RALEIGH – The region has all sorts of growth-related problems, but it is already implementing The Solution.
The region is the 15-county Charlotte area. The problems include traffic and burgeoning development. And The Solution? As if you really have to ask. It’s mass transit, of course.
That’s the message from a group called Voices and Choices, which has released its 2004 State of the Region Report. The language could have been – and perhaps was – lifted from any of a stack of similar reports from similar planning and “visioning” efforts across the United States:
The report recommends that residents and government officials work toward reducing traffic congestion by developing mass transit, and steering future development toward mixed-use projects, where homes and businesses are in close proximity to one another.
“The future is ours to decide,” said Vicki Taylor, editor of report. “We are the last generation that is going to be able to determine the future of the natural resources in North Carolina. We hope that this report will help to produce dialogue and debate among the people in the communities.”
Advocates of Smart Growth, the name most often affixed to this unwieldy bundle of social-engineering dreams and historical revisionism, are famously resistant to facts and realities. Americans, indeed people around the world, have for decades been buying cars and moving into suburbia as soon as their means and opportunities allowed. In North Carolina, the previous trend of urbanization actually never really materialized, at least to the extent it did elsewhere, and the state remained one of small cities and large towns until quite recently.
Charlotte was, of course, the exception. It does have the look and feel of a big city. Raleigh, Greensboro, Winston-Salem – sorry, not really, but as far as I’m concerned that’s no great loss. If anywhere in North Carolina had the potential to make a 19th-century technology like rail transit and a 20th-century development pattern like high-density, mixed-use neighborhoods work in the 21st century, it would be the Queen City.
But it’s not going to be the Queen City. As the Reason Public Policy Institute concluded in a major study a few weeks ago, it is simply unrealistic to expect the Charlotte region’s rail system to bring any significant relief to traffic congestion or any marked change to development patterns. “North Carolina’s population density is nowhere near what is needed to support rail projects of this magnitude,” said Robert Poole, project director and a transportation advisor to the last four presidential administrations. “Folks in North Carolina don’t live or travel like New Yorkers, nor do they want to. It’s unrealistic to think residents of Charlotte will commute the way people in Manhattan or Chicago do.”
We are preparing to spends hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars – federal, state, and local – accomplishing little. And most of those taxpayers will have neither voices nor choices in the process.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation and publisher of Carolina Journal.