Category: Uncategorized

The proposed route would pass the city’s baseball park, also known as BB&T Ballpark, as well as the convention center and Winston-Salem State University, and it would go near Salem Academy and College. The council is to vote today (March 24) on whether to adopt that route.

How to pay for it? The city is looking a a menu of potential federal sources, including Small Starts and TIGER grants and TIFIA loans. (Transit fans will know what those are). The article does not mention any potential local source of funds, and it notes that city council member Dan Besse said the state government these days offers little political support for rail systems.

Read more, and see a map, at this link.

It was one of the best evenings of political theater I’ve watched in recent years. At-large council members Beth Pickering and later Patrick Cannon drew sustained applause from a street-car loving audience when Pickering and then Cannon announced in support of the proposal. Both had voted a year ago against including the streetcar expansion project in the city’s long-range capital program.

But new City Manager Ron Carlee and his staff came back with a different proposal, which wouldn’t put the streetcar into the city’s capital program, and so wouldn’t use property taxes to fund it.

In an election year, with Cannon already an announced mayoral candidate, the many passionate audience members from East and West Charlotte who spoke in favor of the streetcar might have had an effect. (Mattie Marshall quoted Langston Hughes: “What happens to a dream deferred?”)

It’s worth noting that Pickering, a Democrat, won her council seat in 2011 as a newcomer to local politics, coming in fourth for four at-large seats in a heavy Democratic turnout spurred by Mayor Anthony Foxx’s re-election. For a Democrat without huge name recognition to anger the heavily Democratic West Charlotte AND the Democratic-leaning East Charlotte neighborhoods could be a huge political problem.

“All things considered, my No. 1 priority is to revitalize the East and West sides,” Pickering said, as she announced her support. Because only one vote change was needed to switch last year’s 6-5 vote against, her announcement meant the streetcar proposal would pass.

Amid sustained applause, the as-of-late seldom seen mayor walked into the chamber. Foxx, nominated to be U.S. Transportation secretary, has taken a low-profile role in recent weeks. (Question to ponder: Would he have joined the meeting if the streetcar vote were going the other way?)

Then Mayor Pro Tem Patrick Cannon spoke at length about how his concerns last year had been dealt with, and that he would support the streetcar proposal as well.

Important note: The vote Tuesday night does not assure that the 2.5-mile streetcar extension will be built. It was a vote to apply for a federal grant and to use certain unspent city funds as a local match. If the Federal Transit Administration doesn’t award the grant, then it’s back to the drawing board.

Other, slightly less important note: The “streetcar starter project” – a 1.5-mile length along Elizabeth Avenue and East Trade Street – is already under construction. The ultimate streetcar plan would be 10 miles and extend from Beatties Ford Road north of I-85 through uptown and then east to the site of the now-defunct Eastland Mall. The vote Tuesday was to build it from the uptown Transportation Center to just west of Johnson C. Smith University, and east from Presbyterian Hospital (a.k.a. Novant) almost to Central Avenue.

Re Eastland – City Council just voted 10-1 to demolish it. The city owns it, is trying to sell it to developers (two are interested) and neither wants the building. And so passeth the regional shopping mall from the world. At least, from that part of the world.

Terminology is obscuring the public debate.

I’m sitting at Charlotte City Council meeting awaiting their votes on a couple of items: Whether to apply for a federal grant to extend the already-begun 1.5-mile streetcar project, and whether to spend almost $900,000 to demolish the now-city-owned Eastland Mall, a defunct regional shopping mall on Charlotte’ East Side.

So I took advantage of the attendance of Ron Tober, former CEO of the Charlotte Area Transit System, former executive director of the nonprofit group Charlotte Trolley Inc., and current consultant with Parsons Brinckerhoff. He has worked on transit systems all over the country, from heavy rail (which does NOT mean intercity passenger rail; it means it has a third rail, which is electrified, as in subways, and deadly to touch, as in “Social Security is the third rail of American politics”), to light rail to commuter rail to streetcars to trolleys.

1. What is a “trolley”? 
Tober: The term trolley is used for a historic (or faux historic) car that runs on rails and is fed by an overhead electric wire.

2. Are streetcars and trolleys the same?
Tober: Not if they use modern cars. Trolleys can run in the street or on dedicated tracks.
In other words, streetcar systems such as Portland’s or Seattle’s are fed by overhead electric wires, but aren’t “trolley” systems as the term is generally used in the transit-building world.

3. If the Lynx used old-timey-looking cars, would it then be a trolley?
Tober: Yes.

So there you are. To say Charlotte’s proposed streetcars would “waddle” down the street is true only if the cars are unstable. Which the Federal Transit Administration won’t allow.

To save money, for the early 1.5-mile streetcar starter project now under construction, the city plans to use the faux historic streetcars purchased originally to run on the Lynx tracks, part of the now-comatose Charlotte Trolley nonprofit group’s pre-Lynx-line project that ran a historic and then the faux-historic cars along what’s now the Lynx rails.

So you will see historic-ish cars running on overhead electric wires, along Elizabeth Avenue and East Trade Street. That will be both a streetcar and a trolley.

But when the envisioned modern cars arrive for the envisioned streetcar project — whenever or if that happens — it won’t be a “trolley” line any more. It will be a modern streetcar.

A much bigger problem lies ahead, for the whole city.  I wrote about it yesterday, after hearing Foxx’s state of the city speech Monday and while I was dipping in and out (via Twitter) of the City Council’s discussions at their yearly retreat. Here’s what I wrote: “Growth challenge dwarfs the streetcar spat.”

My point, and it’s one Foxx alluded to in his Monday speech, was this: The way Charlotte grew until now is not the way the city will grow in the future. Annexation has all but ended. So how can we keep the city’s property tax base healthy without easy population and territory growth? Since 2003, large parts of the city have shown property value decreases.

And today I came across a scary statistic that I wish I’d had yesterday. It was deep in the agenda packet for next Monday’s Transportation and Planning Committee meeting. (Am I a policy geek or what?) It said:

“Growth in the last decade due to annexations:
Charlotte grew in the last decade (2000-2010) by 190,596 people or 35.2%. Out of this 123,916 people or 22.9% were due to annexations since 2000.”

In other words, 123,916 out of a total of 190,596 new Charlotte residents, or 65 percent, came through annexation. Annexation is effectively over (due to a new N.C. legislation – read my article for more information). So how does Charlotte grow for the next 10 years?

It was so interesting I decided to try a “Storify” story – a way to compile Twitter accounts for people who may not be familiar with Twitter or who may not want to take the time to wade through everything. In other words, people who are neither as geekily interested in local politics or as easily distracted as I am.

Here’s my account. “What’s the City Council hearing, saying at its retreat?”  I didn’t include all the Tweets; I selected those from reliable reporters and others, and tried to catch the most important topics and remarks.

The retreat started out in routine, dutiful fashion, as the council members heard growth projections and reports about each of the council’s seven districts. But after lunch, at the end of the day, it seems tempers frayed, and council members – some of them at least – began accusing each other of lying. Voices were raised. Following it on Twitter was not as riveting as being there, I’m sure, but you can catch the flavor easily enough.

The result, unfortunately, was an extremely lengthy Storify story. But to get to the testy exchanges, you can skim to the end. For a more pointed account, read Charlotte Business Journal reporter Erik Spanberg’s “Charlotte city leaders duke it out over spending, streetcar at Thursday retreat.”

A few quickie highlights:  Among “Markets to Watch,” Charlotte ranks No. 17, Raleigh No. 11. The top five, in order: San Francisco, New York,  San Jose, Austin, Houston. You’ll find the remarks about Raleigh on Page 40, and Charlotte on Page 42.

This gloomy analysis from Streetsblog describes a state Department of Transportation mired in debt, one that ranks 49th nationally in per capita transportation spending.

The defeat of what was called T-SPLOST (might that name have been a factor in the loss? It sounds like something splatting on a hard floor), also means the ambitious greenway-around-the-city called the Beltline has no major funding source.

My analysis-from-a-distance: The package had too much packed into it, was too large a sum ($7 billion) for these financially hurting times, and by trying to please both city-dwelling transit-lovers and suburban- and exurban-dwelling motorists it was vulnerable to pleasing neither. Note, also, that this vote was not only in Atlanta, but in all the state’s metro regions. Other measures, crafted by elected officials in other regions, passed in three of seven regions: Augusta, Columbus and a central-south Georgia region. Note, also, that voters inside the restrictive-annexation-law-strangled city of Atlanta passed the measure. Was messy politics involved? You betcha.
This idea for regional transportation funding has been in the works for years. Here’s a 2008 Neal Peirce column that describes some of the groups that pushed for it. Note, 2008 was a good two years before the anti-tax, anti-government, anti-transit Tea Party overtook the Republican Party. Add that political influence to the generally bad economic climate in the Atlanta area, and you have a problem. The Sierra Club and NAACP opposition did not help.

What happens next?

My guess is that the region’s civic leaders won’t give up and will, after a long and restful vacation, try to figure out how to pay for important needs. After all, here’s what Sam Williams, president of the Metropolitan Atlanta Chamber of Commerce, said in 2008: “Failure to invest [in transportation] would spell economic disaster for Georgia.”

But for now, it must be terribly disheartening for those people who have tried for so many years to find a solution to the problems Atlanta faces with transportation.