Chattanooga public transit, past and present
Imagine more than 300 miles of track connecting the North Shore to St. Elmo…Downtown to Lookout Mountain…Red Bank to Signal Mountain. Comfortable, efficient, affordable electric vehicles moving thousands of people a day to and from work and shopping. A vision of 2020? No, a memory of 1920.
Chattanooga’s past was marked by one of the most advanced public transit systems in the south. Streetcars were the preferred mode of transportation by many in the city for decades in the early 20th century.
Low interest rates, cheap gas, and movement to the suburbs made the rail less attractive as a way of getting around, and so in the 1940s the streetcar fell out of fashion altogether. Tracks were paved over and forgotten. Even today, some of the wider streets in town like Market St. and Rossville Blvd., when undergoing a repaving project, can give up the long-hidden tracks.
For decades after, diesel buses and sedan cabs were the only other public transportation available in the Chattanooga area. A private company, Southern Coach Lines, ran routes to and fro from the end of World War II until 1973 when the Chattanooga Area Regional Transit Authority was created. CARTA has been the torch-bearer ever since.
But Chattanooga is different today. It will be even more different tomorrow. What will public transportation look like in the future? What factors must be considered when planning for the movement of a population? It’s not easy. It’s part history lesson, part research, part crystal ball, and all subject to change.
Rather than a crystal ball, CARTA has chosen to take a more measured, a more scientific approach. For the last year, the authority has been conducting surveys, hiring consultants, and holding workshops trying to see where people will be in the near future. Where are the jobs going to be? Where will the new houses and apartments be built?
“We’re in the middle of doing a five-year plan,” says Lisa Maragnano, Executive Director of CARTA. “We’ve hired Jarrett Walker Consulting and we just had our second workshop with them last week to look at what transportation could look like in Chattanooga going forward.”
And yet the best-laid plans don’t always work out, even with research. When Volkswagen first began operations at Enterprise South, it was thought bus routes would need to be added to accommodate the thousands of workers there. But when city leaders realized how much that would cost up front, no one was willing to sign a check.
“When I got here,” Maragnano recalls, “we applied for a grant and were awarded a CMAQ (Congestion Mitigation, Air Quality) grant for a three-year pilot project out to Volkswagen.” Maragnano says she felt the grant would lead to success, but the ridership just wasn’t there. As a result, after the grant ran out, two of the routes were dropped. The city provided funding to keep the downtown loop running.
The failure wasn’t from lack of effort.
“We did handouts, we did payroll stuffers, we did all these things to try and get [people to ride],” claims Maragnano, “and people just didn’t want to use it.”
It’s a recurring theme in Chattanooga where the independence of owning a car, with the freedom of movement and schedule, outweighs any argument, no matter how valid, that public transportation is good for the pocketbook and the environment.
According to NerdWallet.com, the cost of owning an automobile in the United States averages $8,469 per year. Compare that to around $50 for a 30-day all-you-can-ride pass on CARTA. And fewer cars on the road means fewer pollutants in the air. Yet with all the arguments, Chattanoogans still hold onto their cars.
“The car is like a rite of passage here,” laments Maragnano. “Car ownership is very important to people. It shows that they’ve hit a level of success for them, so it’s more of a status symbol, I think.”
Maragnano says CARTA is even trying to meet these car-lovers half way with a Car Share program.
“We have our Car Share program that is on most of our routes,” explains Maragnano. “You really don’t have to have a car. You can take a bus, you can rent a Car Share vehicle for anywhere from 4 to 9 dollars an hour, depending on the vehicle. You don’t have to pay for gas, insurance…bring the car back and then use the bus to get home.”
Still, Maragnano knows it’s a tough sell.
It may be a question of the chicken and the egg. Will people not give up their cars until they have a more attractive alternative? Is it time to consider adding extra routes? An electric shuttle like in downtown? A light rail system?
Not so fast, says Maragnano.
“Technology is obviously an issue for us, too,” she says. “I mean every time technology changes, there tends to be a lot of technology challenges for us, trying to keep up with it, trying to figure out what’s going to happen with the autonomous vehicle thing, and what route that’s going to take and…I’ve been doing this for 35 years and I’ve never seen so many changes so quickly. One right after another, after another, and they’re not thoroughly vetted.”
Electric vehicles have been on Chattanooga’s streets for nearly three decades now. The free Electric Shuttle runs between the North Shore and Downtown and the Southside, one of the most successful programs of its type in the country. For several years, CARTA has run eight Hybrid Electric buses on fixed routes and plans to add three all-electric buses to the fixed routes any day now.
Light rail is working in many cities…more in the European Union than in the U.S. But the initial cost is a non-starter.
“It’s been four years now since the proposal came out,” says Justin Strickland, Chairman of the Chattanooga Transportation Board, “and the moment the money started to be discussed, it was stopped dead in its tracks.”
Even though light rail was a popular choice among city residents at several town hall meetings, no one could provide a work-around to the expense of acquiring rights of way, laying tracks, building stations, and buying trains.
Volkswagen has announced an expansion with another 1,000 workers expected to be added to the payroll, not counting additional supplier hires. That means an influx of new families to the area.
Philip Pugliese, Transportation System Planner for CARTA, has an idea to enlist some of these new residents. “Somebody new moves to Chattanooga, what’s the first thing they do?” asks Pugliese. “They go online to EPB and get their electric utility, right? And what’s the very next thing EPB does? They sell them internet. And then you know what’s the next thing they sell them? An entertainment package.”
Pugliese feels this first point of contact would be a great place to extol the virtues of a public transportation lifestyle. “Why shouldn’t your next choice be a transportation package that’s custom-tailored for your location?”
Pugliese says the EPB Customer Service Representative could inform the new Chattanoogan of bus routes near their new home, the availability of bike share, car share, and parking.
CARTA isn't alone in providing transportation that you don’t have to own. Uber and Lyft look to continue their growth in the Chattanooga area and a new service is due any day now.
Bird is a new company that’s made a big impact in cities across the country. The firm places dozens to hundreds of electric motorized scooters in a city and advertises an app through which users can locate and rent one of the scooters.
However, Bird has been met with mixed reviews. Unlike the bike share program currently in operation in the Scenic City, there are no collection points for these scooters. Riders just leave them at their destination. The scooters are GPS tracked by employees who pick them up and charge them.
In San Francisco, this has become a problem as the scooters litter the sidewalks, even blocking access to driveways and doorways to the point that the city is now considering legislation to require more control over the distribution of the devices.
Chattanooga has experienced enormous growth over the last three decades and looks to grow even more in the next twenty years. Expansion of our current public transportation infrastructure will be required, as the streets and highways will be unable to handle the increased traffic without major, expensive expansion projects.
The saving grace is that Chattanooga, like other cities, will not be required to depend solely on buses to move people. Ride Share services, taxis, bike rentals and even little electric scooters will allow Chattanoogans to get from here to there efficiently, effectively and even with a little style.
Louis Lee has been a journalist since high school. After a stint in the U.S. Navy, he worked for a newspaper in Baton Rouge. He is now an award-winning documentary filmmaker who still likes to cover local news.