Brace yourself because this is ugly. Let’s start in-state with–you guessed it–Charlotte, where as Antiplanner reports– pretty much every aspect of the Queen City’s public transit system is “doing equally poorly.”
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.
…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.
Of course–“CATS is learning absolutely nothing from its declining ridership,” according to the Antiplanner. But it could be worse, like out in Seattle, where the new streetcars might be too big for the existing track.* And that’s not all (of course)—-the line extension is behind schedule and over budget. Never mind that “ridership on the city’s two existing streetcar lines has lagged expectations, but SDOT predicted that connecting the two lines with a First Avenue line would cause ridership to soar exponentially.”
*Thanks to my friend Fred for alerting me to the Seattle Times story.
