The Metropolitan Transit Commission’s absurd five-year delay in moving ahead with bus rapid transit for the Independence line is not fooling anyone. Here’s Under the Water Tower predicting doom for the corridor:
I wonder what people are thinking when they decide no loaf is better than half. Voting to wait five years before choosing between light rail or busway for the Southeast corridor? So much can happen in five years — and almost none of it is good for realizing mass transit along Independence Boulevard, which last I knew was one of the more heavily traveled roads in the state. To top it off, they spent an extra $19.5 million on land they may not need. What — they’re not spending enough already?
The East side rail loons do not seem to understand that unless the heavy commerical traffic on 74 gets the road improvements needed for 20 years now and the commuter traffic gets some sort of functional park-and-ride option, the corridor cannot be fixed. Plopping rail stations along the way at tremendous cost then giving more tax dollars to developers to build next to those stations is not part of that fix.
A bus rapid transit line out to a big park-and-ride lot at North Sardis makes sense. Therefore, that solution is virtually guaranteed not to be the selection of a broken transit policy process in Mecklenburg.
