The planning commissioners practically pounced on the CATS guy.
CATS Deputy Director John Muth had just finished briefing the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Planning Commission on Monday on the status of the transit system. (Headlines: South Corridor trains running by fall 2007, many decisions to be made summer and fall on which corridor goes next, whether the West corridor gets light rail, bus rapid transit or streetcars, etc.)
Then several commissioners began suggesting to Muth oh so nicely that CATS really, really, really needs to make sure the West transit line goes to the airport.
Because right now, with the still-tentative plans, it wouldn’t. The likely route would go down Wilkinson Boulevard, not to the airport terminal.
Planning commissioner George Sheild, a developer, probably summed up the sentiments of many others: “I think a really good rail connection from the airport to downtown would do more for Charlotte than the whole South Corridor.”
Anyone who’s ever traveled in or out of a city with good transit connections to its airport – Washington, London, even St. Louis – knows how easy it is to arrive, walk down the hall or down some stairs, and get into a train or bus or tram. Cheaper, too.
Muth was pleasant, but noncommittal.
There’s just one problem with everyone’s wishes on this: The federal money for transit comes with strings attached. One string – more like a rope – is that the project has to meet a cost-effectiveness test. The feds set the rules for how you calculate cost-effectiveness, involving projected ridership, time saved by riders, etc. Those federal rules got even stricter in the past year.
The early numbers on the West Corridor showed light rail to the airport wouldn’t pass the cost-effectiveness test. That’s because not enough people go to and from the airport. Most of the people using our airport – a longtime US Airways hub – are just switching planes.
Muth said some new pots of federal transit money are available for smaller-scale projects, and CATS is looking at whether it might be able to use those pots to fund streetcars in the West corridor as well as the “Streetcar” project it plans for Trade Street and out Central Avenue. Streetcars cost less to build, because they run in the street, but they’re slower – because they run in the street, with the other traffic. And the federal money in those newer pots don’t pay as big a percentage of costs.
Transit to the airport? I’m all for it. I hope CATS and the airport and the city can figure out how to make it happen.
But I don’t think it’s likely, at least not in the next 20 years.