RALEIGH — North Carolina’s three largest metropolitan areas — Charlotte, the Triangle and the Triad — are in various stages of the process of constructing commuter rail systems. Mecklenburg voters approved a half-cent sales-tax hike back in 1998 to help build their system. Triangle counties are collecting special taxes on car rentals to run empty buses back and forth to the Research Triangle Park, and later to cover part of the cost of their planned rail system. And the Piedmont Triad — comprising Greensboro, Winston-Salem, High Point, and surrounding areas — is at an early stage of dreaming up their own railroad fantasies, having just instigated their own car-rental tax for transit.
It is all so pointless. Even a “successful” commuter rail system would have a barely noticeable effect on traffic patterns and congestion. A few developers would make some money near transit stops, virtually all due to the massive government subsidies involved. A few folks would switch from buses to trains, thus saddling taxpayers with proportionally more cost. And a few politicians would preen proudly for the cameras, proclaiming their “progessive” policies and moving on to the next potential boondoggle.
A January 2003 report by longtime transportation scholar John Semmens serves as a good summary of the arguments against this course. Perhaps Gov. Mike Easley would benefit from taking a gander, given his bad new idea of raiding the Highway Trust Fund to cover the state portion of these transit projects (which would be mostly funded with “federal dollars” found growing on money trees and in pots at the end of rainbows).
Automobile drivers aren’t subsidized. They pay the full cost of the highway system they use, and then some. Rail transit, by contrast, is not a viable economic enterprise in virtually all cases. It is, however, a viable political enterprise.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation and publisher of Carolina Journal.