Last weekend I rode AMTRAK to Chicago and back. During this very pleasant trip I was fascinated and a tad dismayed at the view of America that one gets from the train tracks. While I am not naive enough to think it would be a garden of cleanliness, I was surprised at the way communities tend to sweep “less desirable uses and activities” under the rug or as they say, “on the proverbial wrong side of the tracks.” Uses that were seen commonly, included:

Manufacturing plants (operating and abandoned);

Warehouses;

Power plants;

Water and sewage treatment plants;

Landfills;

Pawn shops and resale stores;

Rescue missions and homeless shelters;

Storage yards;

Junk and scrap yards;

Long lines of stationary box cars, coal hoppers, and tank cars; and

Chain link fences usually topped with barbed or razor wire.

While some of these uses make perfect sense along a rail line, I kept wondering if these were truly the images the respective community’s chambers of commerce wanted to portray to visitors, potential new employers, travelers, and tourists? I doubt it. Sure, onerous uses have to go somewhere, but why congregate them along rail lines, especially on those areas most often populated by the less fortunate or poor.

It was that aspect which bothered me the most, considering it’s the less fortunate who cannot afford many of the products that end up being discarded in those landfills, scrap yards, and junk yards located adjacent to them. It is also the less fortunate who cannot afford to pick-up and move to greener pastures to avoid the sights, noise, odors, fumes, and other noxious aspects of such uses.

There were places that have realized the importance of making a positive first impression to rail passengers, just they way they would along gateway corridors for incoming automobiles — New Buffalo and Niles, Michigan are two examples from my trip.

Of the larger cities, Kalamazoo has been the most creative by converting its train station into an intermodal transportation center.

As planners, a significant part of our job is deciding the most appropriate location for all land uses, whether they be nice or not-so-nice. However, by overloading the less desirable uses in limited areas, aren’t we imposing a de facto blight on the residents of that part of the community? That is one of the dirty little secrets of planning that really bothers me. How to solve it? Aside from a more even distribution of all land uses across the entire community, two other ideas come to mind:

Require more stringent landscaping and aesthetic standards in industrial, manufacturing, light industrial or similar areas.

Direct spending and construction of parks, museums, libraries, pathways, trails, recreation areas, and other public or semi-public land uses to these same areas as a way to counter-balance the effects of the less desirable uses.

I certainly do not have all the answers to this issue, so other thoughts and ideas on this topic are most welcome. I look forward to reading them.