In the grand scheme of the universe, it was statistically inevitable. Eventually, something had to go Ron Tober’s way. The Charlotte Area Transit CEO has presided over debacle after debacle in the construction of a mass transit plan now on track to cost more than 10 times what the city’s consultants — who also did estimating work on Boston’s Big Dig — originally estimated it would.
Then last week, the news broke. The light rail transit foes who have hounded Tober for years managed to collect the 49,000 signatures they need to put a repeal of the half-cent mass transit tax on the ballot in November.
The mass transit repeal is probably the single biggest political miscalculation I’ve seen anyone make since I started covering local politics almost a decade ago. The shiny-shoes crowd and their damned consultants couldn’t have come up with a surer way to keep our mass transit plan alive if they tried.
The attempt to repeal the tax isn’t the problem. It’s the timing. There is no way on God’s green earth that this community is going to vote down the transit tax because former Mecklenburg County Commissioner Jim Puckett, whose recent accomplishments include a loss in the at-large county commission race, says it would be a good idea. The community generally ignored Don Reid when he was on the city council — which is a shame since most of his predictions have been right — and I doubt they’ll listen now.
At best, by the time voters hit the polls in November, the South End light rail train will have been running for a week or two on just part of the track, if it’s up and running at all. So transit foes are essentially asking the public to imagine complex problems that don’t exist yet and react to them.
If the train starts running in October, here’s how the headlines will read that first week: “Thousands of Riders Show Up to For Rail’s Opening Day.” Because people think we’re building Washington’s Metro or New York’s subway, they’ll initially be curious to hop aboard. Even if the trains don’t run before the November vote, it’s asinine to think a majority of voters would slash funding for a train taxpayers paid a half billion dollars for without giving it a chance to run.
Either way, here’s the headline that will run Nov. 7, the day after the election: “Voters Reaffirm Mandate for Light Rail.” That “mandate” will give local leaders the cover they need to initiate billions more worth of mass transit spending before the public discovers the truth buried in a report by city consultant Charles Lesser & Co. years ago: It will take hundreds of millions of dollars, and likely more, in government subsidization of development along the South End line to achieve the ridership numbers transit consultants forecasted. Charles Lesser & Co. refused to even speculate on a final price tag, or whether the city’s ridership forecasts, which CATS has since downgraded, were even achievable. (Naturally the city buried that report, so the public doesn’t know much about it.)
That’s why this transit tax repeal probably has Tober sleeping a lot better at night. He could really use a light rail/mass transit mandate from an uninformed public right now. Tober knows the tough headlines he’ll have to deal with next year, after the South End line opens for business. Within six months of the train’s launch this fall, the public will have figured out what Charles Lesser & Co. knew years ago — that the light rail line is little more than a glorified Uptown parking shuttle. By then people will have begun to notice that rail cars seem to be running half-empty, like many of the buses in this city, and the first headlines will have begun to appear about the massive subsidization costs that no one saw coming.
Those in charge will feign bafflement over why the subsidies necessary to run the line are six, eight, 10 times what anyone predicted. By next spring, the full reality of the costs of the North rail line will begin to sink in. As I first predicted almost two years ago, the federal government, which paid half the cost of the South End line, won’t be funding the North line because it is forecasted to have so few riders — a mere 4,600 a day — that it doesn’t meet federal funding criteria.
Because that has received so little coverage elsewhere, the public is still largely unaware that for over a year, the Metropolitan Transit Commission has planned to use upwards of $100 million — initially — in property tax money from businesses and future growth along the northern line to fund it. That’s property tax money that could go for roads, schools and police. Again, we’d be spending this property tax money so we could move 4,600 riders a day on the north rail line while over 100,000 drivers a day are forecasted to clog I-77 in a decade, 25,000 more drivers on I-77 than today.
I’m fairly confident that by November 2008, voters will be calling for Tober’s head on a spike. That would be a great time to ask the public what they think about repealing the tax, because by then, they’ll have enough information to form an actual opinion.
But by then, it will be too late.
This article appears in Jun 6-12, 2007.
Tara, just make sure you keep a copy of this article to forward to City Council when they act shocked next year. Just like I hope you did when they feigned shock at the cost overruns a year or so after you told them it was going to happen.
I think you’re mostly right, however, with the bloated CMS bond package on the ballot, voters won’t have the stomach to support this much wasteful spending.
The fact is, many voters would like to evaluate the South Line before committing to 4 more. Of course, the pols don’t want that because we all know it will gush 100M+ yearly.
Once that message is put out there loudly (and it will be), this thing will get lambasted like the arena bundle.
No Tara, based on the phony Pat Mumphord-led “grass-roots” organization move, these guys seem pretty desperate.
I think it’s more likely Ron Tober will “retire” (much like Jim Pughsley) about a month before the election.
The pom-poms and shiny shoes won’t enough on this one. The public is not as dumb as you think.
Yes, the Light Rail Line has gone over budget and is running behind schedule. But when will Tara do an article on the cost over runs for the last section of I-485 that opened? Wasn’t it a 1 1/2 years late in opening up? Didn’t it go millions of dollars over budget? Just curious . .
I think the Transit Tax W-I-L-L N-O-T be repealed. Somehow, the light rail line will partially open 2 weeks before the vote takes place, which will win over swing voters. The repeal vote will fail and then planning will start on extending the light rail line up to UNCC.
THE BOTTOM LINE: I think in the long run, a growing city like Charlotte will be better off with a mass transit system than without one. Yesssssssssss, roads can be expanded for more capacity. But at some point, roads will reach their capacity. I mean, how many more lanes can you add to South Blvd./Providence Road-NC16/(insert other major city roads here) without tearing down businesses & homes? We all know that the Independence Blvd. Freeway project will never be finished (or maybe in 2075!!!!!!!!). I-85 is pretty much maxed out now; You might be able to squeeze in 2 more lanes on I-77 from SC State Line to Uptown, but that’s it (perhaps if we start campaigning for it now, the project can get started by 2020!!!!!!!).
I think eventually commuters will get tired of fighting their way thru congestion on our area freeways and they will slowly embrace mass transit. When will I-485 in S. Charlotte be widen, 2013 (maybe)? Starting in November, I think some of those folks who sit in gridlock on I-485 will begin to realize ‘Hey, why sit in traffic all morning when I can get off at the South Blvd. exit, pull into the CATS Station and ride the train to Uptown’?
Like in most cities, folks want to live in the ‘burbs because of lower taxes and better schools (which I understand). But at some point, folks are going to get tired of the 1 hour commute into Uptown every morning and start utiliting light rail and the bus system more as their daily commute
When I was living in San Francisco, I rode BART. Thing’s been there for decades. I almost never sat in a full car, and I loved it – easy, pretty cheap, and I could read, look at girls, fiddle with my laptop, and pray for low seismic activity. BART has been heralded as a success by everyone but the people who live there – they know it costs more to run those trains than they’ll ever earn from taking fares, even today.
When I was living in LA I rode the Metro Rail, both the Red and Blue Lines, depending on where I started out. A long, storied string of politicians called Metro a huge success – truth is, it’s never made money, and ridership is way lower than advertised.
I lived part-time in Rochester, New York, too. They’re planning an LRT. Reading their POC docs and compendium, they say they can fit up to 30,000 commuters an hour on LRTs, when “…properly commissioned and set up.” I wish they’d had it working when I was with Xerox – I would have ridden it every day, and traffic in Rochester was pretty light, comparatively. That damn snow, though.
Truth is, seems that history shows LRTs conform to the following standards:
1 – They SAY it’s gonna cost a certain number of million dollars per mile to build. Then they hit a soft spot while tunneling, or a sacred burial ground that has to be circumnavigated, an alien crash site; whatever. In the end, after flurries of lame excuses, they always seem to cost way more than they were bid. True of everything. More so about LRT.
2 – Politicians frequently liken LRT to their days in Boston, New York – cities *designed around* their mass transit. You got tunnels a hundred years old? What’s the cost to operate now? Charlotte was designed for horses and buggies, and that plan’s been retrofitted to cars, not trains, even little ones. People will always drive if they can (all that time in LA may have fried my brain on cars, though. Those idiots drive to the bathroom). And face it: all the transplants here from Chicago, LA and Miami know what traffic is. That little slowdown and pause on 77 is pretty annoying. Try Market Street, San Francisco, northbound at 7:00 AM. That, my friends, is traffic.
3 – They just never actually make enough money to pay for ingoing operations – I just read an article supporting LRT that admitted “San Diego, the oldest modern light rail system in country recovers 68% of its costs from the farebox.” Sixty-eight percent? That’s making money? No. That’s costing taxpayers, like Charlotte’s empty buses. Read HERE: http://www.trolleycar.org/observations/other/becwar020809.htm
People who got snookered into paying premium and buying a piece of shiny white goodliness in Ballantyne are snuggled up all cozy together on 485 and 77 for their low-speed runs into and out of the office every day, bitching the whole way while paying taxes that are on the low side, nationally speaking. They want another few lanes each way on the freeway, not LRT, but hey: no tax increase? No new lanes for a while. Deal with it, and blame your land developers. By the way: not a bad thought, those extra lanes. It’ll cover up the damn garbage laying on the side of the road. I swear after Nashville, Charlotte’s the dirtiest city I’ve seen in a long time. Moral: city councils who let developer grow a city without laying responsibility for improvements upon homeowners are doing a massive disservice to the indigenous residents. So there. I said it.
For the time being, I am running hell-bent for leather from the University Area, in a newly built tract home, paying $45K less for the same model they sell in Waxhaw, and (for now, anyway) no traffic to speak of. Zing! Zoom! Traffic? Me? Nah!
Not…yet, I mean. It’ll catch up to me eventually. Charlotte will grow, like it or not, a lot, and traffic will get to me out here on the Harrisburg border with the cows. By then this debacle, this massive gazillion-willion-dollar weenie of a boondoggle will be up and running, carrying a few thousand tired-looking working stiffs up and down the tracks each day. Those few riders will say, if asked, “Who’s Ron Tober? He play for the Cubs?” Kids these days.
Tara will be calling the entire thing a failure, in retrospect. She’ll be in good company – and I think she’ll be right. But Mister Tober’s replacement, whoever that is, will call it an unqualified success, even if it pays 30% of operations from fares. That’s what political office gets you: a winning perspective on losing (ask George Bush).
What do I care, anyway? My history proves an inability to sit in one house for longer than a few years anyway – I’ll probably be living in Colorado Springs, or Schenectady, or Phoenix.
…Listening to them bitch about the proposed LRT.
To the individual who said, “THE BOTTOM LINE: I think in the long run, a growing city like Charlotte will be better off with a mass transit system than without one”:
Charlotte has had a mass transit system for many, many decades. That’s not the question. What is in play is whether that mass transit system will be flexible enough to take people from where they will live in 50 years to where they work in 50 years. And the answer to that is, only if 50 years from now we force them to live and work where politicians today decided to run rails.