Burying public transportation below Charlotte streets

PHOTO | TROY HULL

Charlotte's initiative to move its transit center underground is drawing skepticism in parts of the community due to the perception that it keeps bus riders – many of them low-income – away from view.

Charlotte has a transportation problem, one that is riddled with racial justice issues.

The onset of COVID – and the short-term reduction in traffic that it brought – delayed the realization for a couple of years that we cannot accommodate all the cars that our growing population brings. We are projected to grow by 500,000 – 700,000 new residents in the next 20 years, and our roads cannot be widened enough to accommodate all the cars that will come with them.

So, we should be making transit and public transportation more accessible and enticing for riders, correct? We should make parking harder and public transportation better. We should be updating our fleet with attractive, clean, all-electric buses that will glide through our neighborhoods and offer commuters and shoppers quiet, clean, emission-free alternatives to driving.

So why did City Council recently vote to build an underground bus terminal to replace the existing Transit Center on 4th Street? I know the answer – money. But there is a lot of skepticism from the community about the reasoning.  

Could there be more sinister reasons that we want to move buses underground? Could it be the logical extension of locating the Transit Center in the first place, which moved “those people” off Tryon Street and away from all the bankers and lawyers who just want to walk to lunch without interacting with Black and brown bus riders? Now we want to, once again, move “those people” out of sight – literally – by burying them underground.

Yes, the city will make a lot of money selling the surface land to some developer to build whatever. But is this going to make riding the bus, and using public transportation to reduce congestion and air pollution, more attractive? Please note that I am just asking questions, and not blaming anyone or any entity for multiple decisions that have led us here.

There is another justice issue here as well, one that I know not many are thinking about based on several conversations I have had.  The public has recently learned that the city is not on track to replace all its buses with electric buses by the year 2030 - the goal originally voted on in 2018 for its Strategic Energy Action Plan. The city council just voted recently to purchase 12 more hybrid diesel buses. The new transit center thus will bring diesel-fuel burning buses underground with all those bus riders. These citizens will be in an enclosed space, breathing harmful diesel fumes.

There are complicated reasons that the city is unable to convert its fleet quickly enough but suffice to say that is where we are now. The fact remains that with over 300 buses in the city’s fleet, it will take many years to replace all the diesel-burning buses with clean electric buses.  And we know that the life span of a bus is about 12 years.

So many diesel-burning buses will be around until 2035 and longer, and the new underground shelter is slated to open sometime in 2028. That amounts to years of Black and brown bus riders breathing diesel fumes in an underground bus shelter, where they are out of sight and out of mind.

When you look at the rates of asthma and COPD and other respiratory illnesses in our city, you will note that “the Crescent” of east and west Charlotte has a much higher incidence of these chronic illnesses. These are illnesses that cause children to miss school days, workers to miss pay days, and generally set folks back in their access to economic opportunity.

Where is the racial equity effort in our transportation planning? I have been unable to uncover it.

The gist of the matter is that with these recent decisions, we are going to continue to put Black and Brown people in places with unhealthy air. And, instead of making public transportation more accessible and inviting, we plan to hide it underground. All in the name of making money from land that can be sold to the highest bidder.

There is still time for new decisions that will indeed make the underground transit center attractive and healthy. But that will likely not be on the cheap. Voters (and debate moderators) will have the chance to make this an issue in the upcoming 2023 city elections – and we can hope to hear some good answers to the questions being raised.

Jennifer Roberts is a former Charlotte mayor (2015-17) and Mecklenburg County commissioner (2006-11).

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