Before the history of light rail gets too far down the memory hole in the Queen City, let’s pause to set the record straight.

Mayor Pat McCrory, in particular, seems to be a chronic state of denial regarding the volumes of research which prove — and proved — that light rail is financial nightmare for American cities. Accordingly, it should not be remotely a surprise that the South Blvd. line is now set to bust its $427 million budget.

Even before the 1998 vote to approve a half-cent sales tax for transportation solutions for Mecklenburg, the John Locke Foundation and many others raised serious, substantive questions about the direction of transit policy in Charlotte and North Carolina.

The study, Sidetracked: Transit and Transportation Policy in North Carolina was released in April 1997. Among its observations:

This renewed interest in rail transit-streetcar and trolley systems, now dubbed “light rail,” or more traditional subways and elevated trains, known as “heavy rail” systems-does not indicate that such systems now have become economically viable after half a century of not being so. Far from it. Rail transit systems remain very expensive to build and operate at a heavy loss each year. …

Quite simply there are better ways to spend hundreds of millions of tax dollars than on rail transit.

That study also documented a certain Mayor Pat McCrory heading to Washington in March 1997 to lobby for a $100 million busway between Uptown and Pineville. So things do change on the transit front, don’t they Mr. Mayor?

In March 1999 the Locke Foundation study Putting Safety and Economics Before Politics in North Carolina Transportation, noted the primary impetus behind Charlotte’s light rail dreams had little to do with transportation, the environment, or even displaced development priorities:

Transit in general, and rail transit in particular, are seen as signs that a city is modern and forward-looking. If all the great cities of the world have an advanced transit system, then, naturally, Charlotte and the Triangle must have a transit system, too.

In October 2000, well-respected transportation consultant Wendell Cox came to Charlotte to warn that the then-projected price of $1 billion of Charlotte’s overall transit plans could easily hit $3 billion.

Former city councilman Mark Jackson and former city councilman Don Reid hired Cox to study CATS’ plans. Cox predicted the South Blvd. line would cost $500 million when all was said and done. Together they urged that the city to keep a close eye on the light project as if moved forward.

“We should have an annual audit to make sure we are able to deliver what we promised voters,” Jackson suggested then.

The South Blvd. line then carried an official CATS price-tag of $331 million. Mayor McCrory said the Cox report was wrong and worries unfounded.

Ron Tober said the Cox cost estimate was mistaken about the complexity of the South Blvd. project. “We don’t have monstrous engineering problems to deal with,” Tober explained in September 2000.

Let’s say that again: Six years ago, the Uptown crowd was told that cost projections for the South Blvd. line were far, far too rosy and that the actual price would be $500 million. They dismissed the evidence.

At the same time. the Metropolitan Transportation Commission rubber-stamped CATS’ selection of Parsons Transportation Group for a $5.8 million contract to provide engineering plans to the project. The plans were to have been completed by 2003.

By February 2001 McCrory was giddy that the “future was here” was construction was set to start on the McDowell Street bridge that would carry both the South Blvd. line and the South End trolley. The $40 million trolley, originally to have cost $9 million, would be abandoned in 2005.

In July 2002, former Observer transportation reporter Dianne Whitacre informed the public that the cost of CATS’ transit plans had exploded. The overall price-tag was now $2.1 billion, up from $831 million when the half-cent transit levy won approval.

CATS explained that plans had “evolved” to include more stuff. Transportation consultant Cox again shot down that notion down.

“It’s bait and switch. Obviously there is inflation, but this is not Argentina. And they always ‘forget’ stuff,” Cox told Whitacre.

Mayor Pat McCrory defended the expanded plan and said that Charlotte residents would understand the higher costs were due to inflation. Rob Tober said despite rising costs, CATS was on track to wind up with a $367 million surplus — provided enough state and federal money continued to flow into the projects.

In just a few more months, in September 2002, the overall transit price-tag was $2.9 billion, fulfilling Cox’s prediction of two years before. CATS began to scramble. About $175 million in debt-financing crept into the picture for the first time.

In October 2002, the Locke Foundation’s Michael Lowrey spotlighted the recent cost explosion in the piece “Transportation Programs Built on Deception.”

Then in January 2003 Creative Loafing muckraker Tara Servatius called out CATS’ hiring of Parsons Transportation Group and Parsons Brinckerhoff to design and build Charlotte’s light rail system in her cover story Taken for a Ride?

Servatius noted the dubious track record of scandal and mismanagement which seemed to follow projects these firms were involved in. CATS told Servatius it was unaware of problems at the firms’ previous projects, but that somehow steps had been take to “ensure the public’s interests are protected.”

Rob Tober did not have time to answer questions about the firms or how they were selected.

Mayor Pat McCrory challenged the suggestion that the project would go over budget in Charlotte as other similar projects had done and blamed union labor for cost-overruns elsewhere.

“We’ve never had examples of corruption here,” McCrory assured Servatius.

Soon thereafter, WBT’s Keith Larson asked Mayor Pat McCrory about the issues raised in the Servatius report. McCrory was dismissive, if not downright derisive, of the story and the concerns it raised.

As costs estimates continued to rise throughout the following year and into 2004, the Reason Foundation’s Ted Balaker began work on a study of the CATS’ plan. In June 2004 he delivered his report at a Locke Foundation transit forum at the South Park Hyatt.

Among the Balaker’s findings:

Commuters’ experience with urban rail projects and several decades of research reveal that sizable gaps between promises made and promises delivered are routine. Typically, policymakers and consultants underestimate costs and overestimate ridership.

…Capital cost overruns ranged from 13 percent in Sacramento to 106 percent in Miami. And while operating costs in Sacramento were 10 percent lower than projections for the year 2000, in the other cities actual operating costs exceeded projections by a range of 12 percent to over 200 percent.

… In A whole-system approach to evaluating urban transit investments in 2001, Jonathan Richmond, then of Harvard University, notes that policymakers make major decisions based on initial estimates, and even if the estimates prove to be fanciful, the damage has already been done. Often, policymakers have already passed up better alternatives and momentum has swung toward rail.

Richmond sought to update and expand upon the DOT report, and learn whether the practice of overly
optimistic projections had changed. Richmond analyzed all wholly new U.S. light rail projects in operation as of April 1997, as well as the reconstruction to modern light rail of a streetcar system in Pittsburgh. Overall, Richmond studied 21 urban rail projects from 11 cities, and found that—even after the DOT report—the
promises-made-versus-promises-delivered gap persisted. …

Writing in the Journal of the American Planning Association in 2002, Bent Flyvbjerg, et al, considered cost projections more broadly in Underestimating Costs in Public Works Projects: Error or Lie?. The authors analyzed 258 infrastructure projects worldwide worth $90 billion and asked: “How common and how large are differences between actual and estimated costs in transportation infrastructure projects?”

The answer: cost underestimation is very common, but the magnitude depends on the category of project. Of the North American transportation infrastructure projects considered, road projects (24 total) had the smallest cost escalation (8.4 percent) while rail projects (19 total) had the largest (40.8 percent).

When all projects were considered, rail still experienced the highest cost escalation. The authors found that “rail promoters appear to be particularly prone to cost underestimation.” Moreover, their findings suggest that cost underestimation has not improved over time: “No learning seems to have taken place in this important and highly costly sector of public and private decision making.”

For the authors, the key policy implication of the research is that “legislators, administrators, bankers, media representatives, and members of the public who value honest numbers should not trust the cost estimates presented by infrastructure promoters and forecasters.”

At the same forum UNCC’s David Hartgen and Tom Rubin, a former controller-treasurer of the Southern California Rapid Transit District in Los Angeles, presented other concerns about CATS’ plans including cost under-estimates and ridership over-projections.

City councilman Pat Mumford, the council’s point-person on transit, attended the forum and said the speakers and their research “distorted” the true picture of transit in Charlotte.

And, of course, the past two years have seen repeated indications and warnings that the South Blvd. project was off-track — cost escalations being just one.

The South Blvd. line will cost at least $450 million to complete and that is by CATS own math here in September 2006. A better accounting would include at least another $50 million in light rail-related infrastructure costs, bringing us to the $500 million mark predicted back in 2000. The overall transit plan — figure on $6 billion.

Two crucial recent warning signs stand out. Once again we note the city’s own April 2005 audit of Parsons and the report of the FTA-hired consultants conducted in the spring of 2006. Both reports raised questions about the management of the South Blvd. project.

In both cases, CATS, Ron Tober, and indeed the entire structure of city government dismissed and downplayed those findings.

The effort to re-write history will fail. Pat McCrory, Pam Syfert, and Ron Tober will be held accountable in the court of public opinion for their willful disregard of the facts, not to mention eschewing basic common sense.

If and when Charlotte completes its slide from Queen City to Detroit-on-the-Catawba, people will ask “What happened? What went wrong?”

And the answer will come back — Tober. Syfert. McCrory.