Had fun talking to WBT’s Keith Larson yesterday about Charlotte’s impending light rail disaster. But it was odd to be in the position of house optimist about how this thing is going to turn out. Both Keith and Tara Servatius seem very skeptical that anyone Uptown can: 1) Be held accountable for the mess they have made and 2) Be made to do something besides build $500 million trains.
Here’s how it is going turn out differently this time.
My Reason magazine colleague Katherine Mangu-Ward has a new piece detailing just how a bunch of bloggers forced the United States Senate to adopt a bill that reveal pork barrell spending to some badly needed sunlight.
Powerful interests were against the bill — for obvious reasons. Pork only works if the only people who know about the pork are the ones spending it. A new searchable database of pork is not what the porkers wanted. Yet they were forced to go along because enough concentrated, coherant support for the idea rained down upon the U.S. Capitol.
The same kind of policy shift can happen in Charlotte with regard to the CATS debacle — if enough people beat the city council and county commission about the heads and shoulders (metaphorically speaking).
The lie that CATS could build five corridors of transit with a half-cent sales tax now is in tatters. Accordingly, that money should either be put to other purposes or taxpayers should be allowed to keep it.
In addition, given the dismal experience of the South Blvd. project, by far the easiest project CATS planned, there needs to be an official shift away from anymore train building — and that means trolleys, street-cars, coal-cars, or Lionel — and toward express buses, bus rapid transit, road building, and HOT lanes as Charlotte’s approach to transportation solutions.
Time, however, is short. Right now CATS and the Uptown crowd are pursuing a two-track (!) approach to papering over the crisis. One track concerns securing new funding; that means begging the feds for more money while squaring up plans for hundreds of millions in bonds to floated or perhaps outright loans. The second track is continuing to obscure and cover up exactly how and when the South Blvd. project went bad.
They are counting on Charlotte figuring it is too late to change anything — that a vote in 1998 forever doomed Charlotte to insane transportation choices. That is not true — at least it does not have to be.
