December 01, 2004 News & Views » Citizen Servatius

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The real deal on rail

So the feds finally funded the damn train. Well, hallelujah. Looks like Charlotte's big city boosters won this one.

As for the rest of you who are still baffled by their determination to build a light rail line down South Boulevard, given that even the city admits it won't reduce congestion and may actually increase some types of pollution, you're apparently still way, way out of the loop. Let me help you understand.

Your problem is that you're still thinking of light rail in terms of transportation, and the people who get it know that's simply not the point.

Grab a map of the county and plunk it down. Imagine your goal is to expand uptown, to find new and exciting directions for office buildings and mixed-use retail developments to grow, no matter what the cost. Now place your finger at the center of uptown and move east, down Central Avenue. Nope, can't build there. It would mean ripping down miles of African-American neighborhoods that rim the inner city's edge, and we all know the uproar it caused the last time we did that. They're still talking about it, decades later. Now move your finger upward to the North. There's room for some development, but ultimately, you run into the same problem. Ethnic neighborhoods. Now move your finger downward dead south. You'd have to tear down affluent neighborhoods, another major no-no.

Then there's South Boulevard. Past Atherton Mill, there's nothing but junk. Miles and miles of junk. On the right side of the Boulevard in particular are blocks of warehouses and decrepit buildings just waiting to be condemned and turned into something tidier.

Now imagine that the city announced it was going to spend an ungodly sum of money condemning, clearing and redeveloping land along South Boulevard in order to expand uptown. People would flip. So would the judges when the city tried to explain in court why it wanted to condemn a perfectly good used car dealership with a proud history of serving the Hispanic community.

But light rail changes everything. With rail, the city becomes the de facto developer of uptown's new expansion phase. Maybe people will ride rail. Maybe they won't. In the end, it doesn't really matter, because that's not the point. It's the development, stupid.

Still don't buy it? Then ask yourself this question. The worst bumper-to-bumper traffic is on the northern leg of I-77, not South Boulevard. If this light rail thing was sincerely intended as just another transit alternative for those stuck in traffic, why didn't they build the Northeast rail line first, the one they claim will eventually run to Concord Mills? The answer is easy. No direct positive impact for uptown.

Back in 1996, when light rail was still a controversial idea with no funding, the Charlotte City Council made a telling move. It began negotiations with Norfolk Southern railroad to buy the right of way along the train line down South Boulevard to preserve it for light rail. No one was worried about the land for the North line at the time, because even then the South line was the one that really mattered.

Since then, it has all fallen into place like clockwork.

This year, the Charlotte Chamber led and won the statewide fight to get voters to pass Amendment One, which allows governments to use bonds to finance development without going to the taxpayers for approval. They needed the cash to redevelop uptown's next phase along the South rail line and having to go to taxpayers for it every time would slow them down.

Back in the early and mid-1990s, when many of the city's beautiful people still didn't understand how rail would free the hands of government to expand uptown, they fretted about our overcrowded roads and searched for ways to expand them. In fact, two different committees that studied light rail in the mid-1990s turned it down because studies showed Charlotte lacked the density to support it, particularly with so many people making cross-town trips to work that rail could never compete for.

Today, no one who gets it worries about traffic congestion any more, because they know the secret. The worse traffic gets, particularly for those in the suburbs, the easier it will be to sell condos and office space along the rail line and the easier it will be to grow uptown. Traffic congestion is actually good for light rail, and anything that's good for light rail is good for uptown.

The opposite is true, too. New or expanded roads that make it easier to get from the suburbs to uptown threaten rail, and ultimately uptown.

Don't like it? Tough. If you want to live in the suburbs, you'll just have to get used to it. Sure, you can move across the county line to escape the taxes for this scheme if you want, but you'll still have to fight the traffic when you drive back in to go to work.

Either way, they win.

Contact Tara Servatius at tara.servatius@cln.com

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