As getting around grows harder, work on new Charlotte and SC regional plan begins

Charlotte Mayor Vi Lyles and officials from 12 counties launched a regional transit plan Monday that aims to flesh out years of relationship-building talks about mobility.

A common thread: The fast pace of development is making it harder to get around, and fixing that will help the region compete nationally. Prospective employers want to know how their hires would get to work. New arrivals demand a quality of life that’s not stuck in traffic.

“They expect to be able to get around — that’s why they moved here,” Kathy Pender, mayor pro tem of Rock Hill, said at the kickoff.

Before Allstate Insurance Co. announced in 2017 that it would create 2,250 jobs in a Charlotte expansion, the company noted that some young workers would want to commute without cars, said Janet LaBar, CEO of the Charlotte Regional Business Alliance.

A regional transit system — one that offers new transportation options and would be coordinated across state and county lines on a scale that hasn’t been attempted before — emerged from years of preliminary talks.

“So many peoples’needs to live, work and play cross boundaries,” said Charlotte Area Transit System CEO John Lewis. “People just want to be able to move.”

The transit plan announced Monday, to be called Connect Beyond, will be developed over the next 18 months under the Centralina Council of Governments and the Metropolitan Transit Commission, CATS’ policy board.

The plan will seek public input in evaluating high-capacity transit corridors such as expansion of CATS’s light rail lines. It will look for new strategies in bus transit, like the rapid transit routes recently added on Interstate 77 north of Charlotte, and for innovative ways to reduce congestion. It will also recommend how to make the proposals happen.

Transportation was a focus of Charlotte City Council’s January retreat, and Lyles grouped it with affordable housing among the city’s most pressing needs.

“Everybody needs a place to live, a place to work — and a way to get there,” she said. “We don’t have that now.”

Even Charlotte Douglas International Airport, which hosted Monday’s meeting, is seeing growth in local demand. Long known as a connecting hub, local passengers have increased from 20% to 30% of the airport’s traffic since 2012, said aviation director Brent Cagle.

This story was originally published February 25, 2020 at 5:00 AM with the headline "As getting around grows harder, work on new Charlotte and SC regional plan begins."