Charlotte Area Transit System officials expect the next few years to be busy at the transit agency. In addition to a light-rail line under construction, CATS officials hope to begin work on four more lines by about 2010, the CATS Web site says.
That appears unlikely to happen.
Getting a rail line built involves selling the project at different times and in different manners to different groups. It also often involves offering hope for projects that are unlikely to be built in the real world. The benefits of transit are oversold initially and the costs understated to get local approval for projects. Attempting to get the federal money required to actually build a system typically involves refining projects to a smaller scope than what communities were sold on earlier.
Overselling the rail dream
That a transit project might initially have been oversold or costs underestimated to get the project approved should come as no surprise.
In an influential 2002 paper, three Danish researchers demonstrated that transportation infrastructure projects almost always come in over budget.
Writing in the Summer 2002 issue of the Journal of the American Planning Association, Bent Flyvvberg, Mette Skamris Holm, and Søren Buhl described their statistical analysis of 258 transportation projects costing $90 billion over the past 70 years. The authors found that costs were underestimated in 86 percent of projects, with the amount of the average overrun varying by project type. Rail projects came in on average 44.7 percent over their estimated costs, a larger cost overrun compared to fixed-link (tunnel and bridge)(33.8 percent) or road projects (20.4 percent).
Based upon their analysis, the authors concluded that the original cost estimates were off not because of methodological errors, but rather because the forecasters and promoters of the projects were engaging in deception to get favored projects approved.
In line with Flyvvberg, Holm, and Buhl’s research, the cost of the CATS system grew soon after the Mecklenburg County voters approved an extra-cent sales tax to fund transit in 1998. What had been sold as a $1 billion system soon became $3 billion and then $6 billion.
At the core of the proposal are five transit corridors running out from uptown Charlotte. These corridors are: to the south, along South Boulevard toward Pineville, to the west to Charlotte-Douglas International Airport, to the north parallel to I-77 toward Huntersville and Davidson, to the northeast toward UNC-Charlotte, and to the southeast, along Independence Boulevard (U.S. 74) toward Matthews.
Importantly, the specific mode of transportation — rail, in either light rail or commuter rail incarnations, or buses using dedicated busways — was not specified when voters were asked to approve the tax. Rail service is generally regarded as being more desirable than buses but it is also more expensive to build and maintain.
The undefined nature of the corridors was a key selling point in 1998, allowing voters to think they had a chance of obtaining rail service for their part of town. That possibility still officially exists, at least in theory, today for all five corridors. Public outcry after CATS recommended bus service for the west and southeast corridors caused the commission overseeing CATS to reconsider the decision; planning is under way for both rail and bus service. A decision is to be made later.
The end point of the various corridors was also not certain until recently. For example, there was talk of extending the north corridor beyond Davidson to Mooresville in Iredell County. The southeast line might have reached Matthews, the south line Pineville, the northeast line go beyond UNC-Charlotte to perhaps Lowe’s Motor Speed and an amphitheater.
Selling it to the FTA
CATS is now in a very different second stage of selling its proposed transit lines. One great appeal of transit projects to local governments is that they might have to pay only one-fourth or less of capital costs. Indeed, if local governments had to pay for their proposed rail transit networks by themselves, most would be unaffordable.
The key is getting the Federal Transit Administration to commit to a project and pay 50 percent or 60 percent of a line’s cost. The FTA, however, has a limited amount of money available to fund new lines. It has also instituted a rigorous modeling and scoring system, based in large part upon the cost-effectiveness of a proposed line.
These constraints effectively place systems across the country in competition for scarce federal new start money. That, in turn, forces them to refine their proposals to their most viable cores and eliminate marginal elements.
“They have seen the writing on the wall and are looking to strengthen the competitiveness of their proposals versus those of other cities,” is how UNC-Charlotte transportation studies Professor David Hartgen describes the recent moves by the CATS to shorten its proposed rail lines. By dropping the end stations, which would serve a relatively few riders, a line’s overall cost effectiveness numbers would look better.
CATS dropped plans to extend the UNC-Charlotte corridor much beyond the university. A stop just short of Interstate 485, the Charlotte outerbelt, would be the final stop. I-485 has become a barrier that the south and southeast lines won’t cross either, and thus transit lines won’t reach Pineville or Matthews. And the steep cost of offering rail service to Mooresville, without a dedicated funding source, makes that extension questionable, too.
It’s far from a given, though, that shortening a proposed line is enough to win federal approval. The Triangle Transit Administration reduced the length of its proposed Research Triangle to Raleigh rail line in a bid to obtained federal money. Instead of running for 32 miles with 16 stations, the proposed route was shortened by four miles and four stations in 2004. The FTA has still found the TTA’s proposal seriously deficient in multiple regards. The federal agency has given the TTA until Sept. 30 to address its concerns.
Likewise, notes Hartgen, it’s far from certain that even in their shortened form, the remaining CATS lines will obtain federal funding.
Michael Lowrey is an associate editor of Carolina Journal.