Really the STAC (strategic transit advisory council) that was set up in 2007 in the wake of the TTA DMU line failure should have basically decided to revive the DMU line, except backed by better local funding: a transit sales tax. It had full environmental clearance, all agreements negotiated, and a fully complete, really shovel-ready, 100% design. But there was such a desire to distance us from that project (which I am convinced did not fail based on its merits, but rather for the financial and political reasons outlined above) that, essentially, everything except that was on the table.
I believe that if we had resubmitted that project to an Obama-era FTA, especially if it were backed by a local transit tax, it would have been a slam dunk. They rewrote the rules to include stuff like TOD and, IIRC, to consider cost effectiveness per federal dollar rather than total cost. I think that what happened to the TTA project was actually a not-small factor in encouraging them to rewrite the rules in the first place. Now this is a bit more unlikely, but I wonder if, with enough support from NC’s congressional delegation, we might have even been able to skip some of the years-long project development phase.
Instead we have been condemned to transit purgatory for 22 years, a sentence of which we have served 13 years.
Sigh.