To the Editor:
I have read with increased incredulity the spate of letters to the Chronicle about Duke’s supposed last minute refusal to support an environmentally nonsensical light rail stop at Duke Hospital North. When this subject first came up you published the following letter from me:
04/26/1999
"Regarding Leslie Deak's letter in the April 22 edition of The Chronicle castigating the university for not wanting a Triangle Transit Authority stop at the Medical Center on Erwin Road, she should get her facts straight before writing letters.
Deak's Georgetown/D.C. Metro example is irrelevant. TTA is rail, not underground. Rail is, in fact, "trains" on rails. A Medical Center stop on Erwin Road is part of the next phase of extension to Chapel Hill by the system. But the problem is that because the trains cannot navigate serious grades, Erwin Road would have to be reconstructed with an elevated rail at grade running down the middle of it; then it's off to Chapel Hill via a) the golf course, b) 15-501 bypass, c) the primate facility or d) Duke Forest.
Does Deak not understand that Chapel Hill is on a hill which cannot be climbed by the TTA rail train? Does she really believe that the town of Chapel Hill will allow a terminus at Eastgate (with bus or funicular up Franklin Street)? Is she aware of the concerns of the Chapel Hill authorities?
The President's Advisory Committee on Resources, which I chair, has had reports on this matter over the year, and congratulates President Nan Keohane for both refusing to lend Duke's support to such an environmental disaster, and continuing to support TTA's attempts to come up with a plan which serves riders' needs as well as the environment.”
Duke’s recent statements of its position are not “new.” The financial involvement of too many Durham city and county officials with the over $100 million spent so far on this boondoggle has, of course, never led the local newspapers or TV stations to ask “cui bono?” Perhaps the Chronicle investigative reporters can ask these questions?
In economics, we say sunk costs are sunk. In poker, it’s said “don’t throw good money after bad.” The environmental costs of this debacle are immense, and have never been properly accounted.
I am delighted that the current Duke administration takes their fiduciary responsibility as seriously as they do. Light rail is a project that Raleigh, Wake County and the Research Triangle Park rejected as the wrong solution to the wrong set of questions. It is a project twenty years ahead of its time, but its time was 1980. Electric vehicles, self-driving vehicles, and so on are coming. Fixed rail traffic is going.
E. Roy Weintraub, Emeritus Professor of Economics and Fellow for Center for the History of Political Economy
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