As suggested by a task force appointed by Mayor Anthony Foxx. And it looks surprisingly like a list of items left over or hinted at in the old transit plan. Except with a key difference: any and all pretensions of financial restraint have been eliminated. This includes, per the UPoR:
One change is that the task force assumed that light rail would be built along Independence Boulevard. The Metropolitan Transit Commission had voted for bus-rapid transit along Independence, with the possibility of a complementary streetcar on Monroe Road.
Building light rail in the median of Independence Boulevard would cost more than $1.5 billion, according to the study group’s report.
The task force also recommends running the street car to the airport, something that also isn’t currently envisioned. And when you add it all up, it comes to a mere $3.3 billion to build these additional transit corridors.
Funding? The draft report says raise the transit tax by another 1/2 cent and hope that CATS can find additional revenue sources to cover the rest of the costs. Again from the UPoR:
The draft report says that if all of the transit projects were to be built and maintained solely with a new transit tax, it would have to be levied at an additional .78 cent.
Of course, when the original half-cent sales tax for transit was sold to the public 15 years ago, it was claimed that the tax would bring in enough money to may for five transit corridors running out from Uptown Charlotte. Except that the costs were badly underestimated, the tax revenues were smaller than projected, and the assumption that all the feds would pick up half the costs of any and all rail lines proved to be incorrect.
Albert Einstein defined insanity as “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
So we now face a new draft of a plan, which again promises great things for an additional 1/2 cent increase in the sales tax. And based upon past history, there’s every reason to think that the costs are again vastly understated and the revenue projections greatly overstated. And that projects are being included for no other reason that to sell the whole package to residents of different parts of the county (see: Independence Boulevard light rail in particular but all the projects qualify.)
So is Charlotte and Mecklenburg County insane enough to pursue such a transit vision?