BTW, the headline on Richard Rubin’s transit tax repeal story today is seriously wrong. Charlotte mass transit foes claiming progress tells readers that if you favor repeal of the half-cent sales tax you are against mass transit.
Worse, Rubin’s lede makes the same mistake:
This fall, Mecklenburg County voters may decide whether to pull the plug on mass transit.
No. Charlotte had a bus system before the 1998 tax and could have one without the tax.
Further, some forms of mass transit make sense, others do no. For example, long-time readers of Meck Deck know that I’ve said that a bus rapid transit line from Uptown down Independence to a park-and-ride lot at North Sardis Road might make all kinds of sense, provided connecting and related road improvements were made.
The Uptown crowd is setting up this question as yet another false dichotomy — either pay the money or the buses stop. Recall it was the same deal with city’s the property tax hike — either pay the money or no police. It was a lie then, it is a lie now.
Also recall that for 10 solid years now, CATS, the city, and the county have rejected serious, constructive criticism of their mass transit plans. These so-called “naysayers” were consistently right, yet ignored and belittled. The only option proponents of a sane, responsible, and affordable mass transit system have left is to repeal the funding mechanism and start over.
And let’s not forget that last fall County Commission Chairman Parks Helms had a chance to get ahead of this repeal juggernaut by crafting his own repeal measure for this November’s ballot. He opted to play politics instead and squelch the issue.
The choice is not between transit or no transit. It is between responsibility and insanity.
