I’m glad to see the real motivation behind the Heart of the Triad is again seeing the light of day, albeit at the end of Jordan Green’s Yes!Weekly article. While it’s no secret that Brent McKinney is an advocate for light rail, lately it seems like everyone’s been scratching their heads and wondering why PART’s involved in this deal.

Turns out McKinney has a major allly in Winston-Salem city council member Dan Besse, who, by the way, is running for lieutenant governor:

Besse expressed strong support for passenger rail service linking the Heart of the Triad to Winston-Salem and Greensboro.

“What we can hope to do with passenger rail service is diminish the need for new roadway and additional lanes,” he said. “We’re talking about a fifty percent growth in North Carolina between 2000 and 2030. Under that kind of growth pressure, we’re highly unlikely to be able to develop new transportation that will eliminate all the backlog requests that you get for new roads across the state.”

…..McKinney, executive director of the Piedmont Authority for Regional Transportation and a member of the Heart of the Triad Technical Committee, portrays the project as a matter of cities adapting or languishing.

“It’s a simple formula: Put the destination close to the origin,” he said. “In the fifties the goal was to separate our destinations so you didn’t have to live near a manufacturing plant. Now in small rural areas and mid-sized areas we’re still playing catch-up. There are some areas that saw this coming about thirty years ago and did something. You can point to areas like Portland, Oregon. They said, ‘We don’t want to use this money for interstates; we want to put it into rail….’ The trend we’re on right now is not the trend we need to be on to meet our needs in the face of limited and dwindling resources.”

Developers, McKinney said, are not necessarily at odds with that vision. The profit motive leads developers to respond to market demands, and if consumers demand sustainable communities, developers will build accordingly.

You see where this is heading: high-density development around light rail stops. That’s the high-dollar fad these days. And while HOT steering committee chairman and Greensboro City Council candidate Robbie Perkins so far is the black hat in this deal, the real concern will come if Cherokee Investment Properties gets involved. Stay tuned.