It’s one of those mysteries no one seems too eager to solve. How could the federal government snub our most excellent world-class rail project the way it did? We, after all, are Charlotte and, in typical Charlotte fashion, we simply assumed that Federal Transit Administration officials would fall to their knees upon the site of a few blocks of retrofitted buildings in the South End and immediately meet all of our light rail funding expectations — no matter what half-baked statistical garbage we sent them.
Instead, they gave us $30 million — $155 million short of what we expected — a pat on the head and an explanation that Charlotte’s project wasn’t ready for a long-term commitment. My gosh, how could this be?
Despite what you’ve been told, this is not a difficult question.
You see, Charlotte’s project has a lot in common with most of the other projects at the very bottom of the FTA’s funding list in that it’s one of the nine least cost-effective projects currently being seriously considered for funding — and cost effectiveness is one of the two main factors the FTA takes into account.
But what really made our city’s funding request stand out from the other least cost-effective projects had to be the three years of backpedaling we’ve been doing on ridership figures in our last three proposals to the federal government. No, not backpedaling — that would connote going in a specific direction. We’ve been all over the map. One thing, though, becomes very clear about Charlotte’s light rail project, judging from the data we’ve submitted to the feds — we have no idea how many people will ride or what it will cost.
Along with Charlotte’s project, Phoenix’s Tempe-to-Mesa light rail line ranked at the bottom in cost effectiveness, according to the FTA’s 2005 New Starts funding recommendation report. But unlike Charlotte, transit planners in Phoenix have at least been consistent over the last three years about what it will cost and how many people will ride it, a pretty good thing to know if you’re asking for hundreds of millions of federal dollars. That’s probably why Phoenix at least made the cut on the proposed federal project funding commitments list.
Charlotte is another story.
Three years ago, the Charlotte Area Transit System (CATS) told the FTA that our South Corridor Light Rail line would be 11.2 miles long, cost $348.2 million and have 21,100 weekday boardings by 2025. The next year, CATS told them that though the line would now be almost two miles shorter than it had claimed the previous year, it would cost $23 million more to build and 25,760 riders would board daily by 2025. Now CATS is claiming that the line will cost $386 million, a 30 percent cost increase in just two years, but that only 17,900 would board it by 2025.
Worse yet, three years ago, CATS was predicting that by 2025, the line would attract 14,200 new daily riders, essentially those who would get out of their cars to use transit. That number has now fallen to 7,000. Two years ago, CATS was predicting that nearly 13,000 people would show up to ride the train on its opening day in 2006. A year later, they’d dropped that figure to 9,100.
So let’s see. In addition to being in the bottom quarter of projects in cost effectiveness, we have a shrinking rail line with escalating costs and plunging ridership estimates, no doubt a real winning combination. About the only folks whose figures were as convoluted as Charlotte’s — and whose ridership figures were plunging as quickly as their cost estimates were growing — were Raleigh’s, which is probably why Raleigh wound up dead last on the list behind Charlotte.
Given all this, it’s no mystery why the federal government sent Charlotte back to the drawing board. The feds are waiting to see if and where the south corridor line’s ridership freefall ends. They’re waiting to see what this thing is really going to cost. And at a minimum, they’re probably waiting for us to at least send them similar numbers two years in a row.
All of which makes me wonder … if we’re this confused about the south line, the one we’re supposed to have a handle on, do we really know what’s going on in any of the other corridors? The overall mass transit project has already jumped in cost from $1 billion to $6 billion in seven years. Will $6 billion be enough? Will the half-cent sales tax even pay for it all?
A few weeks ago, in Greater Charlotte Biz magazine, CATS CEO Ron Tober called his organization an easy target for critics in the weekly press, i.e., Creative Loafing. “They’re catering to a lack of tolerance. They’re going to grind away on us,” he told the magazine.
He’s right. They are an easy target. Until Tober and local leaders can get around to explaining the mess described above, grinding away is what they justly have coming.
Contact Tara Servatius at tara.servatius@cln.com
This article appears in Mar 24-30, 2004.
