The city of Charlotte discussed Monday how it will spend money from the new transportation sales tax on buses and microtransit in the coming year.
Mecklenburg County shoppers will start paying the new one-cent sales tax in July. Sixty percent of the money will go to transit.
In the first full year of the tax, there will only be a 5 percent increase in the number of hours buses are operating.
Interim Charlotte Area Transit System chief executive Brent Cagle said that’s because new buses can’t be bought quickly enough. He said the new Metropolitan Public Transportation Authority – which will take over for CATS – plans to spend $70 million buying new buses in the next year.
“At some point we don’t have enough vehicles,” Cagle said. “So this budget will purchase vehicles so you can see those improvements ramping up over the next two and three and four years.”
The budget calls for 50 percent more money for security, and there are plans to improve 100 bus stops in the next year. The budget also calls for spending an additional $2 million to expand microtransit, a new Uber-like service in north Mecklenburg that started last year.
Cagle’s budget presentation did not discuss ridership.
Overall transit ridership has fallen since the August 2025 murder of Iryna Zarutska on the Lynx Blue Line. And ridership is still only a little more than half of what it was in 2013 and 2014.
