Creative Loafing’s Tara Servatius catches up with UNCC transit maven David Hartgen, city council CATS booster Pat Mumford, and together they wonder where CATS’ grand train plans are heading — if anywhere.

Hartgen, as his research shows, thinks that CATS’ five-rail line plan is dead and the city should come to grips with that. Mumford sounds like he is in denial, but clearly sees the hand-writing on the wall with regard to scarce federal transit dollars. And Servatius observes: “After the completion of Charlotte’s single, puny, 9.6 mile carnival attraction of a rail line along South Boulevard, which is scheduled to start running next year, that may be it.”

I would not go quite that far, as CATS has wrangled $16.5 million in federal money for its Uptown transit Taj Mahal, which will be a complete waste without something running from it — like a heavy rail commuter service to points north. But that is the gist of the argument we will increasingly start to hear from CATS and the Mumfords — that we are in for a dime, so we might as well be in for a dollar.

More precisely, when the ridership numbers for the South Blvd. line come in — and Hartgen predicts they will be lower than CATS’ estimates — we will hear that in order to get ridership, we need to build more miles of track. And “we” means Charlotte city taxpayers. Alone. Without federal money. Don’t believe it.

Meanwhile, all of this confirms what CATS strongly implied regarding the Southeast/Independence transit line a few months back. One, it will be a bus rapid transit line, not rail and, two, it will stop at N. Sardis Road and not continue into Matthews for three stations. Plus, as we’ve observed, the stakes are huge with this line as it represents perhaps the last, best chance to get Highway 74 to something like the high-capacity freeway it was supposed to be 20 years ago.

But trains? Well, there’s always Tweetsie.

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CATS’ future?