NC: Long waits, missed buses: Is Better Bus enough to earn riders’ trust back?

Twice a week, Garrick Combs makes his way to St. Luke Missionary Baptist Church to volunteer at its food pantry.

The church is only a 12-minute drive from his west Charlotte home. But Combs takes the bus, which means his commute takes over an hour.

Combs became a full-time transit rider last October when his car was totaled in an accident.

But rather than being on the move, Combs spends most of his time using public transit waiting, he said. Waiting for a bus that’s behind schedule. Or waiting for the next bus or Blue Line train to come because he has missed a needed connection. On some of his routes, one bus comes every 50 minutes.

Potential improvements to the bus riding experience could be on the way. Better Bus, the Charlotte Area Transit System’s proposed plan to enhance the system, is part of the region’s hoped-for transit plan. It would, in part, increase bus frequencies on routes Combs finds himself waiting for.

“It would be nice,” Combs said of the prospect of having a shorter commute.

Last week, Charlotte officials approved a transit plan that prioritizes rail improvements and expansion of the bus system.

While rail garners most of the attention, Mayor Vi Lyles and CATS leadership have touted buses as the foundation of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg transit system. They plan to bolster the bus system using part of the 1-cent sales tax referendum that they hope makes the ballot this fall. But frequent riders and some transit advocates question how much these investments will revolutionize the bus riding experience.

Any investment is a good investment — but opportunities have been missed in the past, advocates say. With a bus system known for being unreliable and inconvenient, some advocates and commuters say work will need to be done to rebuild trust with riders and to entice new ones to see the bus as a viable option.

An hour long bus commute to a place you can drive to in a fraction of the time is “absolutely insane,” interim Charlotte Area Transit System CEO Brent Cagle acknowledged. With the proposed improvements, Cagle said he’s confident people will seek buses as an option.

“We know, with more frequency and reliability people will ride,” he said.

The proposed improvements are encouraging, Combs said, but they don’t solve all the system’s problems. As a daily bus rider, he hasn’t decided if he’ll vote for the potential 1-cent tax this fall.

“I don’t want the city to think they can tax their way out of problems,” he said.

What is Better Bus?

The Better Bus program is a $3.8 billion initiative to improve CATS’ bus system over 30 years. It is one part of the Metropolitan Transit Commission’s approved plan to expand transit in the region. The MTC is a group of elected officials in Mecklenburg County who review and recommend all long-range transit plans.

The plan intends to increase frequencies on the 15 busiest bus routes to 15 minutes or less. Today only one route — the 9 on Central Avenue — operates at this frequency. All other routes will have a bus come every 30 minutes or less. Many are currently on a cadence of 45 minutes to an hour, Cagle said. The plan does not add any bus routes.

The Better Bus plan will also fully implement a CATS ride share program that is currently in a pilot stage in north Mecklenburg County.

Cagle said such microtransit will not replace buses even if it becomes increasingly popular.

“It is an enhancement to the bus network to allow people to access that bus network,” he said of microtransit. “It is very effective in certain situations. It is not as effective in a major transit corridor. Trying to replace the nine biggest bus routes with micro transit would be completely inefficient and ineffective, and we won’t do that.”

The plan includes bus stop improvements, including 2,000 additional shelters, benches and waiting pads, priority signaling on the busiest routes and 89 new buses.

CATS intends for the plan to be fully implemented in five years.

Full implementation will put 250,000 people within a quarter-mile of a bus line with 15-minute frequency compared with 29,000 today.

Under-investment in Charlotte’s bus system has led to a service that is ill-equipped to meet the needs of Charlotte’s growing population, Sustain Charlotte CEO Shannon Binns said. The half-cent sales tax Mecklenburg County passed in 1998 helped expand Charlotte’s bus system, but the revenue hasn’t stretched far enough.

Potential improvements from the 1-cent sales tax are needed to give Charlotteans the service they deserve, he said.

“People need to be able to know that if they show up at the bus stop, even if they just missed the bus, there’ll be another bus coming along relatively soon,” he said. “But because of our lack of investment in the bus system, we don’t have enough drivers, enough buses to meet that expectation that riders reasonably have.”

The legislature would have to give Charlotte permission to put the tax on the ballot, and then voters would have the final say.

“You can’t pay bills depending on CATS.”

Corey Lewis lives just a 15-minute drive from Charlotte Douglas International Airport, where he works. But relying on the bus system would take him nearly two hours to get there, he says.

Life as a daily CATS rider is one full of contingencies, Lewis said. With buses that don’t come on time and missed connections because of their delay, Lewis said he’d be late to work all the time.

But he never is. Other options like Lyft are the reason he still has a job, he said.

“If I had to depend on CATS? Oh man. I’d be living under a bridge somewhere,” he said. “You can’t pay bills depending on CATS.”

Among many frequent riders like Lewis, the bus has a reputation for unreliable service. The only way people will trust the bus is if they see it working for other people, said Julie Eiselt, former mayor pro tem and a transit advocate.

“They can advertise all they want, but until you actually know people that are saying, ‘Yeah, I take the bus every day. It’s great,’ why would you take it if you had a choice?” she said.

Lewis said increasing the frequencies of the buses will be helpful, but he wants CATS to take a second look at optimizing routes. Sometimes, he gets off one bus and has to cross busy intersections to get to the next one. Making transfers like that easier would improve the experience, he said.

The Better Bus plan will add buses, but who will drive them, Robert Dawkins of the nonprofit Action NC asked. A shortage of drivers in 2022 forced CATS to cut route frequency.

Cagle said driver vacancies have been resolved and he’s confident CATS will be able to recruit the drivers needed to implement new frequencies.

Dawkins said he believes investments in the buses are important, but has questions on how CATS will make them happen. Shaving a few minutes off a rider’s daily commute is fine but “it’s not this life changing piece that the city seems to be selling us on,” he said.

Mecklenburg sales tax option

Some transit advocates say the region had opportunities to invest in the bus system long before Charlotte purchased rail lines from Norfolk Southern.

Permission from Raleigh isn’t needed to make meaningful investment into the bus system, former Mayor Pro Tem Braxton Winston said. The power is here locally, but the local government has yet to act on it.

Mecklenburg County has the authority to propose a quarter-cent sales tax to voters for “any authorized public purpose,” said Alex Burnett, public information officer for the county. Most recently, the county attempted — and failed — to use this authority to fund the arts, parks and greenways and supplement teacher pay in 2019.

Winston said the county could use this authority to ask voters to invest in the bus system. But local officials are banking on the 1-cent sales tax – a political strategy, not a pragmatic one, Winston said.

“When it comes down to it, we could fix the bus system and create a world class bus system for less than a quarter cent of that sales tax, which the county has capacity to do right now,” he said. “We don’t need authority. We don’t need to go to Raleigh to get that… we could have done that years ago (and) we would still have money left over to invest in other things. It always confounded me why we decided to do it this way.”

Eiselt said the city also had an opportunity to invest in the bus system during a previous property tax revaluation in 2018, but chose not to.

“Yes, we need the bus system, but until we’re willing to pay for it and pay for the improvement, then no one’s going to take it seriously,” she said.

Leigh Altman, a Mecklenburg County commissioner and member of the Metropolitan Transit Commission, said the quarter-cent sales tax has historically been considered only for core county functions. Transportation is a core function of the city of Charlotte. But she said she can’t prejudge what a future county commission would do with its authority.

While the 1-cent tax doesn’t cover everything she’d want for a transit plan, it’s important to not let the goal of perfect be the enemy of good, she said.

“A $24 billion infusion of critical infrastructure is a huge step forward, which we need to grab with both hands, if we can,” she said. “... We need to make progress. We need to make investments today as soon as possible.”

‘I need transportation’

Combs has come to welcome the waiting in his daily commute. It gives him time to grab lunch, run to the grocery store or pick up a Snickerdoodle iced coffee while he waits for his bus to come.

But this mindset took time. At the start, he was like many other transit riders — frustrated and confused about why their commutes were taking so much time. And as a disabled military veteran, long waits at bus stops without benches don’t go well with his lumbar pain.

Public transit covers most of his commute, but it doesn’t take him all the places he needs to go. He recently rented a car from Enterprise to get to his optometrist appointment at the Salisbury VA.

He has considered buying an electric car and leaving the hassle of long transit commutes behind. But riding the bus and renting a car each month is still a cheaper option than owning a car – the main thing holding him back.

“I don’t want the expense,” he said. “But I need transportation.”

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