There’s nothing more amusing to me than watching this city’s loopy visionheads run smack into the brick wall of reality, then stagger away wondering what hit them. In fact, I enjoy it so much, I’ve built a full-time career out of it. Needless to say, they’ve done it again. This time, it’s the uptown trolley they are trying to save from the rapidly expanding booster-project scrap heap. How they got into their current predicament is a lot more interesting than the blasted caboose itself, because it’s textbook Charlotte, and we are a city that stubbornly refuses to learn from its mistakes.
It started back in the early to mid-1990s, when someone got the bright idea to run a trolley through South End to add momentum to humming redevelopment along South Boulevard, which up until then had degenerated into a state not unlike that of East Beirut. It was supposed to cost $9.6 million to run the thing from South End to 11th Street. Those dollars would supposedly cover the cost of building platforms, switches and upgrade track. Volunteers would run it and raise the money to maintain it. Then the trolley boosters decided they wanted more: a $19.7 million choo-choo with stops along the way that would run through the convention center.
A couple of consultants later, the council bit, but the boosters still weren’t happy. A bus line, they’d learned, might run alongside their precious trolley line.
Local historian Dan Morrill called this idea “an unmitigated disaster.” They wanted rail, just had to have it. Of course, many of these people are the same folks who later fought for a transit plan that will include hundreds of new buses. They just didn’t want those buses near their Dilworth homes or businesses. And they certainly didn’t want them blowing by the trendy cafes at brunch, spewing exhaust.
So, the visionheads decided they’d build light rail along the line instead, and run both it and the trolley through the convention center. As is typical of these projects, right off the bat, the numbers just didn’t sound right. And, as is typical when I’ve pointed out this kind of thing in print, I was treated as the village idiot, that poor reporter who just doesn’t get it.
I wasn’t the only one. Former council member Don Reid didn’t get it either. Reid questioned whether the trolley would be at all compatible with the city’s long-range transit plans, predicting that the trolley would eventually cost the city $100 million. Convention center manager Ted Lewis was worried, too. In a May 1998 letter to the city’s engineering department, Lewis warned that running a transit line through the convention center could lead to millions in cost overruns, lost business — well, what business the center hasn’t already lost — and disruptions, and questioned whether $3.85 million was enough to run a transit line or two through the building.
The letter was leaked to the media, and a few weeks later, Lewis found himself dragged before council by bigger bureaucrats and stammering something about how he really didn’t mean what he said in the letter. That was fine for most of the council, which has never really troubled itself with silly details, but Reid wouldn’t drop it. He figured the city ought to study the logistics of running the trains through the convention center before funding the project. Then they might know what it would cost and whether it was doable.
“I don’t think we should go ahead with any project if we don’t know the cost,” Reid said at the time. “It would be irresponsible for us to go forward with this project.”
But instead, the city improvement cabal considered his questions irresponsible, just as they considered in-depth questions about the arena, bundling, the transit plan and the other sugarplums dancing in their heads to be irresponsible. They accused him of trying to kill the trolley. City Manager Pam Syfert said it was “premature” to worry about cost overruns until engineers finished redesigning the convention center. But of course, it wasn’t premature to begin approving money for the trolley, or to rebuild the Stonewall Street Bridge so the trolley and light rail could run through the convention center.
The whole nasty affair was brushed under the rug until last month when city engineers made a horrifying discovery: safety and logistical problems no one had bothered to investigate would make it difficult — and far more costly — to bring the trolley indoors. Springs needed to reduce vibrations were expensive. So was the cost of replacement space for rooms at the center that would be lost to trains. When the $32 million estimate on combining light rail and trolley construction into one project was revealed — and I know this is hard to believe — city council members were shocked.
Other equally shocking discoveries were made. Since light rail runs a good deal faster than the trolley, it would be difficult if not impossible to run the trolley during rush hour, when it would probably interfere with rail traffic. But if the caboose couldn’t run during rush hour, and if people could take rail instead of it, since the two would run along the same route, well, why have the trolley run all the way uptown at all? So people can take the slower, cuter option down South Boulevard home or to dinner?
That no one thought of any of this should boggle rational minds — whether they like the idea of the trolley or not.
Don Reid must be rolling in his political grave. *
This article appears in Jan 12-18, 2002.
