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Yesterday, the North Carolina Department of Transportation released an evaluation of seventy-seven Statewide Mobility projects that are seeking state funds***. And while you have to play around with the Excel link a bit to suss this out, the Durham-Orange Light Rail Transit project was given the highest Regional Impact Quantitative Score among transit projects, a 53.33 out of a possible 70.

  • Carrboro alderman and light-rail proponent Damon Seils told me this morning: “When the 2020-2029 State Transportation Improvement Program is finalized late this year, the DOLRT Project will be first in line for state funding. Also, with the recent passage of the omnibus spending bill in Congress, which was good for transit, this opens the door to over a billion dollars in federal funding. So, while we won’t know all the details for a while, this is one more huge bureaucratic move forward for the DOLRT Project and a big step closer to a major federal investment in Orange and Durham Counties.”
  • The omnibus was indeed good for transit. Congress ignored President Trump’s demands to slash mass transit funding and instead went in the opposite direction. But while the local governments have long been eager to get this project rolling, the question has been state and federal funding. The state is a question mark because a) the GOP-run legislature doesn’t like rail and generally doesn’t like Durham, and they’ve tried to sabotage this thing before, and b) the DOLRT is asking for more money from the state than all but one other transit project. The feds are a question mark because a) Trump and b) it’s unclear how the feds will rate the DOLRT as it moves through the grant process. And without federal funding, there’s basically no way to make the numbers work.

WHAT IT MEANS: To be clear, a lot still has to break just right for the DOLRT to become real. But the project has so far survived threats from the legislature and the Trump administration, as well as secured significant funding from local governments. If you support this project, there’s reason to be optimistic.

Worth noting: A series of projects connected to Wake County’s commuter rail and transit plan was also evaluated. A $111 million commuter rail connecting Durham to Garner was the best of the bunch, scoring 46.67 out of 70, while a $162 million Durham-Raleigh-Garner-Wake Forest line scored 39.45.

***Update: I just got some clarification from Bruce Siceloff of the NCDOT. While that press release included an (unfortunately broken) link to the seventy-seven Statewide Mobility projects that the agency ranked (and another link to a much larger Excel spreadsheet of projects, which I accessed this morning), the DOLRT was not among them because it is vying for a somewhat different pool of money. Siceloff writes: “This Statewide list only has highway, freight rail, and aviation projects. Statewide funding scores are based entirely on objective data—how the project is rated for safety, for congestion relief, cost-benefit analysis etc. DOLRT will be eligible for funding at the Regional level. Regional funding decisions are based 70 percent on the same objective data. The remaining 30 percent vote is from ‘local input’—a combination of the ratings of DOT division engineers and the local MPOs. These local ratings also will take public comment into account. These ratings will be announced this summer.” Importantly, he adds: “There are good reasons to expect DOLRT will get the maximum money it is entitled to under state law.”