region - they're really the only meta-government between the county level and the state level, and this is the sweet spot for transportation planning. We all benefit from an active, engaged MPO. The value of the feedback KIPDA can garner is proportional to the diversity of the people collaborating, and so KIPDA needs to engage the population as broadly as possible. These public meetings are good, in other words. We need more. A lot more. They're listening, but it is hard.

So we were really excited to hear that KIPDA is moving their headquarters. Their current location is remote, to put it mildly. Riding transit out there is just about impossible. Recently cars have started to overflow their parking lot, and had to create their own mini-transit service from a mall parking lot. So they're searching for a new location.

It follows that by moving to a location that's more accessible to more people, you'll have a stronger agency. Furthermore, you want a diversity of people to be able to attend. But where should they go?

Ladies and Gentlemen - The Contendas:

Downtown Louisville

Bardstown @ 264

Plantside Drive near 64

Studying the Driving Costs

We looked at three potential locations for the KIPDA headquarters. For the sake of argument, each Judge Exective's drive time from the county seat to KIPDA would be equally critical, and nobody else's travel time mattered at all.

Hub & Spoke expressways centered on Louisville make location along I-64 all but irrelevant for Oldham, Trimble, Henry, and Bullitt Counties

Drive times for a commuter from LaGrange (A), the county seat of Oldham to each of three different potential KIPDA locations - as you can see just by inspection of the distances, the drive times are very similar.

We computed drive times using Google Maps for each county seat to each proposed headquarters location, and summed them.

We don't particularly like this way of doing things, but we heard those were the numbers KIPDA was crunching, and that they recommended Plantside Drive. But our results show that there was basically no difference in driving times among the three locations:

Downtown Louisville actually edged the others by a nose. Really, if we're weighting each county equally, then this data tells us that the hub-and-spokes expressways ringing Louisville make each location along I-64 equally convenient for drivers from all the counties.

Who Drives to KIPDA Anyway?

If everyone went from their County Seat to KIPDA, how many miles of induced travel would that cost us? Holding KIPDA meetings at Plantside Drive induces roughly double the travel. That's time out of our civil servant's lives, milage taxpayers pay for, and congestion on our highways.
Technical Note: assigning a 0 cost from "Jefferson County" to "Downtown Louisville" seemed intellectually dishonest - it proved my point too well - so I fudged this one cell to be 5 miles, though I expect a lot of people working from downtown Louisville to simply walk there. This makes the downtown location even greener and faster.

I don't understand why I have to say this incredibly obvious fact, but apparently I do: each county does not generate an equal number of trips to KIPDA. Some generate more than average, and some generate less than average. Now we'll assume trips generated are proportional to population. Downtown Louisville is the center of population for the nine-county region served by KIPDA. Jefferson County is home to 700,000 souls all by itself. The 2nd and 3rd largest counties are Clark and Floyd in Indiana, which also have to drag their scruffy hides through downtown Louisville to get to KIPDA. Together these three counties constitute 80% of the population of the KIPDA 9. What location does the most good for the most people? Clearly, Downtown Louisville is best. Bardstown @ 264 is second best. And Plantside Drive is the poorest performer of the lot.

The only winners of a Plantside Drive location are Shelby and Spencer counties and some folks in far eastern Jefferson county. Alltogether that's about 100,000 people who are hurt. Meanwhile, about 850,000 people are helped by having the location closer to downtown Louisville.  That's helping more than 8 people for each person it hurts.

Quality of Help

Not only are there a large number of people helped by moving KIPDA closer to downtown, but their per-person help is big, while the per-person hurts are small. Because Jeffersontown transportation network is only viable from the cooshy seat of a motor vehicle, the people who attend KIPDA meetings predominantly do so by car. Once behind the wheel, they can travel with speed on the interstate expressway system. So even the people who are "hurt" by moving KIPDA downtown are only inconvenienced by a few minutes.

But not all of the citizens in KIPDA's service area are like that. By chance or by choice they do not use autos. And where do these people live and work? Disproportionately we live very close to downtown Louisville, because thats where one can live without a car. Multiply lots of people by a high fraction of non-drivers, and you get a huge glob all in one place. How do we get around? Transit. Bikes. Walking. We should consider the transportation needs of this sizable group in choosing KIPDA's meeting location. Plantside Drive imposes huge travel costs on these people - about 4 hours round trip.

So each mile closer to downtown saves these people a huge travel cost, at a very low time cost to people from Shelby and Spencer counties. This is a trade-off that we should look at.

click for larger view
Note that Public Health & Wellness probably confused "vehicles" with "motor vehicles". I.e. they forgot about the widespread deployment of urban bicycles.

KIPDA's path to greatness lies in its accessibility.

The greatest good for the greatest number comes by locating KIPDA meetings closer to Downtown Louisville. Failing that, something more central than Plantside Drive would be a vast improvement. For most people, downtown is just better. KIPDA's goals are advanced by a more central location.

Updated: Here is the sense of the Courier-Journal reader comments reacting to news of the planned KIPDA move to Plantside drive.