The Charlotte Area Transit System recently acknowledged that it didn’t create ridership projections before a presentation on its transit expansion plans.
After initially telling WFAE that it could likely provide ridership numbers, CATS later said in a statement that “the purpose of this analysis was limited to evaluating financially feasible options, not to evaluate ridership projections for the approved projects.”
CATS presented four scenarios last month of which train lines and bus rapid-transit lines could be built if voters agree to raise Mecklenburg’s sales tax by 1 percentage point, to 8.25%. While officials have made no final decisions about the transportation plan, the four scenarios presented have already eliminated numerous options — even without knowing which lines would carry the most people for the least amount of money.
In its original transit plan from earlier this decade, CATS planned to spend as much as 90% of new sales tax revenue on rail transit. Republican legislative leaders said that’s too much money for trains, so the new proposal calls for 40% of tax revenue to be spent on roads and no more than 40% of tax revenue to be spent on rail transit. The other 20% would be spent on buses.
With less money for rail transit, CATS and consultant Infrastrategies went back to the drawing board last fall to create a new plan — or at least four scenarios for different parts of a new plan. (Hey, nothing’s simple in a decades-long transit expansion, right?)
Implementing any big plan depends on the General Assembly passing legislation and voters approving a sales tax increase.
Here are CATS’ four scenarios:
All four scenarios envision building the Red Line commuter train to Lake Norman. That’s mandated in the draft legislation for the tax — an acknowledgment that north Mecklenburg has been waiting more than 25 years for the train and that the support of Davidson, Cornelius and Huntersville is crucial.
But all four scenarios also build two extensions of the Gold Line streetcar through central Charlotte. That project is a priority for many City Council members, even though ridership on the existing four-mile line is half of what was predicted.
The differences in the scenarios are over how CATS would build the Silver Line light rail from the airport to Matthews, as well as the Blue Line extension to Ballantyne.
◼️ CATS did not propose a scenario in which it built bus-rapid transit from uptown to the airport, and then light rail from uptown to east Charlotte.
It’s possible that a six-mile train from uptown to east Charlotte might carry more passengers than a six-mile train from uptown to the airport. Or it might not.
We don’t know because CATS hasn’t estimated that, or at least released it publicly.
CATS made some ridership projections in 2023 for the Silver Line from Matthews to uptown to determine which route through uptown would be best. CATS later acknowledged those forecasts contained some errors and were called “really suspect.”
◼️ One of the scenarios has two trains potentially cannibalizing riders from each other.
CATS has proposed building the Gold Line streetcar along Central Avenue and also the Silver Line light rail to Bojangles Coliseum. For about 1.5 miles, the two trains would run parallel to one another, with stations a four-minute walk from one another.
This scenario could make it difficult for one or both of the trains to get federal funding because they could end up cannibalizing riders from one another.
This possibility does not appear to be part of the transit system’s preliminary analysis.
The Trump administration has said it will consider a community’s birth and marriage rates when deciding how to award grants for new federal transit projects. That’s a curveball that’s left transit officials nationwide puzzled.
The same memo from the U.S. Department of Transportation also said it will rely on “rigorous economic analysis and positive cost-benefit analysis” to determine how and where to award grant money. That suggests that a rail project will need to carry a large number of passengers for the lowest cost to win funding.
CATS defended the lack of ridership estimates by saying the rapid transit corridors are all in areas where CATS already sees high demand. It noted that the Gold Line streetcar extension, for instance, would serve corridors that have the two most-used routes in the system: the Central Avenue No. 9 bus and the Beatties Ford Road No. 7 bus.
That’s true: CATS is not proposing to build a train from, say, Mint Hill to Matthews, where it would run through a thinly populated rural/exurban area and generate ridership from scratch.
But there are questions about why CATS picked those four scenarios — and whether ridership estimates would have led them to a different conclusion.
