It's the same feeling. fear, palpable and yet far away-a nauseating helplessness born of absurd cataclysm. I first felt it marching down the linoleum hall for air raid drills in Junior High, my little mind saturated with newsreels of ruinous landscapes around Hiroshima. The big flash that would end it all.
The feeling came back to me thinking about the ominous reality of rail mass transit in the Triangle. It seems a distant threat, yet it is there, and, like the Bomb, no one seems able to prevent it. In the end it was the Russian Roulette of MAD, "mutually assured destruction," played out every day for over 50 years until the collapse of the Soviet Union that rescued mankind from nuclear holocaust. This time we don't have 50 years for the madness to end. Mass transit is almost here and it will alter the cities we love forever. And no one is able to stop it with a counter force like MAD. It's so big and expensive and absurd it's going to happen no matter what we do.
BORN IN SIN
Rail mass transit was born in sin, the political sort. There was not one scintilla of factual data to support the concept in the early 1980s when the idea was floated by radical activists. The need was a lie. Back then the Triangle was hardly the Triangle at all. Even after hooking up Raleigh, Durham and Chapel Hill (and some tangential counties) the population didn't hit 500,000; and that was spread over acres of empty land. Rail mass transit requires population density at least five times higher than density in this area. Even more asinine was that what population density we had was spread out among three cities-four if you count Cary. The lie inside the enigma of rail transit is based on false propaganda from the environmental Left saying that the US is due to starve and die due to over-population, a theory famously purported by professor Paul Erlich in 1968 that has proved to be totally untrue. Yet it is believed: Actually 2209 of the 3141 counties in the US have a population of 50,000 or less. Not only is rail transit absurd today, it doesn't even work in the future. Populations in the West are declining, not increasing.
So just where did the Triangle mass transit idea come from? The answer is: out of the mouths of idiots, useful ones-as Lenin called them, and they were having a heyday in the mid-'70s reorganizing society with their little red books. As do most infantile Marxist theories, the cutting edge (what the communists called the "vanguard elite" that would provide the wedge for the proletariat to pour through) for mass transit originated from the college campus, most notably Duke, home of the more strident and pernicious activists of the era.
As early as 1979, the call came. With no supporting data, the idea was to have local governments pay for studies about future growth and then stick a pin in the demographic map and scream aha! If we don't have rail transit by 2050, we will be living in asphalt hell, grid locked in hopeless traffic jams, gasping for air. Our famous "quality of life" would be extinguished. The first study, naturally, failed to find any justification for rail transit. Yet, undeterred, the enthusiasts kept the drumbeat going, resulting in five more failed studies into the 1990s and a continuing waste of taxpayer money.
NOT SUITED FOR RAIL
The Triangle region, an urban cocktail concocted by the creation of the Research Triangle Park, was hardly a voluntary effort anyway. Raleigh, Durham and Chapel Hill were home to the universities that Park planners used to create the pillars for their dream. They purposefully forbade residential, retail and commercial development within the con- fines of the hallowed grounds to prevent the establishment of a Yankee enclave of highly paid scientists looking down their noses at the jobs in the surrounding cities. Consequently, the three cities grew, Cary was literally created and the region was involuntarily heading to an uneasy alliance whether each liked it or not.
Hardly a recipe for urban rail transit was this accidental marriage we call the Research Triangle. The beauty of the appeal of the region was the opportunity for families to range around the landscape to find a home where they felt comfortable. No central state apparat forced them to live in certain zones or be made to live where they would force density, the base level requirement for rail transit. Instead, roads followed development and year after year the region is ranked number one in "quality of life". What we have here is a place people love.
Yet the activists remained committed. Noting the increased traffic flow around the RDU International Airport, they saw their solution. Another "study" was duly commissioned and funded. Then heartbreak. Turns out only 20 percent of the auto traffic clogging up I-40 emanated from the Triangle. Most of it came from eastern and southern NC citizens using the airport.
What to do now, they pondered. How about we abandon our plans for "deep" rail transit and compromise with "fixed guideways," resulting in making plans to use the existing rail lines in the area operated by the railroads. And off they went except for one small thing. In their utopian zeal they didn't feel it necessary to ask the railroad companies for permission to use their systems. The railroads said no, and for good reason. How are we going to stop a fast-moving freight train when it comes upon a teeny transit vehicle?
The upshot is that the Triangle Transit Authority is going to build rail lines alongside existing private rails and the cost is going to pass one billion dollars real soon. Yet, in my years railing out against rail transit, people seem complacent saying it won't hurt and it may help. They are misled. Here are the reasons we must act to stop this train:
1. No public entity in the region has voted to have rail transit. The money is coming from the federal government-that siphons off our gas tax money in Washington for mass transit before sending it back to the state for road-building-and the NC Legislature that granted funds after back channel lobbying by transit activists. Neither the Feds nor the State asked us in the Triangle if we wanted it.
2. Rail fanatics have worked to stop road projects in order to create gridlock to make their point that we must have rail transit. One example among many: Raleigh's mayor Charles Meeker, when first elected to the City Council in 1992, brazenly attempted to cut off funding for the second year allocation for the I-540 Outer Loop. Had he succeeded, the project would have ceased. He deliberately attempted to create traffic congestion to push the need for rail transit. Another example: a two-person environmental group in Durham held up the widening on I-40 at the Durham Expressway for 10 years. That work is now in progress but the traffic problems due to the purposeful delay was successful in convincing the uninformed that rail transit is necessary.
3. The cost of the rail transit debacle is monumental, yet the worst is still to come. Assuming the first line is completed from downtown Durham to Downtown Raleigh and the estimated $775 million now predicted to finish it out is funded, what happens when the system is complete? For one thing, the citizens in Raleigh and Durham will have to subsidize its operations, as ridership will, at best, cover maybe 30 percent of the cost. The taxpayer bill will strangle us, stopping road-building and causing the curtailment of other services.
4. This is connected to an appalling lack of will on the part of elected leaders in the region. I asked a Raleigh Councilman: Do we have a liaison committee communicating with TTA so we can confront the issues that will arise down the road? The answer was no, and accompanied by a retort: why do you care? It's free money. This so-called "free money" is going to cost us a bundle.
5. Rail transit was born of a political agenda incubated in the hotbed of Leftist radicalism in the 1960s and 70s. The elemental theory starts with the standard hatred of capitalism that views individualism as the enemy to the revered theory of collectivism. Thus the automobile becomes the symbol of individual rapacity. But worse, the automobile uses fossil fuels and pollutes the air. Therefore the car must go and citizens must adhere to the collective principle by living in dense urban clusters so has to preserve the environment and create efficiency of services. Consequently, the radical proponents of rail transit detest what they call "sprawl," assigning to it any negative epithet in vogue. Just the other day, I heard a report on NPR blaming sprawl for juvenile obesity. During the drought here two years ago, sprawl was partially blamed because asphalt on roads leading to suburbia absorbed heat. The absurdity goes on and on because the war against the automobile is a doctrinal affair in which facts are not pertinent when the justness of the cause is all that matters.
6. The essence of the push for rail transit is the wedge of a political agenda with no basis in fact or need. The secular religion of utopian goals blinds adherents to reality. Think for a minute about how you would use rail transit and the overwhelming absurdity overcomes you. If you take a train anywhere what do you do then? Take a cab to your final destination? Wait for a shuttle bus? How do you do errands? Leave work for the dentist? Pick up the kids? This is not New York where density is a geographical reality and trains are available constantly. This is a vast landscape that, in toto, is basically underpopulated.
7. From any rational perspective, rail transit in the Triangle is madness. The current plan does not even go to Research Triangle Park (or the airport) where 40,000 workers congregate daily. Even if transit went there, what do workers do once they arrive at a transit station? Park regulations require facilities to use only 15 percent of their land; just getting to a facility will be more trouble than taking the train. And what about security? Transit stations will be sitting ducks for vandalism, robberies and worse. Are the cities going to provide security on the trains, and at what cost? By the way, train engineers and some workers are union employees.are we ready for that? Will they strike and influence others in the community to join them?
8. Here's the part that causes the sick fatalism we should all feel. Rail transit activists and fellow travelers are literally going to transform our pattern of development, scarring our neighborhood pattern of development in the name of radical theory. Even newcomers must feel as I do, that our City we love is being transformed by central state fiat, in this case, an ersatz little Kremlin not answerable to any of us. Forcing rail transit on an innocent population is similar to Stalin relocating KULAKS from the Ukraine to Siberia against their will.
We didn't fund it, we didn't vote to have it and we are left with the consequences: massive taxation to maintain it; responsibility for its operations; the security required (that no one has addressed); civic leaders who are "asleep at the switch"; delays in critical road projects due to sub rosa lobbying by transit operatives; and the agenda to alter our neighborhoods and quality of life.
Folks, don't say I didn't warn you. The transit holocaust is here.
NOTES FROM LA-LA LAND
.A little bird told me that the cost of choosing chancellors in the UNC system has gone up a few hundred thousand each incident because UNC system president Molly insists on using the headhunter firm that found her after the Board of Governors search committee disbanded when female members insisted on a female for the job- whether qualified or not. Broad is soon to receive a faculty position to ensure tenure payments when she steps down as President and loses her $300,000 salary. According to the chronicle of Higher Education, the average annual professor's pay is $106,000; Molly's is estimated to be $180,291.
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Writers in the region should note that Amazon has instituted a policy called Real Names for online reviewers on the site. No more anonymous attacks by other writers with an agenda.
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Looks like John Kerry is on a Swift Boat to oblivion as the election nears, but he was doomed to drown in prevarication anyway. His candidacy reminds me of another fabled Massachusetts Democrat who led or was close in the polls during the summer before the election in 1988: Michael Dukakis. The divisions in the electorate in 2000 are not there after 9-11. George Bush will sweep, with a coattail that may shake up state elections.
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The Jewish Press.com online newsletter noted recently the 15th anniversary of the passing of leftist newspaper editor IF Stone, mentioning how close his views were to Soviet policy even while he was worshipped by the intellectual Left during his salad days in the '50s and '60s. Stone, as late as 1979, actually propagandized the emerging city weekly association to take on socialist airs and become "alternative." But the article didn't mention that Stone has showed up in declassified intelligence reports as a paid agent of the KGB and GRU.