If you are under the belief that the recent study by UNCC’s Center for Transportation Studies was paid for by the Charlotte Chamber, or somehow was connected with the Chamber: What are you smoking?
It was paid for by UNCC and done by a nonpartisan UNCC transportation study center whose director has a lengthy background in transportation studies.
Here’s what happened: Chamber President Bob Morgan suggested to UNCC Chancellor Phil Dubois that the topic would be a good one to study. That’s sort of like mentioning to Bob Johnson, “Say, you might want to get your players to practice shooting.” I mean, Duh! You’ve got a center of transportation studies. Studying transportation is what it does.
Some people are offering up UNCC Professor Emeritus David Hartgen’s studies as being more objective. Yet several of his most recent studies were paid for by interest groups with a specific position to advance: The Reason Foundation and the John Locke Foundation, two Libertarian think tanks that have funded a variety of studies opposing rail transit and Smart Growth. Those nonprofits have a point of view, and they use their money to advance it, hiring researchers who share those points of view. How is that somehow purer than a short report from UNCC’s Center for Transportation Policy Studies, beholden to no one?
If you bother to read the UNCC study — in contrast to most advocacy group studies such as those from Reason or the JLF — you’ll read no conclusions and no recommendations. Indeed, some of the information it offers will probably be of more use to people opposing light rail transit, such as the comparison of highway and transit spending since 1998.
“Our research has revealed a need for a comprehensive study of the economic, societal, environmental, land use and business impacts of LRT,” it says. Gee, that’s clearly a biased, tainted and suspect statement if I ever heard one.
I suppose some people are going to see dark conspiracies in such statements. Remember, there are more than a few people out there who think Commies in pink robes are hiding under the bed, or they put on tinfoil caps to keep the alien transmissions out of their brains. But the rest of you? Get a grip.
Some people who don’t like mass transit are deliberately trying to plant the idea that light rail mass transit is a creature of the Charlotte Chamber. Though it’s misleading, it’s also a clever political stunt, because a lot of people here are suspicious of the Chamber. But if you think I blindly follow everything the Chamber proposes, well, you haven’t been reading what I’ve been writing for more than a decade.
If you’re thinking mass transit is a creature birthed and nurtured by Charlotte’s business oligarchy then you are uninformed about Charlotte. For about, oh, the past century or so it was the conservative business oligarchy here that fought the concept of any government-funded public transit. They kept a pitiful bus system running on fumes and pennies — and extremely high fares — because business leaders didn’t want their taxes raised just to make life easier for low-income mill workers and black people. It’s still the ultra-right-wing descendants of those anti-tax businessmen who are fighting the transit tax now.
One last thought. Rick, I appreciate your devoted readership and your civility, but it’s blindingly naive to say we can just get another transit tax in 2010, if we decide we want one again. State legislators from outside Mecklenburg just cackle if you mention that possibility.
What Mecklenburg voters do or don’t want doesn’t make a rat’s patootie’s worth of difference unless the legislature allows it. It took years to get permission to hold the 1998 referendum. If we have a transit tax and kill it, it will take years — if ever — to get permission for another one.
Get another transit tax in 2010? It would be easier, and about as practical, to just get hold of the pot of gold at the end of the next rainbow.