It's all about project financing - again 🤷

The Durham-Orange Light Rail is one of the more high-profile #transit failures in recent memory (or maybe not, depending on how much social interaction you get). The headlines were pretty dramatic, talking about how some poor transit agency (GoTriangle) spent $100m+ just for #Duke University to kill the whole thing…
… which is partly true, but it obscures a lot of the complexity behind this multi-decade saga.

You could argue that the DOLRT never stood a chance by relying so heavily on volatile state funding, providing yet another entry into the endless collection of transit projects that fall victim to the vagaries of public money.

Or you could take a deeper look at the actual issues with the DOLRT (because there were some real ones), and come to the conclusion that maybe Duke did everyone a favour, by making sure that a $132m failure didn’t become a $1.32b one.

Either way, I feel that there are some critical lessons with this light rail that we should take home, especially regarding project funding, procurement strategies, and the context-specific politics of building transit systems.

There’s a lot to learn from these lost transit systems 🙂

00:00 Intro
01:46 Lesson 1: Funding dictates everything
05:53 Lesson 2: Power always wins (Duke)
08:54 Lesson 3: Democracy can fall short
10:30 Wrapping up