The Charlotte Rent Seekers Guild held its annual transportation meeting last week. The UPoR reports that the local officials who were attended were pretty downbeat about transit funding. Sample quotes:
“If we don’t do something different, this 2030 or 2035 Plan is going to be more like a 2080 Plan,” said Charlotte City Council member David Howard, a Democrat.
and
“This is not a happy story,” said Huntersville Mayor Jill Swain, who called Mecklenburg’s plans to fund transit “completely and totally obsolete.”
No, what’s completely obsolete are the county’s transit plans period. The assumptions upon which the Red Line was originally sold to voters — that it would qualify for federal money to cover half the construction costs — has long since been proven false. It’s looking increasingly likely that the state won’t pick up a quarter of construction costs either, as CATS has long assumed. The streetcar never made any sense as a transportation project. It’s time for a new approach, one that doesn’t use increasingly scarce resources for extremely questionable projects.
