The rail transit banditos are back from hiding, this time under the guise of an acronym bristling with purpose and authority: the Special Transit Advisory Commission. STAC is comprised of 29 “business, neighborhood and environmental leaders from Wake, Durham and Orange counties” charged to deliver a plan by February 2008 to burden the region with another badly thought out transit plan.
Badly thought out because it ignores the fatal flaw that sank its predecessor, the Triangle Transit Authority, that literally imploded suddenly a year ago after 15 years of wasting time and money to push a transit plan for the Triangle region. TTA’s fatal flaw was the assumption that a rail transit plan be designed to connect Raleigh and Durham. And sure enough, STAC has ignored this lesson and set off to rescue the failed TTA blueprint, ignoring the lessons learned from the failure of its predecessor. As happens when agendas dominate rationality, the chairman of STAC lives in Chapel Hill (where the citizens have opted out of transit schemes) and works in Durham. Go figure.
OLD STORY
Having labored in the rail transit vineyard since it was birthed in the early 1980s, I have questioned the rationale of a rail system that lacked even threshold density to qualify for federal transit funds. In the last-gasp waning hours of TTA, it became obvious that a rail system for this region needed to originate in Raleigh and radiate outward to RDU airport and the Research Triangle Park (and other locations) to make sense.
Here’s why: Raleigh has emerged as the nexus of the Triangle with the density of population requisite for rail transit. Durham is less than one-third the size of the Capital City, despite claims to the contrary by its Convention and Visitor’s Bureau. But here is the clincher that did in the TTA: Durham and Durham County are no longer a part of the Metropolitan Statistical Area with Raleigh. They lobbied the General Accounting Office (that decides these things) to split them off beginning in 2006, leaving Raleigh-Cary by itself and Durham County alongside Chapel Hill and Roxboro, a position of dominance for the Bull City in place of living in the shadow of Raleigh.
This reality was plain to federal officials, who refused to dole out the billions of our own tax money earmarked for rail transit in the region. Yet, here is STAC preparing a Raleigh-Durham rail transit plan as if nothing had happened, still pushing for a system no one in the major hub of the region even wants or that makes any sense — at least according to the lessons learned from TTA.
In effect, STAC is proposing inter-city rail, as in between two different cites, and not intra-city rail transit serving one urban entity. That fact brings up another angle, which should be encouraged: fast rail throughout the United States between major cities. But STAC is dedicated to recycle a failed urban transit system in the wake of the failure of the TTA plan — although tinged with differences in mode, such as utilizing “versatile” curb-guided rapid transit buses that run on streets, as well as concrete guideways, and extending the reach of the system to smaller towns on the outskirts of Raleigh.
People around here already question why huge buses steam around the region either empty or transporting a meager handful of riders. Do the members of STAC think that concrete guideways will somehow increase bus ridership? They should be recommending smaller buses instead. But reality is absent in the mind of urban planners and environmental zealots. Their DNA contains a gene that drives them to alter reality with utopian schemes to fashion a better world in their own image.
MEEKER’S MOVE
The mantra of these types is “smart growth,” a pleasing platitude on the outside disguising a bludgeon to force “dense mixed development” to require people to live along transit corridors. Moving people around sounds more like the Trail of Tears than the right to live where one chooses. And this central planning concept flies in the face of why Raleigh and Cary are selected at the top of every national poll for quality of life. People here like neighborhoods, not densely packed transit corridors.
Yet, the planners know better than we do what is good for us. They persist in their schemes to alter our quality of life in the name of vague environmental slogans. But when it comes down to the nitty-gritty, they are the first ones to shout down density in their own neighborhood. A good example is the demise of Coker Towers on the former Occidental Life Insurance property on Oberlin Road in Raleigh. The developer prepared the perfect plan to please density advocates only to have it summarily shot down by otherwise density-loving neighbors.
The ultimate example of the two-faced nature of the density utopians is the recent power play by Raleigh Mayor Charles Meeker, the ultimate smart growth advocate. His Honor attempted a zoning coup d’etat, relying on a newly elected Council that votes his way to change the ordinances city-wide in one fell swoop: but not to allow more precious density, rather to curtail it by upzoning the code to prevent large “infill” homes and multi-family condominium developement. So imbued with righteousness and power — and deserting his alleged smart growth principles — he bypassed public debate and set up a Council meeting to ram through his changes. The hue and cry against his effort was audible clear to Cary.
And now comes STAC, roiling with purpose to force more density in the name of environmental morality on a community that loves its neighborhoods. They say they want to spend $5 billion or so over the next 30 years to achieve their purposes. That’s not a lot of money, but it could be enough to ruin our quality of life.
Notes From La-La Land
It’s the 20th anniversary of The Closing of the American Mind, a not particularly well-written book by University of Chicago professor Allan Bloom. But it became a big best seller because it discussed the decline of university education at the hands of the radical scholars. With Duke, UNC and NC State, and other schools in our backyard, this area was in the middle of the fray. The recent behavior by the Group of 88 at Duke offered the general public a glimpse of the type of teachers setting campus agendas, indicating there has not been much progress since 1987.
•••
Author and columnist Mark Steyn offered the analogy that the accumulated knowledge of the world is the seven-eighths of the iceberg you can’t see. The job of a college is to make that visible in class. Sadly, students and recent graduates today have only experienced the one-eighth of the iceberg on the surface, unaware of what lies below because the radical scholars deem it racist, chauvinistic and homophobic. The result has created a nation of zombies, otherwise smart kids wandering around in a daze with no guideposts from the past to help them see their way.