Hats off to the Raleigh News & Observer and staff writers Bruce Siceloff and Andy Curliss for their in-depth series investigating the pros and cons of the rail transit system looming on the horizon of Raleigh and Durham. Readers of this column know my views on the Triangle Transit Authority boondoggle. And almost every objection I’ve voiced was covered in the N&O report. Yet, it’s as if the series was designed to cleanse the project by immersion in the waters of truth, thus anointing it as the only option we have in Raleigh and the Triangle to confront our future transportation needs.
Had I been a TTA board member or a vocal devotee, I would hide my face in shame after reading the N&O articles. Yet no one connected with it, political leaders who have allowed the project to reach this alarming state, TTA board members, area advocates, transportation planners... no one seems to have any sense of mortification for this gigantic waste of public money—and worse, no apology for creating an environment in the region that de-emphasized road funding and planning, allowing TTA to carry on under the epithet: “It’s a hideous waste of money that will cost even more in the future while only siphoning a pitiful fraction of motorists. It is infected with the bacillus of central state planning controlled by a small cadre in an attempt to change the pattern of development of one the most highly regarded communities in the world for quality of life without a single vote being cast by area citizens or their locally elected representatives. But it’s all we have because we neglected the stewardship of our future by ignoring road planning, assuming TTA was the answer.”
Put another way, TTA’s train has cost so much that if we change our minds now, we’ve wasted more money. It’s like a business deal that needs cash. Investors are told: You’ve got a million in it now, but if we don’t put in another million, we’ll lose it all. TTA types are sort of doing the same thing, but no businessperson would act so disingenuously in the asking. TTA has cooked the ridership numbers and members seem proud they misrepresented the facts to the feds who hold final approval. Flush with federal cash—that no one is accounting for—property has been seized and plans implemented in a frenzy to create a fait accompli before anyone notices.
Each plan they have concocted has met with the reality that the city and region just don’t qualify for rail transit. Advocates need triangle-wide population and traffic figures to justify the project; but that approach spreads the geography too far to create density. A Raleigh-outward plan probably has merit, but spending nearly a billion to connect downtown Durham to downtown Raleigh is simply petulance, especially in light of Durham’s continuing effort to separate itself from Raleigh and the Triangle concept.
Frustrated that the facts don’t tote up with their utopian idealism to push rail transit because it is the “green” thing to do, we now have a plan that goes nowhere people want to go. The idea is then, let’s make them want to go where the tracks go by building stations that will attract development and presto, the train system will work. This is like a meeting of the Politburo planning the next Five Year Plan. Moving populations around was a favorite Soviet strategy, and TTA shares that same disregard for the individual when it orders people to live near hypothetical train stations in the name of the common good. In this case, hypothetical “density” displaces “sprawl,” which we used to call neighborhoods. Isn’t Raleigh so attractive due to its neighborhood pattern of development? What right do these rail activists have to alter an entire city for their own agenda?
MADAME CHAIRMAN
I know and like Carter Worthy, head of the TTA board, but her letter to the N&O after the series on rail transit divulged the mind-set of rail enthusiasts. She uses the word “sprawl” as if it were foul language, ignoring the desire of citizens to live in neighborhoods rather than dense condo projects alongside a train track. The choice to live in a spread pattern is a unique North Carolina quality since the early settlements under the Lords Proprietors in the 17th century all the way through the modernization of the state.
Historian Milton Ready, in his new book The Tar Heel State, comments: “In looking for its identity in a growing complex of metropolitan areas, North Carolina has managed to retain much of its love of dispersion, of space and land, with its new growth and development. In so doing, it has become an attractive prototype for urbanization in the nation’s future, all the while bedeviling economists and urban planning specialists who stubbornly have predicated its consolidation and high-density concentrations for the past three decades.” See Worthy, living in dispersed patterns is in our ecumenical blood.
Another issue with Worthy’s defense of TTA is her belief that those who object to TTA are typically troglodyte tax naysayers who want to shoot down the train because it costs money. As if the disclosures in the N&O series weren’t enough to make her at least act a little sorry for the waste and incompetence in the TTA saga, she still actually wonders why there is “uncertainty” about the project in the community since there is, “broad support from grass-roots activists to local, state and federal leaders...” The uncertainty does not come entirely from those who fear the future burden of paying for a rail system even its advocates say will not come close to breaking even. It comes from citizens who love their city, who fear it will be sacrificed on a cross of smart growth, forever altering its character.
Worthy leaves out that a cadre of activists (as she correctly labels them) did indeed go after a pool of money in Washington for rail transit, but no entity elected by the people either took it up for a vote or has monitored its activities. As I wrote earlier, TTA is a homunculus, an “other being” that has imposed its doctrinaire vision on the community using and wasting taxpayer money with no citizen voice in the process. TTA, as now proposed, is not of us, nor does it have the community’s best interest at heart.
NOTES FROM LA-LA LAND
Effused with the righteousness of rail transit, local leaders have not stood up to the state to demand they return road money owed to towns and counties stolen to balance the budget, leaving Raleigh, for example, watching its vaunted quality of life disappear down deep potholes riddling the main thoroughfares. Now we discover that the 10-mile strip of I-40 from RTP to Chapel Hill and points west, recently widened and re-surfaced after a 10-year delay caused by a two-person environmental group in Durham, has to be torn apart due to shoddy workmanship. It’s beginning to take on the odor of a conspiracy around here when it comes to road building, and this goes for the recent road bond issue in Raleigh that turns out to be one of those “smart growth” deals to impose “traffic calming” projects—roundabouts and sidewalks—to create a more pedestrian-friendly city. Meanwhile, Raleigh’s roads are sinking into third-world status.
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The recent film that revises the history of the speaker ban law, criticized in the July 2005 Metro along with a new book on the subject, has won the Berkeley Film Festival first prize. That says all you need to know about that.
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I watched in astonishment as the author of the new book 1491, about the Americas before the Europeans, answered the question of how it was that these Indian societies that he thinks so highly of did not invent the wheel. His answer: The Europeans hadn’t discovered “zero” in their calculations, insisting that the Incas and their neighbors were just as advanced as the Europeans because they had, which is preposterous. This guy gets face time on NPR and C-Span because he writes about empowering indigenous peoples in a positive way to the detriment of Europeans. Because he is willing to alter the facts to make an emotional point currently in vogue in academia and publishing, he is given carte blanche to revise history to elevate the self-esteem of failed cultures. I’m sure the book will become de rigueur on campus, where scholarship has been hijacked by the tenured radicals, adding to the mountain of propaganda and disinformation masquerading as truth in a concerted effort to undermine Western achievement.