The Bull in Full

Transit in the Triangle: Together, or apart?

To touch on a topic I keep trying to get to, it seems that the future of public transportation in the Triangle has come very quietly to a critical turning point.  It appears that most of what's going to be said in public has been said, and the talk made its way from the pages of the newspapers to the back rooms, where I can only speculate that haggling over the process seems to be still going on.  Given the amount of time and effort put into the STAC, I can't imagine that the process has already fallen dead.  At least I certainly hope not.

To recap, following the final collapse of the originally proposed Raleigh-to-Durham high frequency rail service, the state government appointed a Special Transit Advisory Commission (a.k.a, the STAC), to be hosted out of the Triangle J Council of Governments.  The purpose, ultimately, was to revisit every step in the decision-making process, to go back over all the options, and to see if out of the ashes of the original TTA plan, something could be made to work politically and financially.  It consists of all sorts of movers and shakers from across the Triangle, from business folks, former elected officials, university leaders, and activists.  The STAC met monthly for the past year or so, working with staff  members from the various local governments as well as the state.  In February, the STAC unveiled a draft report of its recommendations, which showed an ambitious $2 billion comprehensive plan for transit in the Triangle, to be funded through some sort of local tax, similar to Charlotte's .5% sales tax.  One of the Indy's blogs captured it nicely in a post last month, wherein the stresses in the agreement started to show.  Not surprisingly, the fault lines fell along much the same lines as before.  There's all sorts of ways to describe that rift, but ultimately it boils down to the Durham-Wake county line.

STAC releases transit plan

I've been sitting on the idea for a blog post for a couple of months now that I've never gotten a chance to write, because I never feel like I have the whole story.  But Bruce Siceloff at the N&O just broke the story of the Special Transportation Advisory Committee for Durham, Wake, and Orange counties releasing its recommendations for how to go forward with transit in the Triangle, and based on one article, it looks like a home run.

The original TTA plan centered around the plans and developments under the Clinton administration, under which cities around the country got seed money to plan new public transportation infrastructure, with the understanding that any reasonably good proposal would have a good shot at funding.  These funds emphasized getting the first lines built, which always cost the most, so that future lines could grow off of those.  Like in so many cases, however, the Bush administration had other ideas, and gutted funds for the plans, and made up for the loss by increasing the bar on the projected operating efficiency from day one.  That moved the bar from where TTA had been aiming to a level it couldn't reach, particularly with all sorts of idiotic nonsense from Norfolk-Southern and the North Carolina Railroad about right of way uses, as well as intransigence from senior officials at Duke wanting to protect the bucolic charm of the Erwin-Fulton intersection.  The result, of course, was that TTA had to give up on federal funds.

The new plan takes a much different tack.  It still looks for federal funds, but instead of counting on them for over 60% of the cost, the way TTA originally did, it calls for local funding sources, in the form of a half cent special sales tax increase and a $10 increase in the car registration fee (the latter of which is sure to make heads explode at the John Locke Foundation).  This would pay half the cost of a massive $2 billion plan, with the remainder coming in the form of 25% from the state and 25% from the feds. 

And for that matter, the plan looks much better to begin with.