With the city of Charlotte contemplating a 10 percent property tax hike much of which, we are told, will go to pay for the city’s transportation plan, it seems like a good idea to drop in on CATS and see how it is spending the public’s transportation money.

Wow! As luck would have it, here’s a dense 175-page report on CATS and other North Carolina transit outfits from UNCC’s well-respected transportation maven, Prof. David Hartgen. The whole report is required reading for anyone hoping to understand just why CATS cannot possibly do what it intends to do while spending millions not doing it. We’ll just hit the big ideas here.

The first important observation from Hartgen is that CATS is chasing its tail. “On average, a 10 percent increase in service leads to about a 6 percent increase in ridership. So, every new vehicle-mile of service offered increases the systems’ operating costs more than the ridership,” he notes. Once again we confront the good-money-after-bad hallmark of local public policy. (See, Cityfair/Carolina Theatre.)

Next, there is the fact that riding CATS takes longer than driving solo — how could it not with an average vehicle speed of 15 mph. This means that CATS is heavily dependent on “captive” riders — 42% of CATS riders are folks without a car compared to an 8% car-less population county-wide. Hartgen notes:

Although the disparity between rider characteristics and general population characteristics is not as wide for CATS as it is for some other NC systems, the overall rider market is primarily low-income, minority, and no-car-household. Perhaps surprisingly, this profile seems to be remarkably stable, in fact hardening over the past several years, even though the system has expanded its service and express service ridership has grown substantially. In short the system seems to be having trouble attracting choice riders who are so essential to its long term growth; in fact, the short term growth is essentially from the same market that has constituted prior ridership, an ominous sign.

Another scary element is cost. CATS’ operating cost per vehicle-hour is $72 compared to a state-wide average of $63. Hartgen notes this is 35 percent above the 1997 level of $54 and projects to $77.60 in 2010, 46 percent above its 1997 level. Overall, operating costs are expected to hit $111 million in 2010 for CATS. This would be a 384 percent increase over 1997 operating costs and be over three-times the growth in fare revenue for the same period. Also, this projects to about $80 million in local revenue flowing to CATS, up from the current $50 million.

What about congestion and air quality? CATS recently spent your money to hold an anti-ozone rally, won’t CATS help here? Hartgen again:

However, recognizing that 42 percent of CATS riders are dependent on transit, only a 0.44 percent decrease in the 1997 daily [vehicle miles traveled] is attributable to CATS. In 2003, CATS would have decreased the daily VMT by 0.81 percent. In 2010, this percentage is projected at about 1.04 percent of daily VMT. Using the CATS projection of ridership, in 2025, CATS will reduce the daily VMT by 2.36 percent, compared to the trend projection of 1.39 percent. Thus on a regional basis, the CATS system is unlikely to be having a measurable effect on congestion or air quality.

Note also that Hartgen is saying that CATS ridership projections are way too optimistic. Specifically for the South Blvd. light rail line, he projects that “opening year” daily ridership will be closer to 6000 than the CATS-projected 9100. In detail:

The current estimate of ‘opening year’ daily ridership for the South Boulevard corridor, 9100, is also instructive from a ‘diversion’ perspective. Assuming that about 2/3 of this traffic will be diverted from other buses (based on the forecasts for future ridership), then about 3000 current auto users will divert to the LRT. This is less than 10 percent of the current traffic volume on South Boulevard, about 33,000, and about 5 percent of the current ridership, 56,600/weekday. This indicates that the South Boulevard LRT line is not likely to have a discernable effect on even local congestion or air quality, let alone traffic volumes on nearby I-77. Of course, if the realized ridership is less then the impact will be less also.

And now the big picture for 2025, the Vision Thing that has driven everything from the half-cent sales tax vote in November 1998 to all the “transit oriented development” Grand Planning since then, how does that look:

By the completion of the Corridor System Plan in 2025, CATS forecasts about 75 million annual riders, about 250,000 per day; our current trends suggest a lower number, about 45 million by 2025. Furthermore, CATS estimates that fare revenues will cover about 27 percent of total operating costs. However, if the system’s fare revenue percentage continues on its downward trend, by 2025 fare revenues will account for only about 9 percent of total operating costs. Finally, CATS projects total operating expenses of $3.13 billion and total capital expenses of $2.94 billion over the course of its Corridor System Plan, or about $250 million in total expenses per year. Current trends, however, project total annual operating costs of about $219 million and total annual capital costs of about $127 million in 2025, summing to about $346 million in total yearly expenses.

Question: Can we afford to build a transit system that costs $346 million every year yet fails to put a dent in either congestion or air quality? Do we really want to ignore abundant, serious evidence that CATS, despite the best of intentions, cannot deliver what has been over-promised? Is it too late to change course to avert a disaster? Hartgen has a suggestion, but no one Uptown will like it.

“A fundamental problem is that a significant fund source, the ½-cent sales tax, places too much cash in a system that provides too little regional benefit. The region’s elected officials should determine how to expand the use of that resource for other transportation needs, particularly congestion relief,” Hartgen writes.

So here’s the bottom-line. At least one-quarter of the proposed property tax hike would go to fund transportation needs. Yet we are already paying $50 million a year in added sales taxes to fund CATS’ wild plans. Why not quit the different pots of money charade and use the good money to do good things — like road capacity. Hell, maybe even a bike lane or two for no one to use.

Because make no mistake, a vote for a property tax hike to fund Charlotte’s transportation needs today is a green light for CATS’ massive crack-up tomorrow.

That, sad to say, is where the money is going.