Does Mary Schulken even live in Charlotte? Read about it? How else does she come up with such fantastically detached musings on Charlotte transit? Let’s go to the latest one.
Yet here’s something neither side is saying — and something you won’t find squinting at the numbers: Public transportation is a long-term investment whose value may not be evident for decades.
Really? That is what Mayor Pat McCrory says that all the time. And has for years.
Here’s excerpts from just one interview with the N&O last year that was noteworthy because it came immediately before last fall’s big run-up in the South line’s cost and featured McCrory advising the Triangle on how to duplicate Charlotte’s great success with transit:
We had a general plan in place at the time of the referendum which we communicated to the voters. We called it the 25-year transportation/land use plan. …
…It’s a guarantee to both the employers and to individuals that in certain corridors my employees can get to work in a guaranteed amount of time. Not just next year but 30 years from now. …
…I would first look at land use options within your major employment corridors for the next 25 years. …
…Draw a picture of what you want the region to look like 25 years from now. …
…You’ve got to have a grid system of roads that’s being planned — a grid system that wasn’t being planned in either Raleigh or Charlotte for the last 30 years.
Not to mention that we are talking about scrapping CATS’ 2030 plan. Certainly the pro-tax side has been thinking about decades into the future.
What about CATS’ critics? Well, we can certainly go back to the 2004 John Locke transit town hall meeting down at South Park for a pretty much continuous line of discussion about the problems in CATS’ 2025 and now 2030 plan. In fact, the massive operating cost of the final plan — which CATS’ pegs at $250 million a year but could easily hit $350 million — is a primary mover behind the push to junk the current plan.
So right off the bat, Schulken’s premise is flawed. But because Mary thinks she is the only one taking the sober, long-term view we get the give-it-time argument.
The thing is, we’ll never know whether the transit plan will work if we don’t give it time. We’re still at the beginning.
It may need to be adjusted, but we don’t have enough information to decide it ought to halt in its tracks.
Sigh.
This too is old hat.
As Ted Balaker put it back in 2004:
In other words, the completion of one project often means that local policymakers will pursue new rail projects, regardless of how badly the first project performed. Even chronic financial problems rarely dissuade policymakers from pushing for new rail lines. After years of cost overruns, delays and funding uncertainties, officials in Seattle recently used the occasion of their urban rail groundbreaking ceremony to call for additional lines. …
If the North Carolina rail projects are built, there is good reason to believe that local policymakers will pursue additional projects. Even if the first line fails to deliver on promises, policymakers can assure residents that success is just around the corner, that one more line will help the system operate more efficiently. Indeed, whatever the outcome, the response is almost always the same—more rail.
And so says Mary — more rail.
This is why November’s vote comes at such a crucial time in Charlotte’s transit history. The South line is winding up (we’re told) and CATS has yet to break ground on another train line despite rushing head long to do so. There is nothing in the ground we have to walk away from were we to adopt a new transit plan.
Not so in a year or two. CATS excels at in-for-penny-in-for-a-pound budgetary gamesmanship and our elected leaders have shown themselves unable to deal with this. As a result, in a year or two, it will effectively be too late to change course on transit without incurring additional costs. And at that time I guarantee that Mary and the Uptown paper of record will say it is foolish to walk away from X-many millions of dollars already spent on new train lines.
And Mary also continues the congestion mumbo-jumbo:
Investing in mass transit won’t mean fewer cars on the roads in 30 years than there are today. But it will mean fewer cars on the roads than there would be otherwise. That’s a critical detail.
Wonderful strawman there, Mary. Absolutely no one expects that building trains now will mean less traffic in 30 years than we now have. Absolutely no one. The only question is how much future congestion will be reduced as a result of building additional trains. The next train to be built is the North line. CATS projects a daily ridership of 4600 by 2030.
Let’s take that at face value even though there will be some current bus ridership that will be diverted to trains, perhaps as much as 600 riders. That’s transit. How about the roads? As we’ve noted for months CATS says that I-77 will carry at least 177,000 cars a day in 2030, up from 77,000 today.
So for at least $470 million in public dollars, we will reduce traffic on I-77 by — at most — around two (2) percent. Compare that with widening I-77 from 485 to NC 73 at a cost of $40 million. One lane of interstate typically carries up to 2000 vehicles an hour. Make additional lanes HOV/HOT and you begin to get some congestion pricing built into your efforts.
Bottomline, once again we are confronted with options that certainly seem to be more efficient and cost effective that the current $9b train-building campaign. Provided reducing congestion is your goal.
But Mary’s simply seems to be to preserve the status quo at any cost:
We need to remember the big picture.
Why is that key? Because it’s too early to tell whether to pull the plug on the chief funding source for a long-term commitment unless someone offers a better vision to replace it.
Here’s the better vision: Don’t spend $9 billion on something that will not work. Take into account advances in technology and the experience of other jurisdictions and update our our circa 1995 plan for the 21st century.
We need a new plan.
