Transit panel has pedal to metal

'We're behind,' co-chairman says

Think fast. That's the mission statement for 29 Triangle residents who met Wednesday for the first time as an advisory panel asked to figure out the region's long-term priorities for major rail and bus transit service.

Local mayors and county commissioners called for a quick, fresh study last August, after an $810 million commuter train proposal ran out of steam. They took nearly nine months to agree on the makeup of their Special Transit Advisory Commission, but they want the new group to finish its work in less than six months.

"It's very important that on Oct. 31 you give a report," Alice Gordon of Chapel Hill, an Orange County commissioner, said Wednesday at the group's inaugural meeting in Research Triangle Park.

The business executives and community activists spent their first three hours getting acquainted with each other and with the challenge of agreeing on how best to serve three counties that are expected to absorb 800,000 new residents by 2030.

"In my mind, we're behind -- and we're going to fall farther behind unless we do something aggressive," said Bill Cavanaugh of Raleigh, retired president and CEO of Progress Energy and the advisory group's co-chairman. "Atlanta has been behind from the first day I ever went there. They've got a massive problem."

The transit advisory group will meet about every three weeks through the summer, aided by officials from the Triangle Transit Authority, N.C. State University and regional planning agencies.

A technical study to be completed by July will include an updated analysis of many possible transit corridors -- who lives, works and travels along each corridor, how traffic is expected to grow, and what transit options would cost. Then, after soliciting ideas from the public, the group is to develop recommendations for transit improvements.

The local elected officials who sit on the region's two transportation planning boards -- the Capital Area and Durham-Chapel Hill-Carrboro metropolitan planning organizations -- plan to discuss the advisory group's proposals in October. A key part of their work will focus on what to build and how to pay for it.

Gradual worsening

Short funds and soaring costs forced the TTA last year to shelve its push to build a 28-mile rail line through Durham, RTP, Cary and Raleigh. Although the trains would have served some of the Triangle's biggest employment centers, critics said the TTA missed key destinations, including the airport, and would not reach where most people live.

It won't be easy to come up with a better idea that Triangle residents can agree is worth the cost, members of the advisory panel said Wednesday.

"There's no obvious central, single core around which transportation would function," said Carolyn Elfland, an associate vice chancellor at UNC-Chapel Hill. And no urgent "doomsday scenario" that would easily unite residents of the sprawling region.

"Incrementally, it gets worse and worse," Elfland said. "But there's never anything awful that makes people say 'Now!' and 'We definitely need to do it.' It's a process of going on and on, and people not doing anything about it. That's a challenge."