At long last, I’m freed up from other duties to get back to Naked City topics. I’ve spent this past week researching topics such as impact fees and land transfer taxes. More on that in later posts.
First, to take the wind out of some conspiracy theorists’ sails: I opted to start Potterblog about two weeks before the books came out because I thought it would offer fun online reading that no one else at Charlotte.com was going to do. I didn’t plan it months in advance. I didn’t do it to escape writing about that transit study. I did it because I thought it would be interesting (believe it or not, I have many interests) and give readers something they’d enjoy.
Second, although I do appreciate the devoted (if sometimes mean-spirited) commenters and readers of The Naked City, honesty compels me to reveal that Potterblog was far more popular, measured in page views. (Blog readership — high or low — doesn’t affect my pay, by the way. And no, I don’t measure the value of what I do by page views, otherwise I’d be opining about Brad Pitt and the NFL.)
But back to Naked City-land:
Yes, I goofed in making such a big deal of the UNCC transit study . Edd Hauser wasn’t forthright in explaining its origins to me, and I took him at his word when I shouldn’t have. However, a few mistakes in one apparently sloppily done rush-job research report do nothing to undermine the importance of having a good transit system here. It’s just one study, for crying out loud.
Further, nothing in the somewhat obsessive reporting that’s been devoted to the UNCC study indicates Hauser or anyone else cooked the results. Steve Harrison’s analysis confirmed many of the study’s findings. Of the mistakes, some made CATS look worse than it should have, others made CATS look better. To me that shows hasty and sloppy work, not intentional skewing.
The bottom line remains: Much statistical information you’ll read about transit comes from people either stoutly for it or stoutly against it. They mine data charts for tidbits that support their views and ignore tidbits that don’t support their views. I don’t believe the UNCC study did that. Compared with much of what I see, especially from the anti-transit crowd, it was far more even-handed. (It’s not sheer coincidence that the anti-light-rail John Locke and Reason Foundations hire anti-light-rail UNCC prof David Hartgen or other rail transit critics to do their transportation studies.)
Overall, finding dispassionate analysis is tough. Academic studies, as opposed to advocacy group studies, tend to be more even-handed. But academics often have views that affect what they study and how they approach it. That’s true for many subjects, not just transportation.
Even people who aim for even-handed analysis face difficulties comparing one city’s transportation experience with another’s, because each city is unique. They differ in topography, financing, growth rates, growth patterns, land use rules and local culture.
Should Charlotte be compared with Atlanta, which until recent years didn’t require transit-supportive development around MARTA stops? (Miami was the same.) Or with slow-growing Pittsburgh? Or Portland, which decided to support its transit system by capping the number of parking places downtown? Any comparison is, in its own, way, apples to oranges.
At bottom, the issue facing Mecklenburg County is whether the city needs a mass transit system funded with a half-cent sales tax, or not. Some people think it’s a waste of money. I — and many other people — think it’s fiscally irresponsible NOT to build one.