This will probably come as no surprise to you, but not everyone who wants to ride mass transit in Charlotte can. Oh, they’re physically able and willing to travel via bus or train, but, unfortunately, the system fails them.
Take Michael and Michelle Childers. They live in Mountain Island Lake, which is located roughly 10 miles from the center of Uptown. Michelle is currently unemployed and a non-traditional business student at UNC Charlotte. Michael works for a technology company in Rock Hill. Their 4-year-old daughter, Jayden, attends Gateway Academy near University City.
They’ve looked into taking mass transit — after all, a bus stop is located at the entrance of their neighborhood. They hoped to save on the costs associated with driving (insurance, taxes, gas, maintenance … you know the drill), but the time-opportunity cost associated with Charlotte’s transit system is just too great.
Michael logs 60-plus miles per day in a pickup truck that has almost 193,000 miles on the odometer. At best, he can get dropped off two to three miles from his job on Dave Lyle Boulevard, off Interstate 77. At worst, it could take two or more hours — each way — to commute via public transportation, cutting into his family and work time. So, he drives instead.
Time is something Michelle can’t afford to give up. “It’s a crunch,” she says. After she drops Jayden off at school in the family’s SUV, “I literally have just enough time to find a parking space [at the university] and get to class.”
Even if time wasn’t an issue, finding a route that will take her to her daughter’s day care and then to UNC Charlotte is a logistical nightmare. In fact, if you plug in her address and the day care’s address into the CATS’ “plan a trip” Web site, the response reads: “The destination has no stops within the distance we consider.”
The inconvenience isn’t the only reason she’s not interested in mass transit; she’s (rightly or wrongly) concerned about the lack of seat belts and the fact that she can’t strap her daughter into a car seat. “If it’s a law that kids have to be in car seats in cars, why isn’t it a law for buses? What happens if that bus gets into an accident?” she asks.
Beyond any safety concerns, she also worries about the bus schedule. “Even if everything was perfect,” she says, “there is still not going to be a bus that waits for you to drop off your kid.”
And when it comes to the return trip, she points out that life doesn’t always work on a schedule. Sometimes things run over, which may cause her to miss the bus home. Then what? It will take even longer to get home. So she drives approximately 40 miles, five days per week, instead, too.
“It’s great,” she says about the idea of mass transit in Charlotte. “It works for some people, but it’s hard for others. It’s really difficult unless you’re in Uptown. So, it’s great for people who live in Uptown. Good for them.”
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This article appears in Apr 6-12, 2010.
