Last week, Charlotte Area Transit System czar Ron Tober dropped the political equivalent of a nuclear bomb on the Charlotte City Council.
As with most Tober presentations, you had to read between the lines. Essentially, the future of light rail in Charlotte could be dead, Tober told them. After the completion of Charlotte’s single, puny, 9.6 mile carnival attraction of a rail line along South Boulevard, which is scheduled to start running next year, that may be it.
Of course, Tober didn’t actually come out and say this, and he stepped aside to let an underling deliver the most devastating slides to the council. The underling, CATS’ Deputy Director John Muth, didn’t exactly spell things out either, which could be why the council had virtually no reaction to the news.
The bottom line in the charts and graphs was that the Federal Transit Administration has been tightening up its approval process, and if CATS tried to get the South Corridor line approved today, it would be rejected because it moves too few people for too much money compared with other lines across the country. Charlotte was able to get the South Boulevard line approved for federal funding — which covers 50 percent of its $427 million cost — because the FTA liked the city’s land-use plans along the line. But a new federal formula mandates that new projects meet a medium-high efficiency standard. The South Boulevard line ranked medium-low.
Studies of the northeast line, which is supposed to be a continuation of the South Corridor line that stretches up to the UNCC area, are incomplete. But it has been widely, though unofficially, acknowledged for years that the South Corridor line was the more efficient of the two. If that’s the case, the northeast line won’t pass federal muster.
So does this mean Charlotte’s light rail future has ended virtually before it has begun?
“I think we’re all asking that question,” said Charlotte City Council member Pat Mumford. “Does this mean that what we have is it — that [the rail line is] only going to be 9-1/2 miles?”
No one inside the local political establishment seems ready to publicly draw that conclusion. But Raleigh was recently faced with a similar situation when it tried — and failed — to get a first line approved. Raleigh’s efficiency modeling didn’t make the FTA’s cut last fall and, as a result, rail has been largely taken off the table there, despite a decade and millions spent on planning and studies.
UNCC Professor of Transportation Studies David Hartgen thinks the same thing will happen here as CATS moves forward with proposals for future transit corridors later this year.
“Frankly, I think the five-line Charlotte proposal is off the table,” said Hartgen.
The new federal cost-effectiveness formula is complicated, but essentially the FTA wants to fund projects that will attract the greatest number of people and cost the least amount of money to run. That’s partly being driven by the increasing competition for federal transportation dollars, which has become cut-throat. At the moment, about $1.5 billion in federal money is available annually for transit projects. There are currently 20 projects totaling $26.7 billion waiting in the pipeline for funding. CATS doesn’t have any of its new projects in the pipeline yet. Another 120 planning studies, including Charlotte’s, are currently being tracked by the FTA. That makes even qualifying to get into the pipeline highly competitive.
There are ways around this quagmire. A handful of Congress members have managed to get legislation passed exempting local projects from the new federal standards. But when Raleigh asked North Carolina Senators Richard Burr and Elizabeth Dole to try that route, the two sent a letter back to the Triangle Transit Authority urging it to “explore other opportunities” besides rail.
The problem with Charlotte’s proposed northern line, and others like it around the country, is that it runs through areas that don’t have naturally dense housing patterns. The South Corridor line didn’t, either, but local leaders were able to convince the feds that they could condemn and tear down the old warehouses along the line and replace them with dense housing to feed the rail line with passengers.
That’s the “land use” piece that helped CATS get funding for the South Corridor line and overcome a low-cost effectiveness rating. But now cost effectiveness is the primary factor the FTA is using to rate projects.
Without the federal money, CATS would be left to pay at least 75 percent if not all of the project costs, rather than the 25 percent the city had envisioned when the half-cent sales tax for mass transit passed in 1998. Back then, it was assumed that the FTA would kick in 50 percent and the state would kick in 25 percent. But if the FTA doesn’t fork over the federal dollars, Mumford thinks Charlotte will have a hard time getting the state to turn over its 25 percent share.
“If the federal government says, ‘Charlotte, your proposed line doesn’t meet the criteria,’ then I believe it would be difficult for state legislators to say ‘Well, we know the federal government don’t agree with it, but we’re still going to put our money on it,'” said Mumford. “That would be a tough sell for Charlotte. It’s kind of a doomsday scenario.”
Hartgen says he doesn’t think CATS will be able to muster the political support to build another rail line without the federal transit money.
CATS could still do other mass transit projects, like bus lines. It also could compete for funding for smaller-scale projects (called “small starts”) such as a streetcar to run along Central Avenue. But as the CATS presentation to city council showed on Monday night, federal funding is extremely competitive for those projects, too.
There’s just $100 million available in President Bush’s budget for small start projects, money for which every state in the union will likely compete.
“We could have two to three small start projects on our own,” Charlotte Mayor Pat McCrory said. “You’re not talking about a lot of money available at this time.”
Oddly, the Charlotte City Council took the light rail news with so little comment that it was unclear whether the members fully understood the bottom line of the convoluted presentation. The only serious question the council asked came from council member Andy Dulin, who wanted to know why CATS spent $50 million in consulting fees while planning the South Corridor line.
Mumford said his colleagues probably understand the problem, but have decided to put off worrying until later, when it becomes clearer where Charlotte stands in the FTA process.
“I think people just said, ‘All right, it’s not great news but it is not definitive today so we will see what the next step is,'” Mumford said.
This article appears in May 31 – Jun 6, 2006.
