Let’s cut to the chase: CATS will have to cut bus service and raise bus/rail fares in order to close a $3.6m. budget hole, with some of the shortfall stemming from keeping the Red Line heavy rail line to Lake Norman alive.
No one — not even the damn Urban Land Institute — can come up with $400m. to build a train line that will do almost nothing to relieve congestion on I-77. Hell, the Northern town lobbyists are now opening saying that actual transportation is not remotely the goal — rescuing pie-in-the-sky development plans via public subsidy is Job One.
More broadly — 100,000 jobs. Remember Ron Tober declaring that 100K jobs would be needed in Uptown to justify running five corridors of rail transit in and out of Uptown? I sometimes wonder if I am the only one in town who does.
Tober said this in 2006 when the 2030 plan was adopted. This was Tober’s way of explaining that yes, $9 billion for a transit plan — just then hiked from a $6 billion plan and now totaling $9.5b. — was an awful lot of money, but Charlotte’s future growth justified it.
Not anymore. Not if it ever did.
There is simply not enough economic activity — not enough money — to tax it away from the private sector, slap actual current transit riders around with service cuts, and keep wasting it on a vanity train project. But waste it we will. The MTC is set up that way. Unless there is actual leadership from the Northern towns to kill “their” train it will lurch on, zombie-style.
Let’s be clear, any “update” of the 2030 Plan should begin with nixing the worst cost-benefit aspects of the current plan. And any honest look at that would a) Kill the Red Line b) Forget about going to UNCC anytime soon. And it would absolutely, positively not ask for an additional half-cent for transit.
Bonus Huh: How is the UPoR has a front-page story today filed from Haiti but nothing on the MTC meeting?
