No fares, no safety, no transit future for Charlotte | Opinion
Think about a public park. It remains pleasant only when people follow the unwritten rules that keep it that way. Put your trash in the trash can. Keep an eye on your dog. Don’t blast music.
The same is true of an office kitchen. It works only when people wash their mugs and don’t leave a mess for someone else. Once too many people decide the rules are for other people, the whole arrangement starts to break down.
Economists have a name for this — the free rider problem. It describes what happens when people enjoy a common good without doing their part to maintain it. Before long, the people who do follow the rules start to feel foolish for doing so. Left unchecked, the problem does not just create resentment. It makes the whole system impossible to sustain.
Charlotte now has a literal version of the free rider problem on public transit.
The City Council reviewed the Charlotte Area Transit System budget on Monday as the city prepares to transition from a city-run department into a new metro-wide transit authority. Mecklenburg County voters approved a major transit tax referendum last fall, committing billions of public dollars to an ambitious future for public transportation.
But amid the bureaucratese, interim CEO Brent Cagle disclosed a striking number. Roughly half of riders are not paying fares, across both the light rail and the bus system.
For a transit system reeling from a string of violent incidents, that is an alarming place to be.
And it gets at a larger problem. Charlotte is asking us to believe in a bigger transit future while failing to enforce the most basic rules on the system it already has.
It’s not about the money
CATS estimates that fare evasion is costing somewhere between $3 million and $5 million a year. On one level, that is a lot of money, and it makes it tempting to treat this as a simple accounting question. CATS is asking for about $10 million more for safety and security, including a new fare inspection team. If the city is losing up to $5 million from fare evasion, some will naturally conclude the math does not work.
But that misses the larger point. Fare enforcement is not mainly about recovering money. It is about whether the city is willing to enforce the norms that keep transit usable and safe.
Transit only works if it’s safe
A bus or train is not just another public amenity. It is a confined space people enter because they need to get to work, school, the doctor or back home. They cannot simply walk away when something feels wrong. The city therefore has a higher burden to make that environment orderly and safe.
Fares are part of that. Not because paying a small fee turns someone into a model citizen, but because enforcing fares helps establish that public transit is for transportation, not just occupancy.
That is why the city’s posture on safety has felt so inadequate. When City Councilman Malcolm Graham said, “Unfortunately bad things happen to good people, and they happen on public transportation,” he was not wrong in the narrowest sense. But people do not want to hear that violence is part of the deal. They want to know the city understands it has a duty to reduce it.
Charlotte did not always treat this level of risk as normal. In fact, the city used to take pride in just how safe its transit system was. In 1992, 1997, 1999, 2002, 2007, 2008, 2010 and 2011, the North Carolina Public Transportation Association declared that it had the safest bus system in the state, according to Metro Magazine.
The year 2011 happens to be the last year Charlotte had a Republican serving in city-wide office. Make of that what you will.
Today, the picture looks very different. The Observer reported in February that Charlotte’s serious assault rate on buses ranked second in the nation behind only Minneapolis. The federal government found crimes against passengers on CATS running at three times the national average.
Charlotte deserves some credit for finally spending real money on the problem. Security spending has climbed from roughly $10 million in 2022 to about $30 million in this budget. That is a more sensible direction than where the conversation was drifting not long ago.
But even now, safety still feels treated as a fix for a side problem rather than the first condition of making transit work. The city is prepared to spend $70 million on new buses. It is willing to spend $6 million on better bus stops. Both of those are good, yet the question of whether people can count on a basic level of order and safety still feels like an afterthought, something folded into the budget rather than driving it.
That is the free rider problem, brought down from the textbook and onto a city bus. A transit system can’t survive when nonpayment becomes normal and rules become optional. Mecklenburg voters just made a huge investment in public transportation. If Charlotte wants that bet to pay off, it has to prove it can enforce the basic bargain on the system it already has.
Contributing columnist Andrew Dunn is the publisher of the Longleaf Politics newsletter, which offers thoughtful analysis of North Carolina politics and policy from a conservative perspective. He can be reached at andrew@longleafpol.com.