Category: streetcar

Five key takeaways from Charlotte’s newest transit plan

The chosen Silver Line route is shown in green, at right, along 11th Street. The blue line shows where the Trade Street tunnel would have run. Other options not chosen are a surface route along Trade Street (purple) and a route along the existing Blue Line.

No tunnel uptown. A light rail line crossing the Catawba River into Belmont. Finally light rail to Pineville?

When the Charlotte Area Transit System’s policy body on Wednesday unanimously adopted an update to its 2030 Transit System Plan, those optimistic visions became part of the official CATS planning process.

Note to readers: CATS doesn’t currently have money to build any of those things, estimated to cost $6 billion or more. Just so you know.

But here are some key takeaways from what the Metropolitan Transit Commission adopted.
1. No tunnel uptown. CATS hired consultants WSP (the former Parsons Brinckerhoff) to study a tricky issue – how would the proposed Silver Line (formerly known as the Southeast Corridor), get across all the freeways encircling uptown, then through uptown and head west on its route to Charlotte Douglas International Airport and over the Catawba River?

CATS’ existing light rail line, the Blue Line and Blue Line Extension, travel through uptown on a pre-existing rail corridor. The proposed Silver Line would not. It’s planned to run alongside Independence Boulevard and then head west, thereby adding the former West Corridor to the Silver Line. Any way you look at it, getting that sucker through uptown will mean complicated engineering and high costs.

One option WSP proposed was to tunnel under Trade Street to the existing Charlotte Transportation Center, a hub for most bus routes as well as a Blue Line light rail stop, and up West Trade Street to the not-yet-built Gateway Station, which would also hold a new Amtrak station. Gateway Station is also envisioned as the terminus for the long-proposed-but-still-distant Red Line commuter rail to north Mecklenburg. More about that later.

The MTC opted not for the tunnel but for a route running the Silver Line above ground, beside 11th Street, then alongside the existing Amtrak route beside Elmwood Cemetery, over to Gateway Station and then heading west to the airport. It’s less expensive to build, although the tunnel route would have cost less to operate, over time, the consultants said, and would have shortened Silver Line travel time considerably. (Update as of March 8: Brock LaForty, the Carolinas area manager for WSP, says the consultants’ analysis found the tunnel route would save two minutes per trip, a difference
LaForty called marginal, and said WSP had not analyzed whether the tunnel would cost less to operate over time. The statements about travel time and lower operating costs were the personal opinions of Ron Tober, a former CATS CEO who was working for WSP as a consultant on the project until this month.)

2. At long last, Pineville welcomes light rail. Ever wondered why the Lynx Blue Line ends where it does, just outside the south Mecklenburg municipality of Pineville? The stated reason from Pineville officials when the Blue Line was planned almost two decades ago was that the town didn’t want the high-density, transit-oriented development that would, rail boosters proclaimed, spring up all along the line. So the Blue Line ends at I-485, just outside Pineville. 

“Saved us $30 million,” recalled Ron Tober, who was CATS CEO at the time and who happened to be sitting next to me Wednesday night.

For the record, to date no high-density, transit-oriented development has yet come anywhere near Pineville.

And on Oct. 9 of last year, the Town of Pineville adopted a resolution to support the prospect of CATS someday extending its light rail line to Pineville’s Carolina Place Mall and then to Ballantyne in far south Charlotte. “Pineville stakeholders now recognizes (sic) the need to extend the line into Pineville, the Ballantyne area and beyond to … improve the accessibility of rapid transit and provide a faster link to and from other parts of the Greater Charlotte area …” the resolution states.

3. Finally, light rail to the airport, and into Gaston County. Someday. The proposed transit corridor formerly known as the West Corridor, and (sort of) planned to be a streetcar is now officially part of the proposed Silver Line. It would be light rail along Wilkinson Boulevard past the airport, across the Catawba River and end in the Gaston County town of Belmont. This would be CATS’ first light rail venture across county lines. Further, an ongoing Regional Transit Study would evaluate light rail to downtown Gastonia.

Gastonia Mayor Walker Reid III on Wednesday presented a city proclamation supporting the idea of light rail to Gastonia. Politically, Gaston County has been deep red, with Republican county commissioners less than a decade ago complaining that greenways were, in essence, creeping socialism. So this is progress of a sort.

The West Corridor, now renamed part of the Silver Line, would run along Wilkinson Boulevard (the route shown in purple) and cross the Catawba River into Belmont in Gaston County.

4. Still no commuter rail to north Mecklenburg, for now.  The updated plan calls for short-, medium- and long-term options heading north. Short-term would be enhanced express-lane bus service along I-77 to and from the north Mecklenburg towns, using the soon-to-open I-77 toll lanes. Medium term would be bus rapid transit from Gateway Station to Mooresville in southern Iredell County. This service would be all-day, including nights and weekends. Bus rapid transit (a.k.a. BRT) uses dedicated lanes so it’s faster than regular bus service.

Long-term, the plan would be to keep talking with Norfolk Southern about using its rarely used rail right-of-way from uptown Charlotte to Mooresville for rail transit – maybe commuter rail as was originally proposed.

5. Even some Union County enthusiasm. If Gaston County is red, then Union County is, if such a thing is possible, even deeper red. Nevertheless, the town of Stallings passed a resolution asking CATS to at least study the possibility of extending the Silver Line from Matthews into Union County and to a potential terminus in Stallings. So CATS will study that.

Remember, though, there’s no money for CATS to build any new light rail. And to date not one of the surrounding counties has proposed taxing its own residents, as Mecklenburg does with its half-cent sales tax for transit, to help build out the transit system.

Read more details here: “Charlotte unveils new transit options.”

A chat with the godfather of Charlotte’s streetcar

Driver Danny McQueen on Tuesday, awaiting a carload of dignitaries to launch Charlotte’s streetcar. The historic replica streetcars now in use would be replaced during the expansion phase with modern streetcars. Photo: Mary Newsom
Before Tuesday morning’s ribbon-cutting that launched Charlotte’s new streetcar, it seemed appropriate to check in with Ron Tober. It was Tober who originally proposed adding the streetcar to the larger transit plan for Charlotte. One might even dub him the godfather of the streetcar idea.
Tober was the Charlotte Area Transit System CEO from 1999 to 2007 – the longest-serving CATS chief to date.  The original transit plan, crafted before the 1998 voter referendum that OK’d a transit sales tax, did not include a streetcar. It roughly sketched five corridors: South (now the Lynx Blue Line), North (the still unfunded commuter rail to Mooresville), Northeast (being built as the Blue Line Extension), Southeast (envisioned running roughly down Independence Boulevard), and West possibly to the airport and possibly not.
Other than the South corridor, where the city already owned rail right of way, and the proposed extension to the northeast, it was left unclear in those early days which corridors would get bus rapid transit and which would get light rail. That did not sit well with east and west Charlotte neighborhood champions, who clamored for rail service, not bus rapid transit.
In 2004, Tober proposed a streetcar to connect east and west Charlotte. It would run in rails along Beatties Ford Road, through uptown, and out Central Avenue to Eastland Mall, which at that time was open, he reminded me Tuesday morning. The streetcar idea was adopted into the 2006 transit plan update.
Some background: The newly opened 1.5-mile streetcar segment is not funded with the county’s half-cent sales tax for transit. That money goes to the Blue Line, the Blue Line Extension and to run the bus system. Not enough revenue has come in to pay to build more of the 2030 transit plan. (See New CATS chief faces funding questions.) The first streetcar leg was built with a $25 million federal grant and $17 million in funds from the city of

Charlotte.  A hoped-for 2.5-mile expansion would cost $150 million, paid with $75 million in federal dollars and the rest from city money.

My conversation with Tober:
Me: What made you think “streetcar”?
Tober described a process in which CATS planners were studying major investments, and looked at the bus routes with highest ridership: the No. 9 on Central Avenue and the No. 7 on Beatties Ford topped the list, he said.  “So why aren’t we doing something up in there? That was a big question mark for me.”  At a 2002 transit conference he saw a presentation on the then-new Portland, Ore., streetcar. He saw that a streetcar could spur development, potentially reduce operating expenses because it carries more riders per trip, and create connectivity between east and west Charlotte. “That was the rationale.”
Me: Why’d it take so long to build the streetcar?
Tober: “Money.”
Art at the streetcar shelters along East Trade Street.
Me:  Did you suspect the sales tax should have been higher?
Tober: “I really thought the half-cent would be enough.”  The 2009 economic downturn was more severe than anyone projected, he said. That threw off the revenue projections for years.
Me: Compare operating expenses – not cost to build – between buses and a streetcar. (Streetcars run in the street, with traffic, unlike light rail which has its own dedicated lane or rail path.)
Tober: Because a streetcar has higher capacity you can reduce the frequency, which saves labor costs for drivers. Seventy percent of CATS’ budget is labor. But CATS wouldn’t notice any big changes in operating costs until it could convert all of bus route 7 and 9 to streetcar.  That would also eliminate the layover time at the transportation center uptown.
We walked over to the Transportation Center on East Trade Street, where the roar of the bus engines and hissing of brakes made for a gritty – and noisy – series of speeches by dignitaries, including U.S. Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx, who as Charlotte mayor had championed the still-controversial streetcar.  Tuesday, even some streetcar skeptics and opponents were on hand for the celebration. Tober stood quietly, almost unnoticed, in the crowd.

New city manager, new streetcar plan?

Will a new name, a new tie-in to the county’s overall transit plan, and a new funding scheme using no property tax money mean a new outcome that puts an expanded streetcar project into the “yes” column with the Charlotte City Council? (see my article  at PlanCharlotte.org).

(Other news coverage from Erik Spanberg of the Charlotte Business Journal is here, and from the Charlotte Observer’s Steve Harrison  here. For those of you who don’t get the print edition, Harrison’s article was splashed in a major way atop the front page.)

Among the many questions yet to be answered:

Changing minds? Will any of the six council members who last year opposed the streetcar change their minds, now that it’s being paid for without property taxes and will, presumably, have the blessing of the Metropolitan Transit Commission? Council member Patrick Cannon, who is expected to run for mayor, told me those two things make it easier for him to support the streetcar.  Note, however, he did not give an unequivocal “Yes, I’ll support it.”

Thumb on scale at USDOT? Would having Mayor Anthony Foxx running the U.S. Department of Transportation (he’s been nominated but not yet confirmed) increase the chances of the streetcar winning federal transit funding, from either the New Starts or the Small Starts pots of funds?

New name? As new (since April 1) City Manager Ron Carlee told the council Monday night, “The streetcar is not a toy….” By renaming it the CityLynx Gold Line the city hopes to make the point that it’s just one part of the larger transit system strategy. Memo to city: The new name is TOO LONG.

Carlee, city staff, and the CEO of the Charlotte Area Transit System, Carolyn Flowers, teamed to give a presentation Monday night at the council’s dinner meeting, signaling a new approach to the controversial streetcar proposal. Last June, the council’s disagreements over the streetcar helped scuttle a larger proposal for a five-year capital projects plan.

Carlee said he thought the streetcar expansion project – adding 2.5 miles to an already-funded 1.5-mile streetcar “starter” project – would compete well for federal funding from the U.S. Department of Transportation.

Old Charlotte, meet New Charlotte

Old Charlotte met new Charlotte Thursday night. And in this case, “old” doesn’t necessarily refer to people’s ages.

Thursday night, I sat in on WFAE’s latest public conversation, this one on “One Charlotte or Many? A Neighborhood Perspective.“

Among the panelists was Tim Timmerman, a south Charlotte resident and founder of a group called South Mecklenburg Alliance for Responsible Taxpayers (SMART). He’s of the opinion that south Charlotte – the wedge-shaped pie slice with the city’s least crime, highest incomes, highest property values, highest education levels, etc. – is not getting its share of city resources while its property owners pay the lion’s share in property taxes. His part of the city would end up paying for a streetcar nobody wants, he said, and he’s tired of so much city money going to center city. South Charlotte has no voice, he said.

The other panelists – Diane Langevin, president of the Winterfield Neighborhood Association in east Charlotte, Vee Veca Torrence, president of the Thomasboro Neighborhood Association in west Charlotte, and City Manager Ron Carlee, only three weeks into the job – didn’t loudly denounce Timmerman.

But the audience sure did. Several audience members drew applause when they said Timmerman was being divisive. We are one city, they said. Stop being adversarial. We need a strong downtown and strong neighborhoods. We need not only a streetcar but a “spider web” of transit connections throughout the city. Two who drew applause were long-time Charlotte residents, one in her late 60s and a Charlotte native, the other a man who said he, too, lived in “the wedge,” yet he was delighted the city had spent time and attention on uptown. He recalled uptown Charlotte in the 1970s. It was dead, he said, and so much livelier now.

Several 20- and 30-something audience members rose to describe how much they value living in or near uptown and being able to walk and bicycle around the city. They urged better bicycle amenities. One young man said he had moved from Buffalo to Pineville and that he came to Charlotte because it had a transit line (and less snow). He’s looking to move closer to uptown. They talked about living in Villa Heights, Grier Heights, Echo Hills and Shamrock Gardens. Note: Those particular speakers were white, and the first two neighborhoods have been predominantly black for decades.

They don’t want to live in suburban south Charlotte, they said. “I would consider that a step down,” said one.

To a longtime Charlotte resident, this is an amazing sea change. For years, opinions such as Timmerman’s dominated the city’s discourse. And those neighborhoods of little houses and even less  cachet were where you lived until you could afford a new subdivision in south Charlotte.

Obviously, it’s not as though south Charlotte today lacks for people who want to live there. But the enthusiasm of the crowd for living as close to uptown as they could afford was inspiring. They want to live in “the city.” They want to bicycle and walk and take transit. This is a whole new interest group being added to the city conversation, alongside voices like Timmerman’s.

This is not the Charlotte I moved to 30-some years ago. And that, I think, is a wonderful thing.  
 

Bike-ped trail along rail route hits the ground running

I had just spent 2 1/2 hours listening to Charlotte City Council members talk about the upcoming city budget – with the specter of the proposed streetcar hanging overhead, in the gov center’s windowless Room 267. And that was after Mayor Anthony Foxx and City Manager Ron Carlee, in his second week into the job, said any streetcar discussion should be off the table for the day.

The discussion before the non-discussion of the streetcar was not exactly optimistic. As the Charlotte Business Journal reported this week, (“Consultant: Charlotte transit plan at least $3 billion short“) the income from the county’s half-cent sales tax for transit isn’t enough to allow any more of the proposed transit system to be built after the Blue Line Extension. No money for the Red Line commuter rail to Davidson (although the problem there is lack of federal money). No money for the Southeast Corridor, whether it ends up as light rail or bus rapid transit. No money for the West Corridor. (Remember it? I thought not. The 2030 Transit Plan calls for a streetcar to the airport. Yes, the plan calls for TWO streetcars, in case you had not noticed.) No money for the East-West streetcar – which, yes, has been in the adopted transit plan for a decade and which the city has proposed building without waiting for the Metropolitan Transit Commission to find any (nonexistent) money.

In any event, Foxx told the council, referring to the “promise” to build the transit system using only the sales tax: “When people say a promise was broken, I’m asking which promise are they saying was broken? The promise to do it within the half-cent sales tax? The promise to get the plan built in 2030? ‘Cause one of them’s going to get broken.”
I left that, yes, depressing meeting to go another one, much more sparsely attended, which also focused on a long-range transportation proposal that doesn’t, today, have money to be built. But this one was, strangely, more cheering.

See below for link to click for larger map

The venue was, if possible, even bleaker than windowless Room 267. This was a public workshop at the extremely utilitarian (and remote, unless you live in northwest Charlotte) Mecklenburg County Park and Recreation Department building on Brookshire Boulevard. It was held to share information and listen to public comments about a proposed Mooresville-Charlotte Trail. 

The trail would  be a 30-mile bicycle and pedestrian path running, roughly speaking, along the proposed route of the Red Line commuter rail line from Charlotte to Mooresville (although the train wouldn’t go to Mooresville unless Mooresville or Iredell County ponies up some money).
Maybe it’s because the trail is so young in terms of  planning and so far under the publicity radar, but people in the room – the few people in the room, let me say – were excited and optimistic.

Imagine being able to hop on your bicycle in Mooresville and ride an off-road trail 30 miles into uptown Charlotte – no traffic lights, no fighting cars and trucks. Eric Gorman, a planner with consulting firm Parsons Brinckerhoff, estimated that an experienced rider going 20 mph could do the trip in about 90 minutes. In other words, commuting to on bicycle could be a real alternative for residents – well, very fit residents – all along the trail.

Some details:

Time frame: “It will be decades for the whole thing,” said county greenway planner Gwen Cook.
Where, exactly, it would run: Hasn’t been fine-tuned. It would start uptown along Irwin Creek near Ray”s Splash Planet. Much of the route is proposed to run along the Norfolk Southern rail right of way between Mooresville and Charlotte, but no negotiations have begun with the railroad. Click here for a  pdf map with some details of the early thinking.
Who’s paying for planning so far? The project won a $35,000 planning grant from the Mecklenburg Union Metropolitan Planning Organization (MUMPO).
How is it connected to the proposed Red Line transit project: It isn’t, other than being referred to by some people as the Red Line Trail, and by its hoped-for location near or in the Red Line right-of-way. Funding and planning don’t rely on the transit project.
Who would pay for it? According to planner Cook, funds would be found the way they have been for other greenway projects: Local government partnerships, land dedications from property owners and developers, grants from various state and nonprofit sources. In other words, piecemeal, over time.The group anticipates about 60 percent of the needed easements would not need to be purchased. For example, land has already been dedicated for it in the Brightwalk development on Statesville Avenue.
What happens next: The last scheduled public workshops were this week, although more might be scheduled. With consultants Parsons Brinckerhoff and Alta Greenways, a report will be finished in June. Then, all seven  local governments involved would be asked to include this trail into their plans. Cook noted Mooresville and Iredell County have already have such a trail in their pedestrian and bicycle master plans, and it is included in the nonprofit Carolina Thread Trail plans.
Then, as money becomes available, she said, some “low-hanging-fruit” projects that would get a lot of immediate use are likely to be launched first.

Want to know more?
See a map, a presentation, a video and a fact sheet by clicking here.

Why funding Charlotte’s streetcar is tough

Maybe this item’s headline should be Yet Another Problem with Single-Use Zoning.

There’s been chatter among city policy types about finding some creative finance tools for Charlotte to use to build the second phase of what would ultimately be a Beatties Ford Road-West/East Trade Street-Hawthorne Avenue-Central Avenue streetcar route.One tool being talked of is a special tax assessment district.

(For the purposes of this post, let’s set aside whether said streetcar is a good or bad idea. I tend to think it’s a good idea, as a way to shape and lure development to parts of the city that could use a development boost, but I know others disagree with that. Topic for another day. For now, let’s talk about financing.)

Because of a reluctance to use regular property taxes (for reasons that have not been clearly articulated, at least not in my hearing, but that seem to be taken as gospel), some folks have talked of special tax assessment districts, akin to those that fund Charlotte Center City Partners or University City Partners, along the streetcar route. It’s a tool used around the country to help municipalities pay for infrastructure seen as helping specific neighborhoods.

But here’s why that tool isn’t very sharp in Charlotte, at least not along the part of the streetcar route that is already
funded and ready to start construction this year (Presbyterian Hospital up to the Transportation Center at Brevard Street) as well as the proposed-but-unfunded second leg (from Presbyterian out Hawthorne to Sunnyside Avenue and from the Transportation Center up West Trade Street to Johnson C. Smith University). If you know what’s along that route you’ll notice that huge chunks of land along it are tax-exempt, owned by government or educational or other nonprofit institutions. The hospital. Independence Park. Central Piedmont Community College. The I-277 right-of-way. The old county courthouse. The Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department. Old City Hall. The Federal Reserve Building. The Transportation Center. The arena is city-owned, too. Once you pass The Square you’ve got First Presbyterian Church, the federal courthouse and Johnson & Wales University land. The I-77 right-of-way and, a few blocks later, Johnson C. Smith U.

Yes, there are some taxable parcels along the route, too. I’m just saying …

Years ago, the old and lamentably too-well-followed Odell Plan for uptown Charlotte called for a zone of government buildings, mostly on urban-renewed land appropriated from what once was a black neighborhood called Brooklyn. By creating a district of mostly government buildings, we’ve created a district without much privately owned land. And thus lowered any potential tax revenue for projects like the streetcar. It’s a good illustration of why a fine-grained urban fabric (meaning a lot of different, smaller uses close to each other, instead of huge-footprint, single-use projects) really does seem to be healthier, economically, in the long run.

Of course once you get past JCSU to the west and hit Central Avenue on the east, the amount of potential redevelopable land is much greater. But those sections aren’t even in the city’s long-range capital plan (which hasn’t been adopted anyway).

Want to read more about the streetcar’s potential economic impact under varying scenarios? To download the first part of a 2009 economic development study click here. For the second part click here.

Rail matters: the South End lesson

A local television station yesterday did a short feature on the South End neighborhood in Charlotte. If you click here, you’ll see my colleague Bill McCoy, the director emeritus of the UNC Charlotte Urban Institute, describe how the area has changed. As just about anyone i Charlotte could tell you, a huge transformative event was the launching of the city’s first light rail line, the Lynx Blue Line, in 2007.

The Ashton apartments in South End. Photo: David Walters

Nov. 24 marks the five-year anniversary of that launch, so a little retrospective is fitting. But it’s also important to know that South End was reviving before 1998, the year Mecklenburg County voters passed a half-cent sales tax for transit and we all knew, finally, that we’d get a light rail line. Three important lessons:

1. Zoning and design matter.  The city created transit-oriented development zoning categories to allow and encourage the form of development that best serves public mass transit: walkable and mixed-use, and denser than single-family-only residential or office-only or industrial-only. You’d think that would be a no-brainer, but many cities made the mistake of launching rail transit in 1980s and early 1990s yet did not change development codes. What they got was not much transit-friendly development.

2. South End’s development was sparked before the 1998 transit vote by a small-time, volunteer trolley run. So it was the hope of light rail, and a modest little rail ride, rather than mass transit service itself, that was key.

The nonprofit Charlotte Trolley volunteer group launched a historic trolley car ride down some railroad tracks the city had bought because the city hoped someday it might use them for light rail. This trolley run (not a streetcar; it didn’t run in street) was barely a mile and didn’t even cross I-277 and go into uptown. Yet it was enough to encourage developers. It didn’t hurt, of course, that the former industrial area later dubbed South End abutted uptown as well as the prosperous Dilworth neighborhood. By the time the Lynx launched in 2007 plenty of transit-oriented development had already occurred. Alas, the historic trolley run itself was booted from the line by a combination of federal safety regulations and a Charlotte Area Transit System revenue crunch after the 2008 financial crash. Beloved old Car 85 awaits a new neighborhood with which it can work its magic.

3. This is last, and most important: It was not adding public mass transit that sparked the development. It was adding rail transit.

Proof? For years, city bus No. 12 has traveled up and down South Boulevard. Yet the area languished until the spark from the old trolley coursing on the rails. Why didn’t the bus spark development? Because rails mean permanence. A regular old city bus can be rerouted. Few developers would peg their future to a bus route.

The city says it wants to help other languishing areas (can you say “Eastland Mall”?). City council members should remember the lessons of South End. If you want developers to commit, then the city should commit – to rail. 

Transit? ‘It’s going to take decades and decades’

Streetcar in Portland, Ore. Can Charlotte’s project find funding? (Photo: David Walters)

The big picture may have gotten buried Tuesday as Charlotte City Council members chewed over, and chewed and chewed, different alternative revenue strategies that might enable the city to build the second leg of its proposed streetcar.

Most of the discussion was about finding ways to pay for the streetcar project that weren’t a simple, citywide property tax increase. But here’s the big picture, as articulated by City Manager Curt Walton: “The Blue Line Extension is likely to be the last project of its kind.”

That $1.1 billion project recently won federal funding for half its cost.

Don’t expect Congress to continue to fund a public transit program that pays half the cost of building, Walton said. As for the other proposed 2030 Plan transit projects – the Red Line commuter rail, the Silver Line corridor to the southeast, the West corridor  toward the airport, Walton said, “We’re not going to get those anytime soon. It’s going to take decades and decades and decades.”

The first streetcar leg – from Presbyterian Hospital to the Transportation Center on East Trade Street – is being built with a $25 million federal grant and $12 million in city funds. The $119 million second leg – from the Transportation Center to Johnson C. Smith University and from the hospital to Sunnyside Avenue near Central Avenue – was a piece of a $926 million, eight-year Capital Improvement Plan that did not win council support in June. The whole CIP would have required a 3.6-cent increase in the city property tax.

Meeting for the second in a series of budget-specific sessions, the council spent most of two hours talking about different revenue tools for the streetcar. Although the streetcar project (from Beatties Ford Road at Interstate 85 to the former Eastland Mall site) is a part of the Metropolitan Transit Commission’s 2030 transit plan, it’s far down the list of projects, and the transit sales tax isn’t bringing in enough revenue to let the MTC build any projects after the Blue Line Extension, due to start construction next year.

 So the City Council decided to move ahead on its own with the streetcar project, using only city money. But council members haven’t agreed how or whether to pay for the extension. Tuesday, most council members agreed to keep looking for tools such as Tax Increment Financing, Synthetic Tax Increment Financing, Special Assessment Districts and Municipal Service Districts to help with the streetcar funding. (To read more about what all those things are, click here to download the city staff’s presentation from Tuesday. Bonus: You’ll get a copy of a consultant’s economic analysis of the streetcar’s development potential from 2009.) All are essentially property taxes but would use the higher property tax revenues from the development the streetcar is expected to lure to the route. For instance, a Municipal Service District assesses a special property tax over a certain part of the city, to be used for specific purposes to improve that area. Examples are Charlotte Center City Partners and University City Partners.

Unlike cities in some other states, Charlotte council members aren’t empowered can’t decide to raise sales taxes or create a local income tax, or even create a parking space surcharge. In North Carolina, cities have little leeway beyond property taxes and some specific fees (water/sewer services and development-related fees) for raising revenue. (For more about the ways cities around the U.S. lack the ability to chart their own financial destinies, see this AtlanticCities.com piece,”To Fix Municipal Finances, States Need to Back Off.“)

Some city council members have asked city staff for more information about the possibility of using a Business Privilege License Tax  (which N.C. cities can levy, under certain conditions) that would apply to parking businesses, on a per-space basis. The city staff said its very rough estimate of what would be needed to raise $5 million a year via the BPL tax on parking spaces would cost roughly $110 per space per year.

My prediction: This will not be the last time you hear of all those tools – TIFs, MSDs, STIFs, SADs, BPLs, and so on – discussed as possible ways to pay for transit projects. As Walton warned, cities across America will have to look to urban-region taxpayers to fund their own transit projects. Whether that’s fair or wise national transportation policy is a question for another day. Regardless of the answers, it’s likely to be reality for the coming decades.

Fads and the city

Uptown Charlotte skyline. Photo: John Chesser

An excellent package of articles is running in the Charlotte Observer, examining how much taxpayer money the city spends on its convention center (up to $30 million a year), questioning whether the payoff justifies the expense. Here’s a link to Sunday’s article: “Selling Charlotte: Convention business requires millions from taxpayers.” Look for another piece Tuesday, examining why the city for years hasn’t questioned the assumption that conventions do, indeed, help the city’s overall tourism climate. (Update 8/21/2012: Here’s a link to the Tuesday article in the Observer, which looks at the apparently overblown estimates of local spending by conventioneers: “Visitor spending more fiction than fact.”) And I might note, here, that the tourism industry is not known for high-paying jobs, either. Here’s the link to an Observer article today exploring job-creation and wages: “Far fewer jobs than promised.“

Currently the city and the city’s Charlotte Regional Visitors Authority spend as much as $30 million a year for construction debt, operating losses and convention subsidies for the convention center. The Observer‘s editorial board today says it’s time to “Consider being unconventional,” i.e. to discuss whether to end the “arms race” of convention centers.

The discussion was needed years ago. The nation is overbuilt with convention centers, all chasing too few conventions to fill the available space. Charlotte’s CRVA is mostly funded with the “prepared foods tax,” a special 1 percent sales tax  paid every time you eat out or even buy a sandwich or roasted chicken at a grocery store deli. Here are some projects $30 million might pay for if spent differently: a center city park, expanding the greenway trail system, streetcars, reviving the historic Charlotte Trolley rides, restoring the Carolina Theatre or many other tourism-related projects.

The whole question of what, really, works in invigorating a downtown is one more cities should ask. I’ve watched, sometimes with amusement and sometimes with angst, as Charlotte pursued various fad-of-the-moment projects to try to pump life into what was, by the 1980s, a downtown (here, we call it “uptown”) that emptied after office hours.

Yes, those efforts were important and valuable, and it’s to the credit of the city’s so-called “uptown boosters” that they didn’t give up on the vision of having a center city that was a real center of activity.
But … but …

Having that goal plus having deep-pocketed uptown boosters with easy access to elected officials in a place with a certain lack of self-confidence in Charlotte’s inherent charms has made this city an easy mark for the fad-of-the-moment, regardless of whether the resulting projects were in fact, good medicine for what was ailing the city at the time or thoughtfully designed to endure.

A few examples:

1. Cityfair. Where the Hearst Building sits today used to sit – for what seemed like about 20 minutes – a festival marketplace named Cityfair, built in the era of Harborplace and Faneuil Hall. The fact that Charlotte had no harborside or historic market halls did not deter the fad-of-the-moment gang. Cityfair opened in October 1988 and closed by fall 1991; it reopened for a few years then died for good. The city lost $4 million in the end. Cityfair’s flaws were many: Its design was vintage suburban shopping mall, not fit for an urban streetscape. Its food court was popular but, set on the ground floor, it sent little traffic into shops on higher floors. Cityfair arrived just as Belk closed its uptown store, so hoped-for foot traffic from an overstreet hamster tunnel never materialized. Category: “Fail.”

2. The Blumenthal Performing Arts Center. This public-private partnership has added a quality to uptown that was badly needed when the Charlotte Symphony was playing out at Ovens Auditorium on Independence Boulevard. Although I have griped over the years about its hamster-tunnel-to-the-parking-deck design and the suburban-shopping-mall-design of the nearby Founders Hall, its category overall: Winner .

3. NASCAR Hall of Fame. Overblown projections, a deal negotiated amid machismo hype, and a design that pretends it is a space ship, not an integrated part of a city. Category: May come to define “Fad-of-the-Moment Fail.”

4. Tryon Street Mall. You don’t even know what this is, do you? Those odd looking bus shelters and fancy pavers along Tryon Street were part of a “streetscape” design the city undertook in the early 1980s, back when the national fad-of-the-moment was the idea that fancy pavement would make people come to uptown. No, really, they believed that. The shelters, which did not even keep bus riders dry, cost as much as $80,000 each. The artfully designed newspaper racks never got used by actual newspapers. The fancy pavers in the street cracked and were replaced by concrete faux-brick pavers. Yet the street trees and the wide sidewalks have blessed Tryon Street ever since. So this fad ended up having a legacy that people take for granted today, even if they’re still scoffing at those silly $80K bus shelters. Category: A fad with unexpected positive benefits despite itself.

5. The aquarium. At least we did not build one. Aquariums were all the rage about 15 years ago, after Chattanooga, Atlanta and Charleston built theirs. Discovery Place (itself a child of the 1970s fad for children’s science museums, and not a “fail”) wanted to freshen the uptown science scene. I always thought we had enough sharks already along Tryon Street. Category: Potential fail averted.

Today’s fads: Streetcars. Bike-share programs. Even larger convention centers, and convention hotels.
Which will succeed, and which will fail? I’d bet on the first two to be winners. The last one? Not so much.

NCDOT moves ahead with new uptown train station. But …

After years of planning, the N.C. Department of Transportation and the City of Charlotte are officially seeking developers for the proposed new passenger rail station in uptown Charlotte. They’re issuing a Request for Qualifications (RFQ), with proposals due Sept. 21.

If you’re an interested developer, click here for more information.

“This RFQ is the next step in selecting a master developer for the project,” says the NCDOT press release issued Thursday morning. What’s being called the Charlotte Gateway Station is envisioned as a central hub for Amtrak, Charlotte Area Transit System bus and streetcar service, the long-proposed-but-still-unfunded Red Line commuter rail project to north Mecklenburg County, Greyhound Bus service and the county greenway system.

Unfortunately for the Red Line and possibly for the streetcar, Mayor Anthony Foxx said in an interview Wednesday that, when it comes to any transit services beyond the Blue Line, “We’re stuck.” (More from that Q-and-A format interview will be posted at PlanCharlotte.org as soon as I can type up the transcript.)
The streetcar has funding only for about a mile and a half between Presbyterian Hospital and The Square at Trade and Tryon. An expansion proposal using city funds only, that would take it to the Gateway Station site on West Trade Street near Johnson & Wales University, was killed by the City Council in June.

The N.C. General Assembly has, for two years in a row, tried to kill funding for the planned-but-not-yet-built Blue Line Extension. Both times the BLE was saved in closed-door bargaining.

But this year the legislators decided to make any rail transit projects compete head-to-head with funding for highway projects, a prospect that most transit supporters believe will all but doom any further rail transit in the state.

But to end on a more cheerful note, replacing the dreary Amtrak station a couple of miles north of uptown on North Tryon Street will be a relief to many rail passengers who use the state’s three daily trains to Raleigh and back.