You may have missed the news, all three lines of it, that the Uptown Gold Rush trolley buses will stop their special service after Bobcats games.
Beginning tomorrow, the CATS’ will no longer run the faux trolleys for Bobcat games due to low ridership. The Orange line will cease service at 6 p.m., and the Red line will stop at 10 p.m. The South End Shuttle bus (which replaced the $40 million Charlotte Trolley) will still run, and will be parked on Brevard Street after games.
CATS had just extended the buses to run during the CIAA basketball tourney at the end of February and had been running the Bobcat Gold Rush buses since the Uptown arena opened in November. A good guess would be that were it not for the CIAA tourney, CATS would’ve ended the buses’ post-Bobcats run much sooner.
There is also larger lesson here. The buses were free to ride which means that you could not have possibly priced them any lower and still people avoided them. Consequently the only option for CATS and their city government co-conspirators to increase ridership is to make it more expensive to drive. That is done by artificially restricting the flow of traffic Uptown (take away lanes etc,) and by reducing parking spaces, both of which are well underway.
