Don't Let North Carolina Become Another New Jersey

This post originally appeared on May 24, 2007, on my recently deleted Faux-Pen Space blog:
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As my aunt pulled up to a stoplight outside Durham, North Carolina, one afternoon last July, she told me that at one time, hers would have been the only car there. This time, six cars were ahead of her.
More than once during my weekend visit, she remarked how the Triangle had built up in her 31 years of living there, and how tough it would be to get around without a car. I had a similar experience; I was staying at the Washington Duke Inn, and unless I arranged a ride, I was forced to limit my explorations to wherever my feet could take me. How many times can you visit the Duke student center in one weekend?
As someone who had not been in North Carolina since 1978, I was wowed by the growth of the Triangle. And now, you may have read, that state outranks mine - New Jersey - in population.
Yet, while my "Garden State" faces the prospect of becoming the first state to reach "build-out," some North Carolinians are wasting the opportunity to get things right where we’ve gone way wrong – public transportation.
Don't let the light-rail opponents get away with getting rid of the half-cent transit tax. You will pay dearly in the end.
Up here, the Delaware River Port Authority’s high-speed line carries 33,000 riders a day to and from Philadelphia. In fiscal year 2005, NJ Transit carried some 800,000 riders a day and another 620,000 riders on the weekends. The Southeastern Pennsylvania Transit Authority carries 299 million riders a year on its rail lines, trolleys and buses in and around Philadelphia. Just imagine all those people driving on our (still-crowded) highways.
Now, imagine those kinds of numbers on North Carolina's highways. I’m no demographer, but it wouldn’t surprise me if many newcomers moved there to get away from the mess we have here.
Your light-rail foes don’t get it. The idea is to build the light rail before North Carolina becomes another New Jersey. Before they join us at "build-out." The unintended consequence of keeping mass transit out of your back yards is that you will get more cars passing by your front yards.
It is encouraging that a Charlotte area poll shows a majority favoring keeping the tax, but 57 percent is not a large figure. Don’t be NIMBYs; embrace the rail. Perhaps all these foes need to be convinced is to spend time with me on New Jersey's roads. And I promise I won’t wax nostalgic about how things used to be.