This week’s “Daily Journal” guest columnist is Joseph Coletti, Fiscal Policy Analyst for the John Locke Foundation.
Planners love trains: subways, els, high-speed rail, and – in North Carolina – light rail. Trains have romance. Cars ignite passions, planes inspire dreams, but only trains can be both nostalgic and progressive at the same time because only trains offer freedom to travel within stultifyingly narrow bounds. Cars and planes have so much freedom that liberals need to pay indulgences in the form of carbon credits to assuage their guilt.
I have enjoyed the convenience of trains where I’ve lived and visited, though even in those places taxis were the preferred method of transportation for those with enough money or without enough time. The number of cabs in a city is probably a good indicator of the need for a subway system. Full buses could also indicate a potential market for trains. Unfortunately for Triangle area rail romanticists, there just aren’t many taxis in the area, nor are the buses very full.
Markets don’t matter when planners get involved. In Charlotte, Planning Director Debra Campbell (the most powerful person in local government you’ve never heard of) admitted, “The real impetus for transit was how it could help us grow in a way that was smart. This really isn’t even about building a transit system. It’s about place making. It’s about building a community.”
Despite the federal government’s refusal to fund a proposed commuter rail line in the Triangle, local governments have not given up on their plans. The Special Transit Advisory Commission (STAC) recommended building two rail lines that would eventually connect to each other and to RDU Airport.
STAC’s plan shares with the original Triangle Transit Authority (TTA) proposal the goal of using existing rail rights of way for Amtrak and freight carriers. I live close to both the existing station in downtown Cary and the proposed Northwest Cary station and decided to see what it would be like to ride the rails to work in Raleigh.
After a 20-minute walk, I arrived at the station. Most days, 20 minutes gets me to the office. While I could have driven to the station, the trip is only about a mile and a half, which would have meant my car was doing its worst emission damage for the entire trip to and from the station – not a good green life.
The train portion of the trip itself was 10 minutes from platform to platform. Commuter rail would have two more stops, in West Raleigh and at N.C. State, to make the 8.4-mile trip closer to 15 to 20 minutes.
Once at the Raleigh station, there is still another 10-minute (half-mile) walk up Dawson Street to get to the Locke Foundation. Commuter rail would therefore more than double the length of time it takes to get from north Cary to Raleigh while providing almost no clean air benefits. For those who live in southern Cary, Apex, or Holly Springs, the train would be a complete waste of time, money, and effort.
None of this even begins to take into account the added inconveniences of not having a car at work. I sometimes stop at the library, the grocery store, the pizza place, or the dry cleaner on the way home, but that would likely not be an option with Triangle rail for some time and then only if development actually happened as planners hope.
It seems unrealistic to think, as Bob Geary suggested in a recent Independent Weekly cover story, that rail will unite the Triangle. Planners designed Research Triangle Park (RTP) in the 1950s to be a green space – park – with widely dispersed businesses. Ersatz planners like Geary look at it 50 years later and condemn it for not being conducive to mass transit. If you need another example, consider how the old neighborhoods destroyed to make way for public housing in the 1960s became the model for urban renewal in the 1990s. Planners are never done because they keep rethinking their visions of Utopia.