We may have the talent to design good transit solutions, but we also need politicians to budget money for them.
There’s a reason why we keep applying for federal moneys: our overlords at the General Assembly refuse to help. The last time anyone in the Triangle asked for state funding, they went out of their way to specifically prohibit that in the state budget.
Besides... (click me!)
We already fund a huge chunk of our own transit through the transit sales tax. So if we’re getting more bang for our buck through federal taxes as @oakcityyimby pointed out, what’s wrong with taking advantage of that opportunity? By helping Raleigh’s residents move more efficiently, Washington benefits as well: it can create more opportunities for interstate commerce (read: jobs!) and grow its tax base.
We could totally diversify revenue streams, though, but that seems to be an active field of research and experimentation. Public-private partnerships for big transit projects are a massive challenge that we haven’t really figured out yet, as the drama in Maryland’s Purple Line light rail project shows us. Ad revenue doesn’t account for much, and real estate is also such a recent development that GoTriangle hasn’t even seriously considered it -at least, not yet. Transit projects also get overpriced, run over time, and underdeliver in the US, but people including in the Bay Area are still fighting to get decision-makers to do better.