Antiplanner visited our fair state last week:
…North Carolina, where transit agencies seem to be competing to plan the wackiest, most-expensive rail transit lines that few people will ever use. Right now, the leading contender must be Raleigh, which (according to a paper by UNC-Charlotte transport professor David Hartgen and transit accountant Tom Rubin) is planning a light-rail line that will cost $33 per trip and a commuter-rail line that will cost $92 per trip.
The Antiplanner, however, is in Charlotte looking at a proposed commuter-rail line that is expected to cost more than $450 million to start up and is projected to carry only about 5,600 trips (meaning 2,800 round trips) a day in 2025. The Antiplanner calculates that, for about the same price as the rail line, taxpayers could give every one of the 2,800 riders a brand-new Toyota Prius every other year for the life of the rail project.
This rail line is such a dog that not even the Federal Transit Administration will help pay for it. So the Charlotte Area Transit System (CATS) is proposing that local cities and counties cover half the costs, while the other half would be shared by CATS and the state of North Carolina. Under a proposed financial plan, five cities and two counties are to use “value capture” to raise their half of the money.
Value capture is based on the idea that new transportation facilities increase the value of properties served by those facilities. Taxes on that increased value thus form a sort of “user fee” to help pay for those transportation facilities. While it sounds reasonable to some, in fact this idea is completely nuts, especially when applied to transit projects such as the proposed commuter-rail line.
But the proposed regional light rail line isn’t even the latest news in my hometown. N.C. transportation officials have also endorsed a bridge over Capital Boulevard that would be part of the proposed 162-mile track that would run trains as fast as 110 miles per hour between Raleigh and Richmond, Va.
