Charlotte Shows Why Transit Is a Waste

I suspect it has begun to dawn on transit agency officials that the Trump administration is not going to shovel money their way as the Biden administration did. That means many of the larger agencies are going to have to put some of their rail plans on the shelf for at least four years or until a more sympathetic administration takes power. Unfortunately, I doubt that many will seriously consider altering their long-term dreams of building rail lines all over whatever urban areas they serve.

Light-rail train in Charlotte. Photo by James Willamor.

A case in point is the Charlotte Area Transit System (CATS), whose ridership (as of December) is still less than two-thirds what it was before the pandemic. Despite this, CATS has grandiose plans for its future. Central to those plans are the development and operation of a 25-mile Red Line commuter train from downtown Charlotte to the suburb of Mount Mourne. This line is such a loser that the Federal Transit Administration refused to fund it back in 2011, so CATS tried and failed to get local communities to find half while the state would fund the other half.

Apparently, CATS is still not expecting federal support for the Red Line, but it hopes the feds will help pay for a new Silver light-rail line, to join the existing Blue line, as well as extensions of the Gold streetcar line. Among other places, the Silver line would go to the airport as well as the football stadium that is the home of the Carolina Panthers. This is always a good way of getting support from naive white-collar voters who would never ride transit to work but think they might take it to the airport or a game once in a while.

Click image for a larger view.

To support its plans, CATS has prepared four so-called alternatives. I say “so-called” because all four alternatives would spend hundreds of millions of dollars starting up the Red line, all four alternatives would extend the streetcar line in both east and west directions, all four alternatives would increase bus service, and three of the four alternatives would expand the Blue light-rail line.

The Red line is considered a foregone conclusion because the city has already purchased most of the rail line it would use from Norfolk Southern at a cost of $74 million. It will still take at least a half a billion dollars to get this line into shape for carrying passenger trains, building stations, and providing equipment and maintenance facilities for that equipment. All of that is going to take years when, if they wanted to, they could start running limited-stop or non-stop bus lines along that route next week.

CATS admits that it has made no attempt to estimate future ridership of any of these lines. After all, most of its revenue comes from taxpayers, not riders, so why worry about whether anyone will ride them?

CATS says that “the purpose of this analysis was limited to evaluating financially feasible options,” and apparently financial feasibility has nothing to do with ridership. Instead, the transit definition of “feasibility” is whether transit agencies can sucker taxpayers into paying for a new project. Of course, CATS also hasn’t estimated the costs of any of its projects, but why bother since the real costs will end up being much higher than any of the estimates.

When Trump and Musk promised to cut government waste, I hoped that they would cut capital improvement grants to crazy projects like light rail and commuter trains. Now I suspect I wasn’t ambitious enough: they need to completely cut federal funding to transit as that funding has divorced transit agencies from the need to actually serve the communities they tax. I hope they do it soon.