GoTriangle’s leaders are meeting in their monthly meeting tomorrow, and it gives us much more context to Durham’s hesitation in pitching in $260M more to the commuter rail project. It seems like there are three reasons:
1. Daily bus riders and people of color in Durham support commuter rail, but don’t see it as a priority.
Durham County’s manager for its transportation programs wrote about their recent work in updating their county transit plans. It included this summary of citizens and stakeholders’ thoughts, among other things, on the commuter rail project:
2. Going more into debt would screw up Durham County’s credit.
Durham and Orange counties also have to rewrite financial agreements as a part of their transit plan revisions. This revealed an unexpected bug in the system: GoTriangle currently gets to call its own shots in financially managing Durham County’s transit tax district. Neither Durham County’s taxpayers nor planners in the DCHC MPO currently have a direct say in how these dollars get spent.
Naturally, the three parties are trying to fix this by creating a new interlocal agreement powered by a new financial model. But one byproduct of this change is that, unless they want a drop in credit ratings, Durham County has to set aside more rainy-day funds than it currently does.
This means, as an unintended consequence of switching to a fairer way to share power, Durham County essentially lost “at least $50 million” that they used to be able to budget for future transit projects.
3. Durham County’s still reeling from that time they tried to build light rail.
The other narrative that’s been getting popular, as @Christopher mentioned earlier, is the sticker shock from the Durham light rail project that got killed off in 2019. Durham and Orange counties lost $157 million in learning their lesson -more than enough to make up for the funding gap for commuter rail- and we now know why.
The former Durham light rail project didn’t just go through planning, but also had detailed environmental and engineering work and purchased some land for a maintenance facility before it got killed off. A detailed breakdown of how we lost so much money is also on the agenda document. Here’s a table that summarizes that:
Over $130M of that went to management and design ($83M of which did to a single contract with engineering consultant HDR). After a 2017 renegotiation, Durham County footed just under 82% of that bill.
As an aside, Durham’s MPO is trying to do a corridor study that, in part, should make the case for BRT where light rail was once proposed. But according to their own documents, they had to put that project on ice for two years because they could only scoop up $50,000 -nowhere near enough money to attract consulting firms to work on that project.
There's also a $270M question on how to design the train platforms, so that's another thing to think about too.
In happier news, Norfolk Southern’s been getting back to GoTriangle, and staff memos are showing signs of progress in modeling rail traffic and service impacts! That should help us learn how smoothly, quickly, and frequently trains can run, and what sorts of infrastructure investments are necessary.