Meanwhile, in University City

The revolution is spreading.

In a “town hall” meeting in University City, CATS honcho Ron Tober got an earful from local residents. The Uptown paper of record reports:

University City residents peppered city officials with questions about the half-cent sales tax that funds mass transit at a District 4 town hall meeting Thursday, prompting city officials to advocate for it.

Charlotte City Council member Michael Barnes hosted the meeting, which Mecklenburg County commissioner Valerie Woodard, city officials from several departments and about 60 residents attended.

The tax, which generates about $70 million for transportation, is on the November ballot.

Residents asked why they should trust the Charlotte Area Transit System after the South Corridor light rail line cost has climbed about 109 percent more than its estimate.

Residents told CATS chief Ron Tober that if he says the Northeast Corridor line will cost $500 million, they expect it to cost $1 billion.

Tober defended the work on the Blue Line South Corridor, saying rising cement and steel prices fueled cost increases.

He urged residents to review a UNC Charlotte study, which showed Charlotte’s light rail cost at roughly $48 million per mile, while Seattle’s cost $179 million and Dallas spent $60 million. (It’s at www.transpol.uncc.edu. Click on “Analysis of CATS”.)

Tober said only one-third of the tax goes toward light rail.

Ah, where to begin.

First, CATS expects the Northeast line to cost $750 million, not $500 million. Second, a common-sense question — if two-thirds of the transit tax goes to pay for buses now, what will pay for light rail later? If you said, property taxes — you win a cookie.

Seattle? Ron Tober is seriously comparing costs in Seattle to the South line? Might make sense were CATS boring through hillsides and had a station 150 feet below ground. Tober thinks the people of Charlotte are idiots.

And again with this Edd Hauser study. Let’s try one more time to put that thing in perspective.

On the question of capital construction costs of light rail, the Hauser study uses an odd mix of 10 systems some of which started running 20 years ago to compare to CATS’ South line. Is there a better, more up to date data set out there?

Well, yes. Just last week the Federal Transit Administration released a study from Deloitte Consulting on nine recent mass transit projects around the country, the oldest of which dates to 1996.

The Deloitte study includes two projects the Hauser study omitted: a Southern NJ Transit line of 34 miles with a cost of $998 million, or $29 million a mile and a Portland extension, 5.5 miles for $125 million or about $22 million a mile.

Bottomline, these projects cost what they cost based on many factors unique to each project, such as the amount of existing right-of-way is used. CATS was fortunate to have existing right-of-way to lower the cost per mile. Great. But let’s not compare the South line to projects that used new, exclusive right-of-way like Dallas, or have tunnels like Seattle and think we’ve proved something conclusive about CATS or the South line.

More importantly, the Deloitte analysis of recent light rail projects cites the South line — and the South line alone — for having construction bids that came in well above expectations along with design problems.

This is the crucial lesson of South line.

CATS chronically under estimated the cost of the line almost from day one. And when repeatedly confronted with questions about those cost assumptions, CATS refused to admit any possibility of error. One more time, let’s recall that transit consultant Wendell Cox predicted the South line would cost $500 million back in 2000. CATS and Ron Tober dismissed that notion.

And then CATS proceeded to repeatedly rachet up the official cost of the then 11-mile project from $331 million to $463 million for 9.6 miles.

Now that this latest number has placed CATS firmly in the middle-of-the-pack when compared to other projects around the country, Tober and CATS’ defenders want to celebrate this mediocrity and failure to accurately project the cost as a some great achievement.

Have fun. The rest of us have to get to work to pay this thing off.

Bonus observation: The Hauser study contains concrete errors of fact on the capital cost question. A table on page 17 lists the South line’s original cost per mile as $48 million — the same as the current cost. How can that possibly square with even the $30 million per mile number the FTA approved as the project entered its preliminary engineering phase in September 2000? I have no idea.

Things get really bizarre when you consider the next table, however. There it is noted that the original cost of the South line project was $221 million. However, this initial cost number was obviously omitted from the previous data set.

Using $221 million, the original cost per mile should have been $20 million per mile, not $48 million. In other words, CATS missed the cost per mile number by 140 percent. And the final tally is still not in. The only other project in the Hauser comparison that comes close to missing the mark that badly is St. Louis at 107 percent and that project is the subject of on-going litigation.

Wait, there is more. Table 11 inexplicably lists the original project length as 9.6 miles. This is also wrong. The original length as approved by the FTA was 11 miles. Only when Pineville opted out of the project in 2002 did the project shrink to its current length.

When you plug in these corrected numbers into the Hauser table, this is what you get in terms of per mile cost escalation:

Given CATS performance with the South line, it is perfectly reasonable to expect that the $373 million North line will actually cost $522 million and the $750 million Northeast line will cost $1 billion.

We need a new plan.