Thursday, December 4, 2008

$1.8 Billion

That's how much the development along the Charlotte light rail line adds up to. No small, change, that's over 250% return on the initial investment of just under $500 million. That's just on the development and doesn't include these savings:
Morgan said new mixed-use transit-oriented development has sprung up along the line. There’s numerous anecdotes about lifestyle changes, he said, including downtown workers living in condos or apartments near rail stations who have sold their cars and avoided insurance, gas and other costs while getting transit subsidies from their employers.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

i'd like to do some kind of competition to talk about national priorities. if we're spending $340 Million a day in Iraq, then we livable streets advocates should each take a week's worth of that spending and built whatever system we want in whatever town we want. we'll just give the mic to one advocate each week and see which system they'd like to add. then we plot all the systems on google maps. and we can leave our money for the next person to use if they want to build, say, HSP or something.

:)

Jay Heikes said...

You ain't seen nothing yet...
The NE corridor has about 5X the development potential as the South Corridor. Nearly every development in the South Corridor was redevelopment of industrial space, very little was built on open land. The NE corridor will open thousands of acres to development (partly from the removal of a freeway and by traveling through unused industrial space). Already there has been countless projects being built in NODA near the proposed 36 street station.
The North Corridor has even more open space as it travels through the North towns. One development, Bryton http://www.aacusa.com/brytonmp.html
Located in Huntersville. It is one of three massive TOD's under construction along the line. Plus there are already several TOD's that have already been built in anticipation of the line such as Vermillion, Oakhurst and the Lowes Campus.

Also, there is an interesting article in the observer today regarding the effects of the budget crunches of CATS and NC. It seems everyone, even Ron Tober is in a frenzy over the sales tax.