We have very little old rail that can be converted. They did test on Central (phase 3) dedicated bus lanes for 6 months which I think is to see if they can get away with a road diet without having to widen the road to much more once they get past Plaza midwood area. I will say the roads it travels on are not major roads and a lot of people avoid the tracks as much as possible.
As John mentioned in the video, the streetcars (trams) run in the middle of the street to slow down traffic and encourage pedestrians and cyclists to use those streets often. Charlotte drivers tend to drive very fast around town, and are among some of the most discourteous drivers in North Carolina (I should know, I lived there once). Streetcars are excellent traffic-calming machines! Downtown (Uptown) and city centers are not designed for fast driving because they are usually the most-populated parts of a city or town. Motorists need to slow down and practice extra care in these areas. Alan Fisher, thank you for your excellent videos, I enjoy your commentaries. Would you do one on Charlotte sometime? I did not notice your name until I had started posting my comments. Keep on educating me!
The thing is, the track in itself slows cars down. Just driving on those rails will slow you down. That concrete looks new, but as it ages, it will become real bumped. I'm from Melbourne, and you don't want to be driving more then 40 - 50 km/h on tram tracks. We do this thing where we sit either to the left or the right of the tracks trying to keep the wheels off the rails. They are slippery, especially in the wet. But, honestly, you can't drive fast on them. Yeah you have to wait for pedestrians, but that happens here too. What it does for streets is it makes them great to have retail business on them. Find a nice tram stop and build a coffee store next to it, a cafe, and you'll have a tonne of customers. Slow cars like to pull over and get coffee. Parking around the back 100%. Half the cafe's in Melbourne are next to a tram stop. :P
It's definitely not the best solution for rail transit, which is why the Blue line will always be able to carry far more people, but hopefully this line is the first of many streetcar lines... also @Jonathan Fritz, yes, I agree
The line will begin public service on Monday, August 30. It was announced yesterday on the city's web site and on some local media outlets. No mention of a ceremony or other public event, just the operating schedule: every 20 minutes from 5am to 2am, 7 days a week.
Yeah I saw that. I can’t think of a more begrudging opening to a basically new rail line. Like if they weren’t legally obligated to open it by the end of the month, it probably would not open for another year…
@@TheFourFoot They must have dispensed with a public event either because of Covid, or because they're so embarrassed about the delays that they want to get it over with as quietly as possible. I would have been happy if they had been able to wait until maybe October, when it's cooler. The weather forecast for Monday has a high of 97 degrees! But I'll probably drive up for it anyway, and aim to get there just after the morning rush, before the heat really ratchets up.
I completely forgot about this and man has Charlotte grown and moving in the right direction at the perfect time. I'm a bit skeptical about the on-street running but, needless to say, this entire rail network is coming together beautifully. You did a great job on once again!
Im glad be a Citizen of Charlotte CATS is doing pretty good with their plans for the gold line and the silver line and the new gateway station charlotte is getting better with it's transit system
Gateway Station and Union Station in Raleigh have level-boarding platforms for passenger train riders. That's a plus for Amtrak, a big help for people in wheelchairs and other physically-challenged travelers. I hope they will make all of their stations between Raleigh and Charlotte level boarding. Roanoke, VA, has a level-boarding station.
Charlotte honestly looks really nice, especially for a city in North America. If I didn't know any better Id have said its more like the cities we have here in Australia.
Absolutely. There’s a lot neighborhoods in this country that are completely opposed to catenary wires, but a battery powered streetcar seems pretty innocuous.
I'm in Charlotte, love the video! This is better than anything that the city has put out themselves! Also, any chance of a similar video on the Blue Line?
The planners in Charlotte started the city's rail network at a good time, decades before the Queen City hits 1 million. I remember the freight trains traveling on what was then a single track Uptown south from Pineville 10 miles (6 km) away, behind the Convention Center and proceeding north. At the time, the city had less than 450,000 people. Now the LYNX Blue Line tracks follow roughly the same freight route but trains run through the Convention Center. Thanks to the state's liberal annexation laws in the 1980's (they have since been revised), Charlotte and other cities in North Carolina grew like rabbits.
i’m hoping as we slowly move away from cars in general and charlotte continues to gain population they can ramp up rail construction exponentially to get more lines more quickly
As far as the old replica cars go, there is a small group called Lakewood trolley that seek to creat a heritage line along an old CLT trolley/rail line of the same name. Now there hasn’t been a lot of news about them recently, and they do have a small fleet of heritage cars, but they may be able to get these leased from CAT’s.
A few years ago, I made a list of lines for various cities to up their metro station count, coverage, and number of lines. I would like to see how they would all look on a map together, but I don’t know how in Google Earth to do what John has at 0:06. Could someone or John please share how you can get all of those pins for cities and to show multiple lines at once?
so excited to see charlotte’s rail transit expanding. the more progress that’s made on the gold and silver lines the more likely it will be to see even more lines and hopefully a rapid transit subway or elevated line in the future. i’d love to see charlotte become walkable and non car centric in my life time
I am a retired Charlotte Officer. I patrolled the Hawthorne Street area in the early 90s. Absolutely everything looks different. : ) When I started we had 500 officers and about the time I retired thee were 1800.
I heard a while back that the gomaco cars are being sold to Memphis to add “new” serviceable cars to their trolley and serve the waterfront line which, along with the Madison Ave line has been out of service ever since two trolleys burst into flames in 2013 and 2014. I haven’t heard anything on this for a while but I’ll look for the news story I saw!
I heard "Silver Line" and got scared for a second, John. Hahaha but this looks really cool! It's always great to see streetcars making a comeback in the US. It's also interesting that Phase 2 only costed $150 million! It shines some light on how light-rail can be affordable (pun intended) unlike some projects *cough cough* GLX *cough cough.* Awesome footage and explanation my man! Keep it up!
The street-level tour (starting at 2:55 ) feels just like a "street view" tram ride in Cities:Skylines :) Also helping the illusion is the immaculate streets _and_ the music being the same that a popular C:S TH-camr "Biffa Plays Indie Games" is using in his current city build series.
Correction - The future silver line will travel north in parallel to US 74 at that location; the median, currently bus lanes, will be converted to express (toll) lanes.
I love what Charlotte is doing with transit nowadays, but the Amtrak new station isn't gonna be finished in a long time. Someone I know said they think the actual station wont break ground for another few years. But the current station is good for what it is. Its better than Altanta in my opinion lol
With the building of the Carolina Panthers practice facility is in Rock Hill SC there were talks of extending the blue line to South Carolina. The red in my open is a good idea but Norfolk Southern will not allow the city to use their track. Also the county north of Charlotte does not want to use a penny tax to raise the funds for the line
They'll be preserved. They are only 17 years old, so either Charlotte would find a way to run them as tourist trolleys or someone is gonna lease-to-own them
I have a picture of those errant beams for Hawthorne Bridge somewhere. I saw them on one of my many trips to Charlotte. Hawthorne Bridge curves left to right but the beams I saw in the median construction zone curved up and down only. Oops!
Nice! I did the exact same drive a week ago Saturday when I was in town for a convention, my first visit to Charlotte in a year and a half. More traffic (looks like you did it on Sunday), but still a fairly easy drive. I'm looking forward to coming back for the opening. Are they still testing during the day?
A famous sentence: Money is the answer to everything. To that, I include: If you have the money, you can create lots of things. Banks have that kind of money!
Transit expansion is always appreciated, but there are several things I don't like about this line: 1. It's too bad the line has so much shared ROW. If there's traffic the streetcar will crawl with everyone else... Not to mention stopping at traffic lights. This immediately makes the streetcar less attractive than the car 2. The stations are really ugly and uninviting. They also seem a little bare - they need more shade, train arrival screens, trash cans, more seating and better wayfinding signage. I also wish that streetcar/tram tracks in the US weren't embedded in concrete, that's really ugly as well. And speaking of ugly stations, they could have at least got rid of the former stations. 3. The CTC/Arena stop appears to be located quite far from the Blue Line stop. Makes transfers less convenient 4. 5th street (the street with the interchange track) looks to be a side street. Why the hell would it have 4 lanes?? And crossing guards in the middle of downtown (or uptown)... They should have traffic lights which give the Blue line trains priority instead, it works great 5. I also wish those streetcars looked more modern... I mean it looks better than most rolling stock in the US but it still looks quite dated tbh That being said, it's great to see Charlotte expanding their network and I hope they get the funding to build Phase 3 as well as the other lines (Did I see Red, Purple and Grey?) And Charlotte looks good, lots of trees (:
I disagree. The interurban and street car era proved that these systems can work large scale, and many cities in Europe still have very well-functioning tram networks that share road space with cars, Amsterdam being a great example. With that said, when there is space for a dedicated right of way, it is preferable for sure, but I don’t think street cars are bad systems, as they can lead to a lot of growth and less people on the roads. The difference is, street car systems need to have their streets designed with these systems in mind, meaning they need preferential signals at interchanges and other road crossings, amongst other things. They also need to be supplemented and connected to a larger, more standard commuter network, as I don’t believe they’re the best option for long distance commuting, but rather last-mile trips.
I disagree. A light rail (tram) system can work well on both mixed graded and dedicated routes (lines) as long as they have traffic light 'priority' phasing.
The street is a "dedicated corridor" of sorts, and it serves a useful purpose of regulating the speeds of other vehicles. Since streetcars run with auto traffic, they have to yield to traffic lights in most cases (center islands allow nonstop movement). Streetcars in cities such as Philadelphia, PA, New Orleans, and San Francisco are successful and popular. I assume that Charlotte may have included preemptive streetcar signals at intersections (especially where the tracks have interchanges), but Mr. Four Foot might have gotten an opportunity to see those signal casings when he was there. Did you know that Charlotte streetcars helped to grow one of the first suburban neighborhoods there (Myers Park) around a century ago?
Agreed. In Philly, the Girard trolley leaves stuff to be desired, like I hope the SEPTA trolley upgrades involves better separating cars from the trolley tracks on the wider parts of Girard avenue
If you are going to be in Southern California, not only check out the various Los Angeles Metro projects (several of which are years behind schedule and should have been open by now), but also check out the ARROW in San Bernardino County and the OC Streetcar in Orange County.
They are both Trollies. It is the Blue Line Trolley and the Gold Line Trolley. The word Trolley acknowledges tax payers paid for the system, not the government. Battery operated cars are not good for the environment. They should run off the wires whenever possible.
I love Charlotte, it is simply a beautiful city.
Your videos are so nice to watch before bed 🌙 🚆 💭
Charlotte not looking too bad now days, but I am annoyed that majority of the ROW is in shared traffic
Yeah. They really weren’t lying when they said “street” car.
We have very little old rail that can be converted. They did test on Central (phase 3) dedicated bus lanes for 6 months which I think is to see if they can get away with a road diet without having to widen the road to much more once they get past Plaza midwood area. I will say the roads it travels on are not major roads and a lot of people avoid the tracks as much as possible.
As John mentioned in the video, the streetcars (trams) run in the middle of the street to slow down traffic and encourage pedestrians and cyclists to use those streets often. Charlotte drivers tend to drive very fast around town, and are among some of the most discourteous drivers in North Carolina (I should know, I lived there once). Streetcars are excellent traffic-calming machines! Downtown (Uptown) and city centers are not designed for fast driving because they are usually the most-populated parts of a city or town. Motorists need to slow down and practice extra care in these areas. Alan Fisher, thank you for your excellent videos, I enjoy your commentaries. Would you do one on Charlotte sometime? I did not notice your name until I had started posting my comments. Keep on educating me!
The thing is, the track in itself slows cars down. Just driving on those rails will slow you down. That concrete looks new, but as it ages, it will become real bumped. I'm from Melbourne, and you don't want to be driving more then 40 - 50 km/h on tram tracks.
We do this thing where we sit either to the left or the right of the tracks trying to keep the wheels off the rails. They are slippery, especially in the wet. But, honestly, you can't drive fast on them. Yeah you have to wait for pedestrians, but that happens here too. What it does for streets is it makes them great to have retail business on them. Find a nice tram stop and build a coffee store next to it, a cafe, and you'll have a tonne of customers. Slow cars like to pull over and get coffee. Parking around the back 100%.
Half the cafe's in Melbourne are next to a tram stop. :P
It's definitely not the best solution for rail transit, which is why the Blue line will always be able to carry far more people, but hopefully this line is the first of many streetcar lines...
also @Jonathan Fritz, yes, I agree
Didn't know Charlotte was such a nice city! Thanks for the great work
It is a really nice city!
Opened for passenger service on 8/30/2021!! Free until 1/1/2022
The line will begin public service on Monday, August 30. It was announced yesterday on the city's web site and on some local media outlets. No mention of a ceremony or other public event, just the operating schedule: every 20 minutes from 5am to 2am, 7 days a week.
Yeah I saw that. I can’t think of a more begrudging opening to a basically new rail line. Like if they weren’t legally obligated to open it by the end of the month, it probably would not open for another year…
@@TheFourFoot They must have dispensed with a public event either because of Covid, or because they're so embarrassed about the delays that they want to get it over with as quietly as possible. I would have been happy if they had been able to wait until maybe October, when it's cooler. The weather forecast for Monday has a high of 97 degrees! But I'll probably drive up for it anyway, and aim to get there just after the morning rush, before the heat really ratchets up.
Sounds like a good plan! Yeah I’m just glad it will finally be open for the public! Lol
Replica vehicles were sold to Memphis apparently.
I completely forgot about this and man has Charlotte grown and moving in the right direction at the perfect time. I'm a bit skeptical about the on-street running but, needless to say, this entire rail network is coming together beautifully. You did a great job on once again!
Thanks a lot! I wish the Silver Line weren't so far in the future, but it's gonna be great when it's done!
Im glad be a Citizen of Charlotte CATS is doing pretty good with their plans for the gold line and the silver line and the new gateway station charlotte is getting better with it's transit system
Gateway Station and Union Station in Raleigh have level-boarding platforms for passenger train riders. That's a plus for Amtrak, a big help for people in wheelchairs and other physically-challenged travelers. I hope they will make all of their stations between Raleigh and Charlotte level boarding. Roanoke, VA, has a level-boarding station.
Reaching 10K subscribers, any minute now. 🤩
Charlotte honestly looks really nice, especially for a city in North America. If I didn't know any better Id have said its more like the cities we have here in Australia.
That was a very thorough explanation! Thanks for putting it together.
I like this hybrid of electric lines and battery usage. If they can perfect it seems to be good future direction for more street car lines.
Absolutely. There’s a lot neighborhoods in this country that are completely opposed to catenary wires, but a battery powered streetcar seems pretty innocuous.
Cars are shown in photos I saw from a friend on facebook this morning.
I'm in Charlotte, love the video! This is better than anything that the city has put out themselves! Also, any chance of a similar video on the Blue Line?
The planners in Charlotte started the city's rail network at a good time, decades before the Queen City hits 1 million. I remember the freight trains traveling on what was then a single track Uptown south from Pineville 10 miles (6 km) away, behind the Convention Center and proceeding north. At the time, the city had less than 450,000 people. Now the LYNX Blue Line tracks follow roughly the same freight route but trains run through the Convention Center. Thanks to the state's liberal annexation laws in the 1980's (they have since been revised), Charlotte and other cities in North Carolina grew like rabbits.
i’m hoping as we slowly move away from cars in general and charlotte continues to gain population they can ramp up rail construction exponentially to get more lines more quickly
As far as the old replica cars go, there is a small group called Lakewood trolley that seek to creat a heritage line along an old CLT trolley/rail line of the same name. Now there hasn’t been a lot of news about them recently, and they do have a small fleet of heritage cars, but they may be able to get these leased from CAT’s.
Technically those cars wouldn’t be heritage cars though, right?
I saw one of the green & yellow trolleys being transported down I-85 south.. I have no idea where there were taking it.
The 3 old cars have already been sold and shipped to another system.. I believe Memphis, Tennessee
A few years ago, I made a list of lines for various cities to up their metro station count, coverage, and number of lines. I would like to see how they would all look on a map together, but I don’t know how in Google Earth to do what John has at 0:06. Could someone or John please share how you can get all of those pins for cities and to show multiple lines at once?
Yes!! I was looking forward to this. Excellent video and thanks for talking about this project!
so excited to see charlotte’s rail transit expanding. the more progress that’s made on the gold and silver lines the more likely it will be to see even more lines and hopefully a rapid transit subway or elevated line in the future. i’d love to see charlotte become walkable and non car centric in my life time
And now there trying to extend the blue line to Ballantyne Via Pineville
I am a retired Charlotte Officer. I patrolled the Hawthorne Street area in the early 90s. Absolutely everything looks different. : ) When I started we had 500 officers and about the time I retired thee were 1800.
If you want to see how Trams were built in Germany, have a look at Freiburg, Karlsruhe, Stuttgart and Berlin
I heard a while back that the gomaco cars are being sold to Memphis to add “new” serviceable cars to their trolley and serve the waterfront line which, along with the Madison Ave line has been out of service ever since two trolleys burst into flames in 2013 and 2014. I haven’t heard anything on this for a while but I’ll look for the news story I saw!
Thanks for the info! I figured it would be something like that
I heard "Silver Line" and got scared for a second, John. Hahaha but this looks really cool! It's always great to see streetcars making a comeback in the US. It's also interesting that Phase 2 only costed $150 million! It shines some light on how light-rail can be affordable (pun intended) unlike some projects *cough cough* GLX *cough cough.* Awesome footage and explanation my man! Keep it up!
great video
Quick question: When are they gonna get rid of the old trolley in Charlotte soon?
Hey there the four foot your videos are very cool I like learning about transit systems
We a blue line video now!
Great thanks for sending me down this rabbit hole.
I heard Memphis is looking to purchase the trolley cars for use on their streetcar system
The street-level tour (starting at 2:55 ) feels just like a "street view" tram ride in Cities:Skylines :)
Also helping the illusion is the immaculate streets _and_ the music being the same that a popular C:S TH-camr "Biffa Plays Indie Games" is using in his current city build series.
Correction - The future silver line will travel north in parallel to US 74 at that location; the median, currently bus lanes, will be converted to express (toll) lanes.
Nice footage! Interesting to see the newer light rails with a lighter livery will be running on this line instead of the heritage streetcars.
Thanks! Yeah, they're far superior in every way!
8:02 I live and work in Charlotte, and I get food from that Halal Cart ALL the time haha
I love what Charlotte is doing with transit nowadays, but the Amtrak new station isn't gonna be finished in a long time. Someone I know said they think the actual station wont break ground for another few years. But the current station is good for what it is. Its better than Altanta in my opinion lol
Yeah the final station building is indeed a few years off, but bringing the station downtown will be nice for riders.
I dont think Charlotte residents are called "charlatans " lol
It’s Charlottians - I am one lol.
Charlotteans. The city may have a few resident "charlatans."
Anyone know the date it’s opening in August?
With the building of the Carolina Panthers practice facility is in Rock Hill SC there were talks of extending the blue line to South Carolina. The red in my open is a good idea but Norfolk Southern will not allow the city to use their track. Also the county north of Charlotte does not want to use a penny tax to raise the funds for the line
I'm hoping the replicas will get preserved somewhere
They'll be preserved. They are only 17 years old, so either Charlotte would find a way to run them as tourist trolleys or someone is gonna lease-to-own them
I thought the Memphis Mata came to an agreement to purchase the three gomaco cars from Cats for use on the riverfront loop in Memphis?
Who operates S70s with original ends besides Portland?
I think Houston comes to mind.
Charlotte sits on the South Carolina border. Do any of these streetcar lines cross the border?
No
What horn is most common on locomotives these days? I've got a K3LA on my truck that I bought about 20 years ago.. Do you ever see these anymore?
I have a picture of those errant beams for Hawthorne Bridge somewhere. I saw them on one of my many trips to Charlotte. Hawthorne Bridge curves left to right but the beams I saw in the median construction zone curved up and down only. Oops!
Nice! I did the exact same drive a week ago Saturday when I was in town for a convention, my first visit to Charlotte in a year and a half. More traffic (looks like you did it on Sunday), but still a fairly easy drive. I'm looking forward to coming back for the opening. Are they still testing during the day?
They are testing during the day, and for sure, I'm looking forward to riding it too!
Ya the Southern Railway Station in Charlotte has always been considered tiny.
The historic cars may find a home with some sister replica cars in Arkansas
Second biggest financial city! Who woulda thought
Yeah charlotte is 2nd only behind New York city we have a lot of business and banking here
Charlotte is BankTownUSA
@@andrewdiamond2697 true!
A famous sentence: Money is the answer to everything. To that, I include: If you have the money, you can create lots of things. Banks have that kind of money!
North Carolina is home to the first "Gold Rush" and Charlotte with it's beauty is all about the banks
can you do the san Diego mid coast trolley la jolla extension?
Transit expansion is always appreciated, but there are several things I don't like about this line:
1. It's too bad the line has so much shared ROW. If there's traffic the streetcar will crawl with everyone else... Not to mention stopping at traffic lights. This immediately makes the streetcar less attractive than the car
2. The stations are really ugly and uninviting. They also seem a little bare - they need more shade, train arrival screens, trash cans, more seating and better wayfinding signage. I also wish that streetcar/tram tracks in the US weren't embedded in concrete, that's really ugly as well. And speaking of ugly stations, they could have at least got rid of the former stations.
3. The CTC/Arena stop appears to be located quite far from the Blue Line stop. Makes transfers less convenient
4. 5th street (the street with the interchange track) looks to be a side street. Why the hell would it have 4 lanes?? And crossing guards in the middle of downtown (or uptown)... They should have traffic lights which give the Blue line trains priority instead, it works great
5. I also wish those streetcars looked more modern... I mean it looks better than most rolling stock in the US but it still looks quite dated tbh
That being said, it's great to see Charlotte expanding their network and I hope they get the funding to build Phase 3 as well as the other lines (Did I see Red, Purple and Grey?)
And Charlotte looks good, lots of trees (:
Any rail system without a dedicated corridor and signal preemption is a waste of money
Yeah. I somewhat agree. The only real good thing that comes out of them, is new development in the communities they serve.
I disagree. The interurban and street car era proved that these systems can work large scale, and many cities in Europe still have very well-functioning tram networks that share road space with cars, Amsterdam being a great example. With that said, when there is space for a dedicated right of way, it is preferable for sure, but I don’t think street cars are bad systems, as they can lead to a lot of growth and less people on the roads. The difference is, street car systems need to have their streets designed with these systems in mind, meaning they need preferential signals at interchanges and other road crossings, amongst other things. They also need to be supplemented and connected to a larger, more standard commuter network, as I don’t believe they’re the best option for long distance commuting, but rather last-mile trips.
I disagree. A light rail (tram) system can work well on both mixed graded and dedicated routes (lines) as long as they have traffic light 'priority' phasing.
The street is a "dedicated corridor" of sorts, and it serves a useful purpose of regulating the speeds of other vehicles. Since streetcars run with auto traffic, they have to yield to traffic lights in most cases (center islands allow nonstop movement). Streetcars in cities such as Philadelphia, PA, New Orleans, and San Francisco are successful and popular. I assume that Charlotte may have included preemptive streetcar signals at intersections (especially where the tracks have interchanges), but Mr. Four Foot might have gotten an opportunity to see those signal casings when he was there. Did you know that Charlotte streetcars helped to grow one of the first suburban neighborhoods there (Myers Park) around a century ago?
Agreed. In Philly, the Girard trolley leaves stuff to be desired, like I hope the SEPTA trolley upgrades involves better separating cars from the trolley tracks on the wider parts of Girard avenue
If you are going to be in Southern California, not only check out the various Los Angeles Metro projects (several of which are years behind schedule and should have been open by now), but also check out the ARROW in San Bernardino County and the OC Streetcar in Orange County.
they better bring back the old trams for excursions they’re sm better smh
Charlotte shoulda had this along time ago, & the Blueline needs to go to the airport.
I definitely agree with the first part, but they really have their heart set on that Silver line….some day…
The silver line is planned to go near the airport. The airport will have its own trains to allow you to transfer to the terminal.
Looks pretty good but i can't see a single bike lane anywhere...
They have plenty. Just not around uptown
Well there goes the trolley replace by light rail
Charlatans...lol...it's Charlotteans....goofus...
0:32 hey look its a funny looking school bus that uses rails....did Siemens build it? lol.
FIRST
SECOND
Imagine living in Charlotte
That seems like an awful lot of extra work for something a bus could do.
Didnt know that kermit the frog liked trains
My thoughts exactly!!
They are both Trollies. It is the Blue Line Trolley and the Gold Line Trolley. The word Trolley acknowledges tax payers paid for the system, not the government.
Battery operated cars are not good for the environment. They should run off the wires whenever possible.