Hurrah! Charlotte is actually at the forefront of an alternative to driving solo to work, but sorry CATS it does not involve building $450 million choo-choo trains. Telecommuters outnumber transit commuters two-to-one in Charlotte, a new Reason Foundation study finds. The report helps to put mass transit use in perspective:
Telecommuting is quickly gaining ground on transit as the most popular non-automobile commute mode. In many respects, telecommuting has already surpassed transit. In 2000, there were 4,184,223 telecommuters and 6,067,703 transit commuters nationwide. Yet this view is complicated by the transit anomaly of the New York metropolitan area. This one area accounts for over 38 percent of our nation’s transit commuters. Remove this outlier and, nationwide, telecommuters outnumber transit commuters (3,904,656 to 3,747,218)
Does it not make sense for Charlotte to try to be more like say, Greensboro or Nashville both of which have higher telecommute rates, than it does to spend billions on transit and redevelopment to try and be more like New York or Chicago? Which approach would be more cost effective and actually result it getting people off the roads during rush hour?
Don’t you wish someone in local government was asking these questions?
