City Manager-for-Life Pam Syfert does not really deserve a response to her propaganda offensive in defense of the South Blvd. light rail line.

She starts off with a deception — the fiction that no General Fund money helps pay for Charlotte’s light rail delusion — and falls off from there. It is also absolutely absurd to assert that a few thousand express bus riders has had any impact on the local ozone situation one way or another. Yet Syfert does that, which either marks her as a fool or utterly contemptuous of local taxpayers. Pick one.

And again we get the Great Charlotte Road Building Myth. This time Syfert style:

Recognizing we cannot widen or build enough roads to accommodate increasing congestion, voters made a wise investment in the future of the region when they approved the dedicated sales tax for transit in 1998. My obligation is to ensure those dollars are being spent effectively to provide transportation choices for citizens of the county.

Back up. If congestion is increasing, it is only because Syfert and her city planners want it to. The city wants high-density, transit oriented development. With higher density comes great congestion, it is an absolute iron law.

Charlotte, in fact, does not now have much in the way of “increasing congestion.” Census Bureau data show that commute times have barely changed in the past 10 years. Why? Because even adding the modest road capacity of the long-delayed and instantly stressed 485 was enough road-building to keep Charlotte moving. A focused and targeted road-building plan, funded by, say, a half-cent sales tax, should be able to add capacity well into the future.

Since 1998, however, Syfert and her city staff have deliberately moved Charlotte away from building roads. If this trend is not quickly reversed, Charlotte will grid to a halt. The Syfert gang thinks this would be great, because then local residents would be forced to take the trains and buses they are building.

In reality what will happen is that Charlotte will slide into economic decline as jobs and taxpayers move places that are not hostile to the suburban life-style most middle-class Americans enjoy.

The long or short of Syfert’s scatter-shot response to criticism of light rail is one big middle finger to local taxpayers. The Uptown crowd knows what it wants and now knows that you do not like it. But there will be no change.

Everything is on track. Get on board or get run over.