RALEIGH – For all the opprobrium I have heaped on rail-transit projects in Charlotte and the Triangle over the past decade, one might assume that I detest trolleys and subways. Not true. When I lived and worked in Washington, D.C., in the late 1980s I was a loyal Metro user, disdaining surface transportation for the speed and prices found below. When hunting for apartments, I made sure that the prospects were close to rail stations, and ended up living in Merrifield, Virginia within a few hundred yards of the Orange line. My commutes each day, either to the Northwest Washington offices of The New Republic or Capitol Hill, were entirely by train and foot.
Later, when I took a fellowship at the Heritage Foundation to write my first book, I looked up on the map the last station on the Red line into Maryland, called around to hotels nearby, and made a deal with a Days Inn to essentially live there three days a week for nearly a year. Again, my travel was almost entirely by rail. I never saw the inside of a cab (I was commuting up from North Carolina on Monday, back on Wednesdays or Thursdays, so I didn’t have a car anyway).
So what’s this satisfied transit user doing with a full spread of arguments, papers, and columns questioning rail in North Carolina? Just applying a little common sense. Both Charlotte and the Triangle – you can throw in the Triad region too, if you wish, as some there want to start planning a choo-choo line, too – are starkly dissimilar from Washington and New York, two cities where transit makes some degree of logical sense. In the latter case, you have a significant share of the population, whether they live in the city or the suburbs, who have to leave home at about the same time each morning, travel to densely packed urban cores of employment, and then leave for home en masse.
In the early 20th century, this hub-and-spoke pattern of daily commuting – not just for employment but also for shopping and leisure – was ubiquitous. Now it is becoming rare. If you examine maps of commuting patterns for regions such as Charlotte and the Triangle, what you see is not a bunch of thick arrows pointing inward to a downtown in the morning and out in the afternoon. You see those arrows, of course, but they are thinner. Many more arrows point all over the place – one side of town to the other, or suburb or suburb, or even out of the city altogether in the morning (as is true for significant parts of Raleigh and Durham). Automotive travel creates beehives and thickets, not pristine hubs and spokes.
Foolish or dishonest advocates of transit argue that there is a huge pent-up demand for bus or rail just waiting to be tapped if only those skinflint conservatives would get out of the way. More sensible advocates realize that building transit must be only part of a far-larger agenda of transforming the way most of us live, work, shop, and recreate. Transit is a necessary but insufficient condition for this transformation. Indeed, though this is poorly understood outside the ranks of planners and activists, transit and high-density Smart Growth policies are not really supposed to ease traffic congestion or increase options. They are intended to constrict, to “calm” traffic (meaning slow to a crawl by having more cars enter and exit a patch of developed land), and to force development into patterns more congenial to mass movement and regimentation. (This strategy reflects the supposition that current land-use patterns are mainly the result of government decisions to build interstates and other major highways out into the hinterlands. The roads changed the behavior. Actually the roads followed and fulfilled public preferences, but that’s a story for another day.)
I don’t oppose rail-transit investment in North Carolina because the “time is not yet right” or “the wasteful politicians don’t know what they are doing.” I oppose the policy because it inevitably means trying to uproot decades-old patterns of life, work, and play that the vast majority of North Carolina prefer – and indeed have consciously chosen with their feet (and, yes, wheels). The assumption that new employment, commercial, and entertainment centers must be located in downtowns, served by fixed rail, is fundamentally wrongheaded. If used as a basis for public policy, it will have deleterious consequences with regard to economic prosperity, individual freedom, traffic congestion, affordable housing, and other concerns.
Every time I visit my old haunts in D.C., however, I ride the train.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.