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Transit Tangents
The Podcast where we discuss all things transit. Join us as we dive into transit systems across the US, bring you interviews with experts and advocates, and engage in some fun and exciting challenges along the way.
Transit Tangents
Ep. 38: Charlotte - The Queen City of Transit?
How will Charlotte's recent acquisition of a 25-mile rail line revolutionize its transit landscape? This week's episode of Transit reviews the transformative potential of the proposed Red Line project and how it could seamlessly integrate with Charlotte’s existing Amtrak services like the Crescent, Piedmont, and Carolinian routes. We don’t stop there; we also explore the ambitious Gateway Station project aimed at relocating Charlotte’s rail hub to a more accessible downtown location. Join us for a comprehensive look at Charlotte's transit future and the exciting possibilities of reducing car dependency in the city.
Doors are closing. Public transit that's my way to roll On the metro. I'm taking control. Bus stops, train tracks it's my daily grind, daily grind. Public transit, it's the rhythm of my life.
Speaker 1:The city of Charlotte, north Carolina, just last week purchased 25 miles of right-of-way for a new commuter rail line. We'll take a look at the potential for the new line, how it will interact with their existing transit system and the plan for a new gateway station. All of this and more coming up on Transit Tangents. Hey everybody, and welcome to this week's episode of Transit Tangents. My name is Lewis and I'm Chris, and today we are covering some news that just happened a couple days ago for when we're filming this. Earlier in the month of September, on September 9th, the city of Charlotte, north Carolina, actually just purchased 25 miles of rail line from Norfolk Southern that runs kind of adjacent to the I-77 corridor, going from downtown Charlotte north up to Mount Morn, with several potential stops along the way. This is their proposed Red Line project. So with that we're going to kind of talk about the potential for this Red Line project as well as get into some of the specifics of Charlotte's kind of existing transit system.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I'm happy to dive into this episode too, because Charlotte's not really a city that you normally think of as a transit-oriented city or transit-focused city and as we go through some of the data, it may be evident that they're not typically a transit-focused city. So to see the city proactively buying this long rail line, with future plans to expand it and turn it into something like a transit line, is very, very cool.
Speaker 1:Totally, and beyond that too. I mean in doing research for this. We just covered Salt Lake City's Rio Grande plan recently, and Charlotte has their own kind of. It's not quite as elaborate as the Rio Grande plan or as grandiose in some cases, like it's following some existing grandiose.
Speaker 2:Rio, grandiose Randy Griose plan, following some existing grandiose Rio, rio, grandiose Randy Griose plan. I didn't even say it right.
Speaker 1:Randy grandiose. Rio grandiose there we go.
Speaker 2:Randy grandiose not sure.
Speaker 1:Anyway, their plan is called, uh, the gateway project, so we'll kind of get into that, moving Charlotte's existing rail station from kind of like a freight yard in an industrial area that's not walkable to downtown, back into downtown itself.
Speaker 2:Which does sound very similar to Salt Lake City, totally Because our experience arriving into the central station was very semi-industrial, semi-undeveloped parking lots, cement surface parking.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Um. So, without further ado, though, let's talk about what is the existing system that we have in charlotte so far, and we'll start off with, uh, just their kind of regional rail. Uh, how can you get in and out of charlotte on rail? At one point way back in, uh, the glory days of rail, these numbers would have been much higher, unfortunately. Um today, uh, amtrak in charlotte sees six arrivals and six departures per day.
Speaker 2:Um so which is impressive and also infuriating, because austin and san antonio, we can get one train going in either direction. Yes, and one of them is at like six o'clock, six in the morning, leaves from san antonio to come to austin and to be fair.
Speaker 1:One of these uh arrivals departures is at like three o'clock in the morning, so not much better. Um, that's also if you're going to new orleans, which is like, uh, it's like 19 hours, I wrote it down 19 hour train to new orleans. I'm sure plenty of folks are taking that one uh, the the other. So, yeah, so that's one of the routes. That's the crescent, so it goes from new york city, uh, to new orleans, stopping in charlotte and many other places along the line. We have the probably saying this wrong piedmont, piedmont, piedmont. All right, that was right that one goes from raleigh to charlotte, and that is four trains per day each way.
Speaker 2:You said piedmont right. I don't know if you said raleigh right raleigh.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I knew it was north carolinians are gonna not be happy with that I could be wrong.
Speaker 2:I'll probably say except wrong. North Carolinians could say something completely different.
Speaker 1:Yeah, see, I just said North Carolinians, so Carolinian.
Speaker 2:Carolinian.
Speaker 1:I'm not sure. And then the last one. I'm going to have to say Carolinian, or Carolinian again. That's the name of the route the Carolinian Charlotte to New York. One train per day each way, but that a 13 hour journey in total. So, um, especially when charlotte is just just feels like it's an arm's length from the northeast corridor and the acela.
Speaker 2:It's still kind of far, though. I mean, yeah, you like virginia and north carolina are larger states than what people think, true?
Speaker 1:so yeah, um, but anyway that's the kind of existing uh state of the regional rail for getting in and out of charlotte. Again, lots of room for improvement. We'll kind of talk about later. There are a variety of different plans. North Carolina seems to be going pretty hard on trying to improve their passenger rail service. They have already improved some a little bit. The fact that they have kind of their own state system is nice.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and the fact that there's no commuter rail is actually a little surprising. They have this statewide system that can get you from Charlotte to Raleigh. You would think that in Charlotte you would have sort of a spiderweb network of maybe at least one or two other lines that kind of connect all of those suburbs.
Speaker 1:Right, yeah, but like we said at the start, though, there is the O line, we'll be coming down the line. We'll get into the details of that in a second. It's not all bad news, though. Uh, the? Uh. The city has a light rail line as well as a streetcar line. So, uh, the light rail line, known as the, the blue line, or the links um, the links blue line opened in 2007. Um, it mostly serves, uh, south charlotte, basically the area south of charlotte, um, and when you look at it on a map from like satellite view, you can kind of see where you would think it would go, and it actually goes right through that area sort of following uh development down the line right, and I'd be very curious to look at like google earth satellite view over the years to see kind of which came first whether it was the light rail spurred the development, the development spurred the light rail?
Speaker 1:probably a little bit of both, but it's good to see that kind of system and that's an area that seemingly has a decent amount of ridership. The system currently sees roughly 28,000 trips per day. Now, when the light rail opened it, like I said, it just served the South area. There was an expansion that happened back in 2018, so that this light rail system did not just serve the area south of Charlotte, but also connected points north as well.
Speaker 2:To the university.
Speaker 1:Yes, exactly, and so that extended the line an additional 10 miles. So this was not like a one or two station expansion, this was 10 or 15 stations.
Speaker 2:Uh, going to the north, when you, when I was looking at the map and you said that was an expansion, I was actually pretty impressed. It seemed like they would have had the line kind of going north and south and then just expanded towards the ends. But the fact that they did sort of the whole north end as a separate expansion is really cool, and we haven't been to charlotte for this purpose. Uh, I did do some playing around on google maps and, like, saw some of the stations and they're actually really nice areas yeah, yep, um yeah, so it's.
Speaker 1:It's a pretty extensive north, south, uh from this. Obviously it does not cover the whole city. Um, there is a bus system that covers the city as well. It doesn't see the highest ridership, it seems.
Speaker 2:Um, yeah, I believe the entire system, buses plus, uh, trains was around 77 000 riders a week, okay, or per day, per day per weekday, yep, um.
Speaker 1:So yeah, I mean definitely room for improvement there, and when you start to see some of the numbers, you can see some easy areas, in my opinion, where you could find some improvement. Uh, the frequencies on the blue line, uh, at peak times, 15 minutes, um so not horrible for the us, frankly, but peak should be at least every 10 minutes, or better I would.
Speaker 2:I know you said every 15 minutes the first time and I was like, well, that's not so bad, I could plan around 15 minutes to go on a trip, yeah, yeah. But I do understand like the system would be better if you could show up to a station and every five to ten minutes there was a train.
Speaker 1:Right, at least at, like you know, between the hours of four and seven, you know what I mean PM and the same thing in the morning, maybe between 7.30 and 9.30. Have a couple extra trains going back and forth or add some express trains or you know something to kind of speed it up. But you know, 15 minutes. At that time frame I'm imagining pretty crowded, light rail cars and and, uh, you know, hoping that the you know one train is canceled. Now all of a sudden you're sitting there for half an hour. I don't know how often that happens without having the lived experience of being there, but if you're from charlotte and you you know you see this sort of thing or you ride the blue, definitely let us know what your experience is with it in the comments. And as we were kind of planning this episode out, I mean Charlotte I think could be an interesting future episode where we go and do Charlotte in a day using only public transit.
Speaker 2:It's a beautiful city. I've flown through Charlotte several times going to DC or going to West Virginia, and gotten a chance to drive around a little bit and it's a really nice place to live. It's gotten a chance to drive around a little bit and it's a it's a really nice place to live. It's a pretty city and it's it's growing. I think pre-pandemic. It was already growing, I think post-pandemic, similar to a lot of cities in the us, it had a bit of a boom, yep.
Speaker 1:So it would be interesting to go back now and actually see that, how it translates to the traffic absolutely, and I mean, uh, on that note of the growth, uh, I want to point out that charlotte has done a lot to try to build new housing, make it easier to build new housing. I don't know that it's gone quite as far as what we've seen in the city of Austin, necessarily, where in the last year and a half it feels like we've gotten rid of parking minimums. The single family lot size or the minimum lot size got cut into thirds, something like that?
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's significantly smaller.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yep, and and all sorts of like incentives to to build and build higher and build more. Essentially, it seems like Charlotte is is doing a lot of similar things in the right direction, which will kind of help the existing transit network do better, because transit becomes more feasible and convenient for people when you can walk out of your apartment or your house and be on a train in five minutes. Uh, if you're far away from the transit lines and and you know if you can put more people closer to the stations, it will do better no, agree.
Speaker 2:It's almost like we've started to learn that sprawling cities is not the answer. Who would have thought? Who would have?
Speaker 1:thought I don't know. Uh, the last kind of element that we should point out on the charlotte system is the gold line yes we're gonna jump right back into this episode in just a second, but first, if you have not liked this video, go ahead and do so. Also leave a comment.
Speaker 2:We love reading all of them and respond to as many as we can, and be sure that you are subscribed so that you catch every episode as they come out please share this with your friends and if you don't have time to watch youtube videos in the future, you can catch us on any of the podcast platforms that are out there. Just be sure to leave us a rating and give us a comment. So the gold line is the streetcar system in charlotte. It opened in 2015 for phase one. That first phase included about 1.5 miles of total track. It sort of runs like the blue line runs north-south through the city, the gold line runs east-west, kind of through downtown. They did add phase two in 2021, where it was roughly two and a half miles additional track length, but it happened right about the time COVID started to ramp up, so that big investment in the streetcar line got met with a low ridership and has kind of struggled to recover, I think, since they introduced it Right, and I was reading a couple things online too.
Speaker 1:They were also having trouble with frequencies. Part of it was because they were having a hard time hiring drivers and whatnot. The streetcar also is just in mixed traffic. It doesn't have its own dedicated lane, basically, so you're going in mixed traffic, which is tough. I mean it's like a glorified bus at a certain point, like more people will ride a streetcar than a bus, like we've said, like buses aren't sexy, whatever it may be. But at the same time, I mean I also saw a tweet from like a Charlotte urbanist group that will put up and it doesn't have signal priority, and there were something like 77 stoplights from start to finish. It might not have been 70. It was like a stoplight every 700 feet. Yeah, crazy amount of stoplights. And then you wonder why people don't want to ride it and it's like Well, and the frequency is low, you said, oh yeah, it's like 20 minutes per ride.
Speaker 2:I looked at Google.
Speaker 1:Maps for the estimated departures for a bunch of stations at different times of the day, and I couldn't find better than at all. And you know, seemingly every 20 minutes, with unreliable timelines, if you're sitting at stoplights, it's just leaves something to be desired. But right as we've said, when we're talking about salt lake city and other places, that's low-hanging fruit, though I mean, like signal prioritization doesn't have to be super difficult to do. Um, so that's some low-hanging fruit of how you can improve the gold line, improve ridership on the group the the gold line, improve on-time performance, even like better frequencies, because they will just be able to get through faster, yeah, so and they are looking to improve the gold line.
Speaker 2:There are plans to extend the line to about 10 miles long and connect communities further east of downtown charlotte. However, that current expansion is not there's a funding for it yet right, so it is sort of languishing out there until they can get the funding. This is a great opportunity to reach out to the federal government for the bipartisan infrastructure bill and the amount of money that's out there. I know we're doing that in austin right now for our own uh light rail expansion, so I'm sure someone in charlotte is doing that as well absolutely uh with that.
Speaker 1:Let's move on to the kind of the headline here, the O-Line purchase, so kind of some some top line things here. It was officially purchased on September 9th. It's a 25 mile long route going from Charlotte north up to Mount Morn. As we kind of stated previously, the purchase was $74 million, which it's hard to gauge if that's a good deal or not, but it feels reasonable. I don't. Yeah, it doesn't seem like it's hard to like gauge if that's a good deal or not, but it feels reasonable I don't.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it doesn't seem like it's that that bad right 77 million for 25 miles of developed track length of track and right away the tracks are also like in good shape, like it's like uh, from what I can tell, like they could use the tracks what does that come out?
Speaker 2:you said 77 miles divided it's something like 25.
Speaker 1:Uh, it's something like 3 million per mile. Yeah, look at my quick math.
Speaker 2:That was quick math uh, 3 million 80 dollars, sorry, 3 million 80 thousand dollars per mile, and I don't think that's bad, especially when you consider how much it costs to build a mile of rail first from scratch.
Speaker 1:Yes, significantly higher. Um, uh, there's also uh, I can't find an article to kind of back this up, but a local journalist from Charlotte and we'll make sure the link's in the description, if you're watching you can see it on the screen right now said that there is potential for 42 one-way trips per day. Scheduled appropriately could make a pretty reliable system. And commuter rail is not going to be like light rail. It's not going to come every 15 minutes, there's no way. It's probably going to be something more like what we see with the front runner in salt lake city, the red line here in austin. You know a lot of potential there.
Speaker 1:Currently, this is predominantly just a single track line. I kind of scrolled through the whole thing on google maps earlier. There are a couple little sidings where you could pass and whatnot, but currently it's single-tracked. It does look like in the future, if you wanted to, you could double-track pretty significant portions of this without needing to purchase new land. However, there are a couple areas where it kind of sneaks through some tighter spaces in some neighborhoods or through some industrial area. That might be harder to double track.
Speaker 2:And there's definitely benefits for the suburbs outside of Charlotte. This gives people a chance who work in downtown Charlotte to hop on a train and come down. There are sports arenas in downtown Charlotte as well and sort of a vibrant city scene, so it gives people on the outskirts a chance to enjoy the city of Charlotte without having to worry about driving your car down and finding parking and worrying about everything that comes along with driving your car into a major city.
Speaker 1:Totally, and I think, like this extra connection too is only going to benefit the system as a whole too. I think adding this commuter line will also add additional ridership to the blue line, add additional ridership to the gold line and ridership to potential expansions that we'll talk about in a little bit. Here too, more transit kind of brings more transit. Essentially, if people don't need to take a car to get into downtown, then they'll use other ways to get around downtown and it kind of allwhat's the, it's a snowball effect.
Speaker 2:It's a snowball effect.
Speaker 1:There you go Kind of building the whole thing through.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and building better transit systems is also going to help with more economic development. So, like you were saying, this line goes through some areas that aren't the most developed areas. Again, they're kind of going out to the suburbs but it does provide an opportunity for more transit-oriented development to happen on the line, right At major intersections, at town centers, that kind of thing which can really spur a lot of economic development. The example I think of is the Silver Lime in the DC Metro area that goes through Virginia, and if you ride that Silver Lime all the way out to Dulles Airport, at each of those little town centers you have office buildings that have popped up new restaurants, new shopping areas, and this becomes something that doesn't only serve the transit riders but it also serves the communities around this transit development, because now they have a place to go and shop, now they have a place that they could potentially get a job to go work. There's a lot more convenience that kind of comes with those areas as well.
Speaker 1:And, in addition to that, if the city does the planning ahead of time and I've seen that you know I looked through some of the studies and whatnot that they've done on this If, ahead of time, you have a focus on, in these new transit-oriented developments, intentionally building affordable housing for folks as well that has some sort of cap, or having a certain percentage of units in these buildings be affordable housing, you can help combat housing costs.
Speaker 1:Number one, by just supply and demand building more housing. But number two, also having these income restricted units, essentially to help make it so that folks who wouldn't traditionally be able to live right on this rail line be able to live on the rail line, and they're in a unique position where this is this is new they can go and do this the right way the first time. But I think that for this line to be successful, they really do need to focus on on making it, number one, easy to get to the rail stations from surrounding communities, so some kind of feeder bus services and whatnot, but also you're never going to beat just having more people living closer to the station, Right, and all of this kind of culminates into what I was describing struggling to describe as the Rio Grande plan of Charlotte. I don't even remember what I said.
Speaker 1:The Randy Grandi plan of charlotte I don't even remember what I said the randy grandy.
Speaker 1:The randy grandy plan, which is the new gateway station potential, which would be a center kind of transit hub where the o-line slash, red line kind of commuter rail would go, the amtrak existing and potential future additional services would go, the blue line and the gold line currently go uh, bus routes a lot of them run through this area, already culminating into one nice central station that is actually in the city of charlotte.
Speaker 1:I mean, the other station is in the city but downtown charlotte, in a walkable area close to where people live, work, hang out, go to sports games, all of this stuff. So the Gateway Station and this would build all sorts of I mean, in a lot of the kind of conceptual drawings and renderings of this we're seeing a couple new big skyscrapers in the downtown area with building, a whole bunch more housing offices, there's talk of a practice field for one of the sports teams, all of this stuff really culminating in a center transit hub that is also just close to all of the things downtown that people want to do and see yeah, it's almost like we're going back in time, because this is how transit worked in the past.
Speaker 2:Before we were such a car centric culture, you had a centralized system. How it works in the past, before we were such a car-centric culture, you had a centralized system that took people into the heart of the city. It's how it works everywhere else in the world and somehow American urbanists are looking at this and saying, hey guys, we've discovered this new frontier. Did you know you could build a station in the middle of the city and people might use it?
Speaker 1:We're just reinventing the rails here. Yeah, finally, though city leaders are like kind of paying attention to that, it seems like hopefully they're realizing why do we have this grand central station that we abandoned so many years ago, right, or why? Don't we use it again. It's so sad, though.
Speaker 2:In so many places they just tore it down like doesn't exist what is interesting about the gateway station project is that it is near where the historic station was. So, as you were saying, you don't know if this station still exists. I don't think it does. I think it's just an empty lot now. Um, but you look at pictures. It was a station built I think 1906, and it's this beautiful mediterranean style station. It has like a little tower on it. It's let's just tear it down, it's really nice. And then they tore it down.
Speaker 2:In the 1960s they built an amtrak station way out on the outskirts next to a rail yard, because 60s and it made sense um, who's gonna ride a train anymore?
Speaker 1:we have interstate highways that wrap around. Every city, including charlotte, has a pretty good ring of highways.
Speaker 2:I would get rid of that southern highway across the bottom of charlotte well, not only who would ride the train, because now everybody's going to have a car, but also let's move the train station away from the central city, right where the people who probably would ride the train probably still live. But there's a whole other uh topic on on that we can get into uh, but it is exciting that they're sort of bringing the history of rail travel in charlotte back to its home totally, and I mean with with all of this too.
Speaker 1:I've seen we're not gonna get into the specifics on any of these because a lot of them feel a little pie in the sky, Although I think in North Carolina some of them have moved further.
Speaker 1:But there are some great proposals for high speed rail in North Carolina and just kind of connecting into the Northeast corridor and all this other stuff. There's plans for increased rail service. I know in the corridor id stuff there was a lot of new routes and whatnot and potential lined up for north carolina. So having this new gateway station will be such a positive service for any of that new rail ridership in the future so that you're not getting dropped off on the outskirts, you're getting dropped off where you want to be in downtown charlotte, with easy access to other rail lines and other transit to get you around to the specific spot you want to go. So it's it's nice to see that uh included and the only other little expansion I'm not going to get deep into this there's also a whole other light rail line being proposed, the silver line in charlotte. Um, it does look like it just follows existing Norfolk Southern right away again, which again can be good.
Speaker 2:Yeah, not necessarily a bad thing.
Speaker 1:But if it's, you know, if we're just following the rail lines out of convenience and they don't go to places where people live, you kind of run into the issue of like, well, if you spend more money to go through the areas where people live, is that going to pay off in the long run? Maybe not Question for another episode for sure, definitely yeah, and going to pay off in the long run? Maybe not um question for another episode, for sure, but definitely um yeah and then also, uh, charlotte has an airport expansion that's coming up.
Speaker 2:So, as a lot of people who've probably experienced charlotte, you've flown into it or through it. I've done a lot of connections through there. It's sort of a almost like an overflow for atlanta, in a way it's like a hub for american airlines. Yeah, yeah and so I've done a lot of trips through the charl. It's very nice. I've always enjoyed it, unless I'm running late and then you're just hoofing it across the terminal.
Speaker 2:But there is an airport expansion as well and we're going to do a whole episode about airport expansions in the US. We haven't quite got there yet, but definitely coming up.
Speaker 1:But, all in all, charlotte, much like Salt Lake City we talked about on the rise as far as transit stuff is concerned, that stuff is concerned, uh, still plenty of work to do, um, but it was interesting to take a look at it. I just I saw the o-line thing on twitter this week and I was like, oh, that's interesting, went into a rabbit hole looking into it and I was like, oh, we should do an episode on this, I think maybe, maybe charlotte, the queen city will, will wear her her transit crown in the future on that note, thank you all very much, much for watching this episode.
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