Ridership on Charlotte’s new $1.1 billion (actually closer to $1.2 billion) light-rail line is well below expectations. But that’s okay, says the Charlotte Area Transit System (CATS), because they expected it to be below expectations.
The line was projected to carry an average of 18,900 weekday trips in its opening year. When combined with the existing light-rail line, which carried about 15,750 weekday trips in 2016, the total should have been more than 33,500. In fact, it carried just 24,544 weekday trips in May, two months after its March opening.
According to CATS, the shortfall is entirely due to the University of North Carolina at Charlotte ending its Spring semester. “You go from a 28,000- or 29,000-student campus down to 4,000,” said CATS spokesman Olaf Kinard. “For us to have over 24,500 riders [in May] — that’s strong.” Students get free transit passes, so CATS is essentially depending on free riders to justify its expenditure of more than a billion dollars.
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The rest of the CATS transit system is doing equally poorly. The city’s 1.5-mile streetcar line carried 17,713 total (not weekday) riders in May, 2018, down from 40,493 in May 2017. Local bus service declined a mere 5.5 percent. Express bus service within Mecklenburg County fell by 23 percent. Express bus service bringing people in from outside of Mecklenburg County lost 27 percent of its riders. Yet CATS officials aren’t willing to publicly admit that these declines are also affecting light rail.
Like most other transit agencies, CATS is learning absolutely nothing from its declining ridership. Despite the drastic drop in streetcar riders, it is spending $150 million extending the streetcar line another 2.5 miles. It also has plans for dedicated bus-rapid transit lanes, an extension of the streetcar to the airport, and a commuter train to northern Mecklenburg County (a train that is dead for all practical purposes but CATS is keeping in its plans “just in case”). I guess as long as taxpayers and appropriators fork over the money, it doesn’t matter if anyone actually uses the transit system.
Liberal arguments always tend to win in the case of public debate if you capture every possible scenario.
If transit ridership declines or happens to be inherently low, the emphasis they bring up is that they require more subsidies because the current system is not geographically broad enough to serve the area originally thought possible; “WE NEED MORE IN ORDER TO …………………..whatever” or “Our original goal was to…………”. If ridership increases or grows beyond their capacity at a certain point in the foreseeable future it’s an invitation for more subsidies to expand, or worse held over our heads as an “I told you so moment” even if that was or will be 20 years down the road; though that seldom happens with the exception of perhaps BART in San Francisco (which was built to serve 100,000 and now carries 400,000 crush capacity).
It’s like climate change. If the planet’s temperature rises a degree it’s a travesty that must be inclination to spearhead aggressive action against it no matter what the cost, even if the costs incurred only alleviate it by a fraction of a degree. If the temperature drops a degree, it’s also an indication that the effect was attributed to the human augmentation of our climate; Per our investigation. Thus we must take action to insure the climate is stable, give us billions of dollars regardless. The same can be said if it rains more or less, storms more or less, forest fires occur more or less. Katrina’s devastation was the result of climate change; no it was a category 3, downgraded to a 2 which struck for a long period of time over antiquated infrastructure. BUT AH HAAAA, Hurricane Sandy was a devastating storm exacerbated by climate change. No…. it was a storm that coincidentally struck during a high tide….if it happened in a low tide, your house would have been fine…. We went nearly a decade after Katrina without a severe storm hitting landfall, til Harvey………….AH HAAAAAA. If every possible outcome can be attributed to your theory; you’re never wrong.
If Japan and Australia has low crime because it has few guns in it’s personal possession without researching the actual methodology or psychological underpinning for why they had low crime to begin with. While ignoring the fact that gun restrictions don’t seem to work well in major urban areas (Such as new jersey, Chicago, st. Louis, Baltimore, Detroit, New York) or countries (such as Brazil, Mexico, Central America in general).
Worse their most powerful weapon, emotional argument. Since transit is perceived by most as a moral, societal and environmental good, any attempt to curtail it or allow it to expire is therefore….immoral, racist, elitist and bad for the environment, blah de blah blah blah. The chief demographic transit was originally meant for, the Poor, the Handicapped, the elderly and children. Paratransit services have largely outmoded collectivist transit approaches of taking care of the elderly and handicapped by offering essentially door to door service. Vans can carry children to their afterschool destinations and back. And programs aimed at helping poor people buy a car are statistically shown to alleviate poverty, because once you have an automobile you’re no longer locally geographically bound to a career and are free to pursue work or even a new residence elsewhere….which is what cities fear most; people fleeing. The automotive revolution and the building of the interstate allowed people to leave the geographic constraints of cities for better places. Transit is merely the methodology of urban planners to re-acclimate people back to urban appreciation. They failed.
Next up,, they’ll claim the problem is not that the semester ended but that UNC-Charlotte has too many parking spaces.
https://aux.uncc.edu/news/parking-space-count-report-spring-2017
And after positioning the transit line as being for the UNC-Charlotte they’ll wonder why voters rejected a proposed tax increase to fund some other proposed LRT line they’d like to build.
The Antiplanner wrote:
Yet CATS officials aren’t willing to publicly admit that these declines are also affecting light rail.
Not long after the first part of the Charlotte light rail opened, Siemens, one of the companies that was part of the contract (to deliver the light rail vehicles) ran an extremely annoying radio ad in the Washington, D.C. media market that touted all of the wonderful things that happened as a result of the light rail having been built, including the implication that a farmers market had appeared near one of the light rail stops only because of the light rail line being open.
Out of curiousity, when did the LRT line open? Did it operate during the entire month of April or only a portion? If the latter, then it is possible that the weekday figure for April only captured part of the operation of the new line during that month. I’m still skeptical that it is enough to push the monthly average weekday ridership up to the forecast level, but it would still be a good thing to account for.
LazyReader wrote:
If transit ridership declines or happens to be inherently low, the emphasis they bring up is that they require more subsidies because the current system is not geographically broad enough to serve the area originally thought possible; “WE NEED MORE IN ORDER TO …………………..whatever” or “Our original goal was to…………”. If ridership increases or grows beyond their capacity at a certain point in the foreseeable future it’s an invitation for more subsidies to expand, or worse held over our heads as an “I told you so moment” even if that was or will be 20 years down the road; though that seldom happens with the exception of perhaps BART in San Francisco (which was built to serve 100,000 and now carries 400,000 crush capacity).
The arguments that I have heard (which do indeed imply a greater subsidy requirement from some source, including diverted motor fuel taxes or highway toll revenue (as in Pennsylvania Turnpike), meal taxes, rental car fees, or hotel taxes) are usually that the rail line in question is not “long enough” or “extensions are needed to realize the full potential of a rail line” or similar assertions
IMO it is a mistake to assume that large numbers of college students are reliable transit patrons because more than a few commuter students have jobs which may not be reachable by transit, and that means that they almost certainly need to drive to campus. Students that live in on-campus housing are not likely to need to ride transit, at least not for getting to and from classes.
MJ wrote:
Out of curiousity, when did the LRT line open? Did it operate during the entire month of April or only a portion? If the latter, then it is possible that the weekday figure for April only captured part of the operation of the new line during that month. I’m still skeptical that it is enough to push the monthly average weekday ridership up to the forecast level, but it would still be a good thing to account for.
According to an article in the Charlotte Observer from November 2017:
[Emphasis added below]
Ten years ago, the Lynx Blue Line opened after a bruising political fight over its future.
The train was delayed and over budget. Transit opponents had launched a repeal effort of the half-cent sales tax that provides the Charlotte Area Transit System with most of its funding.
Though the repeal effort failed three weeks before the Lynx opened, no one was quite sure how the public would receive the city’s first light-rail line.
Then opening day came. On Saturday, Nov. 24, 2007, the Charlotte Area Transit System allowed anyone to ride the train for free.
CPZ,
I was actually referring to the more recent extension that was built out to UNC-Charlotte. That is the one that would have been affected by the timing of the opening relative to the school’s academic calendar.
MJ, this article states the new extension to UNC opened mid-March so the April count would have been a full month.
https://www.charlotteobserver.com/news/politics-government/article214184194.html