Lay Track. Wait Years. Ride: Plan: Streetcars to Roll a Decade After Rails in Place
By Richard Rubin, The Charlotte Observer, N.C.
Jan. 7–In the next two years, the city will install streetcar tracks on Elizabeth Avenue, expanding urban growth beyond uptown and introducing a new type of transportation to the city.
Except for this: Streetcars won’t start running until 2019. The full line will open in 2023.
The Metropolitan Transit Commission voted late last year to put the streetcar behind light rail to University City and commuter rail to the Lake Norman area.
The unanimous decision stunned streetcar proponents from Beatties Ford Road to Johnson & Wales University to Central Avenue. Now, communities and developers who had hitched their hopes to the rails share puzzlement and frustration as they contemplate opening dates ripped from a Jetson family calendar.
Without the streetcar, they wonder, what comes next?
Start with Clay Grubb, the developer reshaping six blocks of Elizabeth Avenue into a trendy urban neighborhood with a Whole Foods grocery and condos galore.
Last year, Grubb helped persuade the Charlotte Area Transit System to redirect the streetcar through a proposed development off Hawthorne Lane. He was aware of the city’s $277,000 purchase of steel streetcar rails. They will be laid during an estimated $10 million remake of Elizabeth Avenue that includes sidewalks, streetlights, sewer lines and underground utilities. The all-in-one construction effort could start by summer.
“If you’re already installing tracks,” Grubb said, “you get pretty bullish that it’s going to keep going.”
No such luck.
Cheryl Miller, president of the Commonwealth-Morningside Neighborhood Association, thought the streetcar would stop on Central Avenue, near her house. She went to meetings, studied plans and talked to excited neighbors about quick rides uptown without parking.
By the end, Miller felt cheated.
“We just kind of felt like we wasted our time,” she said.
Across town, Kelly Alexander says he’s flabbergasted at the decision, which saps momentum from attempts to remake Beatties Ford Road.
“The folk who are struggling to try to make these neighborhoods viable, continue to keep them viable, both in the east and west, just got jammed, to be polite,” said Alexander, who owns a prominent funeral home. “The people in the center city, who were the urban pioneers in Charlotte’s 21st-century revitalization, likewise took one on the chin. It doesn’t make a lot of sense.”
Backers, price tag held sway
Why did the MTC delay the streetcar? Money and politics.The Northeast Corridor to University City is pricier ($600 million in today’s dollars, vs. $250 million for the streetcar), but federal money should cover half the cost, according to CATS.
Because streetcars travel in traffic and replace existing bus routes — and because future development can’t be counted — federal formulas don’t favor them, said CATS CEO Ron Tober. That may change next year, when the federal government releases rules for a new program designed for smaller projects such as streetcars.
The north line has some of the same problems as the streetcar, but it has something no other line can claim: three of the nine MTC members.
The mayors of Davidson, Cornelius and Huntersville have no other transit line through their towns, and their push helped make the north line a top priority. Still, construction is uncertain as the MTC tries to pay for it without federal help.
Tober acknowledged that CATS’s public statements about the streetcar lacked a crucial caveat — that timing depended on the MTC. He still likes the idea, partly because high-capacity streetcars will save CATS operating money on three of its four busiest bus routes. But, for now, there isn’t much Tober can do.
Willie Noble, who manages the streetcar for CATS, will continue another six months of environmental work, then shelve the plans until further notice.
Some development in doubt
So what happens while those plans are sitting on the shelf?
Some areas, such as the commercial strip of Central Avenue near The Plaza, will thrive as uptown spills beyond the Interstate 277 loop. Grubb, however, hasn’t decided whether he will scale back his plans for Elizabeth Avenue.
However, more marginal areas farther out might not get a boost, several developers said. Talk of the streetcar helped generate interest in properties near the intersection of Central Avenue and Briar Creek Road, said real estate broker John Nichols.
Developers like the streetcar’s permanence. Riders — and potential riders — like its image.
“There is a certain stigma that comes with city buses,” said Rob Pressley, a partner in the redevelopment of the Morningside Apartments off Central Avenue into a 1,000-unit urban center. “There are a lot of folks that would take the streetcar that would probably not take a bus.”
Brian Nolen, president of the Wesley Heights Community Association, said he hoped the streetcar could bridge the gap between his neighborhood and uptown. It’s now tough for residents to walk safely under Interstate 77. But the delay puts the streetcar vision out of focus for most people, he said.
Nichols said he worries about future MTC decisions, particularly because most of its members live outside Charlotte.
“They have no reason to care,” he said. “That’s our biggest concern. Will we always get pushed to the back of the line?”
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Copyright (c) 2007, The Charlotte Observer, N.C.
Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Business News.
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