The Blue Line extension is great. Now double the transit tax

About 1,000 people jammed the UNC Charlotte light rail station Friday morning. They wore T-shirts that said “First to ride” and waited in line for two hours to take the train’s maiden voyage toward uptown. After 10 years of planning and four years of construction, the hoopla was appropriate, but the whole event was also a discouraging reminder:

This is not nearly enough.

Charlotte’s Blue Line now runs 19 miles, from I-485 in the South to UNC Charlotte in the north. It’s a crucial addition, but it’s only a start. Mecklenburg County needs a more robust bus system, and mass transit to the airport, to Lake Norman and out Independence Boulevard to Matthews.

Transportation might be the city’s and region’s least-appreciated challenge. Mecklenburg County’s population is expected to jump by 465,000 in the next 20 years. The 10-county region will grow by about 900,000 people in that time.

That growth, or something like it, is coming, ready or not. And it will paralyze this region if we don’t vastly upgrade our transportation systems. The roads, even if widened a bit, cannot handle an influx of hundreds of thousands of cars.

How can Mecklenburg County chip away at its soon-to-be-massive need for more transportation options? Double its sales tax dedicated to transit, for starters.

Mecklenburg voters approved a half-cent sales tax for transit in 1998 and beat back a repeal effort in 2007. Now our growth demands that we tack on another half-cent.

Another half-cent would double the $93 million the current tax brings in each year. Combined with federal and state money, that would give commuters a fighting chance to not sit in their cars for hours on end each day.

John Lewis, the CEO of the Charlotte Area Transit System, estimates light rail to the airport, Lake Norman and Matthews would cost around $6 billion. Revenue from an additional half-cent wouldn’t suffice, which means the region needs additional strategies.

One could be what is known in planning circles as “value capture.” There are a variety of ways to implement it, but it generally means paying for some of the public’s investment through the higher land values that investment will produce. The Blue Line prompted some $2.1 billion in new development in the South End, for example. Since that was made possible by public investment, it’s reasonable for the developers and others who profit from that development to put some toward the public cost.

Most politicians are understandably hesitant to raise taxes. But the public backed transit tax referendums around the country in 2016, transit expert Jarrett Walker says, and the free market is showing that new residents want to live in cities with more density and less sprawl.

“The question,” Walker told the Observer editorial board Friday, “will not be whether we can fund a good transit system. It’s how can we not do it? How can we tolerate the outcomes of not investing in transit?”

This story was originally published March 17, 2018 at 5:36 AM with the headline "The Blue Line extension is great. Now double the transit tax."