Carson Cohn had three minutes at the podium Thursday night and used them to ask the Metropolitan Transit Commission a question Charlotte's transit agency has not answered.

" promised me over a month ago an answer as to whether an alternative could be found with a new system to prevent double payment for cash transfers," Cohn told the MTC at its public hearing on the Charlotte Area Transit System's Fare Modernization Program. "I'm yet to receive a response."

The hearing was the last formal public-comment session before the MTC takes up the program for adoption. CATS Chief Administrative Officer Elizabeth Presutti told commissioners that staff "anticipates requesting adoption of the final proposed changes by the MTC at their May 27th meeting." The chair, Mecklenburg County At-Large Commissioner Leigh Altman, closed the agenda item by calling the proposal "a major upgrade, overhaul, and a step into the future for greater equity and for greater efficiency."

The change Cohn was disputing — the part where cash riders lose their transfer — sits inside that "step into the future." Twenty days separate the hearing from the vote.

Cohn opened his comment by paraphrasing Nelson Mandela ("a nation should not be judged by how it treats its most successful citizens, but rather by how it treats those struggling the most") and closed by paraphrasing Malcolm X. The framing was deliberate. He had three minutes; he came prepared.

What the MTC Will Be Asked to Adopt

The proposal — the product of a comprehensive fare study CATS launched in June 2024 — restructures how riders pay, what they pay, and how the agency manages reduced fares. The official public comment period opened April 1 and closed Thursday. Written comments are still accepted through the channels CATS has published on its fare modernization page.

A short list of what changes if it's approved:

• New ways to pay. Tap-and-go contactless cards, mobile wallets on phones and watches, the existing CATS-Pass app, and a new CATS-issued smart card that can be reloaded at a planned retail network or online. Paper magnetic-stripe fare media, tokens, and 10-ride punch tickets all go away. Cash is still accepted at fare boxes and ticket vending machines.
• A simpler fare structure. Five existing fare categories collapse to three: community shuttle, local (which now folds in express bus and streetcar), and express plus. Streetcar riders would pay a fare on all modes under the new structure, per Presutti's presentation.
• Fare capping replaces day, weekly, and monthly passes. Riders tap each trip from a stored-value account; the system caps total spending at the equivalent of an unlimited pass. For a local full-fare rider that ceiling is $6.60 per day, $30.90 per week, and $88 per month — equivalent to 3, 14, and 40 trips. Once the cap hits, the rest of the rides in that period are free.
• A two-hour electronic pass replaces the 90-minute paper transfer for riders using electronic fare media.
• An expanded reduced-fare program — described in detail below — adds new populations and replaces the K-12 school enrollment standard with age-based eligibility for youth.
• Express Plus gets cheaper. The Express Plus fare drops from $4.40 per ride (twice the current $2.20 local fare) to $3.50. CATS describes the new fare as 1.5 times the local fare. The agency also plans to discontinue Express Plus pricing on Regional Express service running outside Mecklenburg County.

Implementation would phase in over roughly 18 months following adoption.

The substantive transit policy here matches what the agency has been outlining publicly since January: a modernized fare collection system meant to bring CATS in line with peer transit agencies, paired with broader reduced-fare access. None of those elements were the subject of any pushback in the formal comment period the MTC heard Thursday.

The pushback was about the part of the proposal that affects cash riders.

The Two-Hour Pass, the Paper Transfer, and the Question Cohn Asked

The current fare system gives every rider a transfer. A cash rider who pays $2.20 at the farebox today gets a paper transfer good for 90 minutes — long enough to make a connection. Under the proposal, that paper transfer disappears.

The replacement, an electronic two-hour pass, is the key efficiency gain in the modernization plan. It also, by design, is available only to riders using electronic fare media — a CATS-Pass account, a tap-to-pay card, a registered smart card. Cash riders still have access to the system; they just lose the transfer. The official program page is direct about this: "there are no transfers for cash payment at farebox or at a ticket vending machine."

That single line — which Cohn referenced from the podium — is what the equity argument turns on. The current system gives a cash-paying rider one fare to make a transfer trip. The new system requires that same rider to either carry an electronic card and reload it before they need it, or pay $2.20 a second time when they board the connecting bus.

Cohn's argument was that the second outcome is, in practical terms, the default for the population he said CATS most often serves. "What if I'm a rider who lives a mile from a participating retailer and I have to start my trip and I don't have a transfer ready?" he asked. "So I'm going to have to pay double. And that's not the way it's set up right now for cash-paying riders. Currently, cash-paying riders do not have to pay double for a transfer trip."

He thanked CATS for the outreach the agency has committed to with shelters and refugee services on the new payment system. Then he made his ask: "I urge you all to allow a grace period for the rollout of the new payment system. And I beg of you not to force cash-paying to pay double."

Whether the agency has examined a path that avoids the double payment for cash riders — and what that path would look like — is the answer Cohn said CATS told him was coming and that has not arrived. Thursday's hearing closed the formal comment period without it.

What CATS Says the Program Does for Equity

The agency has a serious counter-case. It is the case Altman summarized in her closing remarks, and it has more than rhetorical weight.

Fare capping itself is presented by CATS as an equity tool. Today, a rider who wants unlimited-ride pricing has to buy a monthly pass up front, in a single transaction. Riders who can't afford that lump sum end up paying per trip across the month and often pay more in total than someone who could front the pass cost. Under the proposal, that calculation goes away: every rider, regardless of how they enter the system, gets the unlimited-ride cost ceiling automatically. Reduced-fare riders get the same protection on a lower scale.

The reduced-fare program itself also expands materially. Children under 5 ride free with an adult, regardless of height. Youth ages 6 to 19 are eligible for reduced fares — a change that replaces the current K-12 enrollment standard with a simpler age threshold. The senior age threshold rises from 62 to 65 over multiple years, and current eligible seniors retain eligibility through the transition.

Three new reduced-fare populations are added:

• Income-eligible riders enrolled in qualifying assistance programs. Presutti named the qualifying programs: Medicaid, SNAP, WIC, free and reduced lunch, housing vouchers (formerly known as Section 8), and the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP).
• Veterans.
• Active-duty military.

All three new categories require an application, registration, and the use of electronic fare media. They cannot pay reduced fare in cash. Renewal cycles also extend significantly: under the current transit ID system, riders renew annually. Under the proposed program, seniors renew every 10 years.

The case for the package is real. A program that brings new populations into discounted fares, eliminates the upfront-purchase barrier for unlimited-ride pricing, and modernizes the payment infrastructure is — on its own terms — pro-equity. Cohn did not dispute any of that.

What he disputed was the specific design choice in the cash-transfer rule, and what he asked for was specific: an alternative that preserves the rest of the program while not requiring a double payment from the rider who shows up at the farebox with $2.20 in cash. That question is not answered by the rest of the package. It is the question that has not been answered.

The Equity Analysis CATS Conducted

The Federal Transit Administration requires fare equity analyses on proposed changes that affect minority and low-income populations. Presutti walked the MTC through what CATS produced.

"In accordance with FTA guidance, CATS conducted a fair equity analysis, and there were two analyses completed," she said. "The first looked at the average fare paid by different populations, and the second looked at access to retail network for different populations. And per the findings of the analysis, there were no mitigations necessary to implement the proposed fare program changes."

The transcript does not contain the underlying methodology — what populations were studied, what threshold was applied, how the retail-network analysis treated riders who don't live near a participating retailer. Presutti did not present those details Thursday and the MTC did not ask. The conclusion she presented — no mitigations necessary — is the conclusion the agency will carry into the May 27 meeting.

That conclusion is what Cohn was disputing when he said the new payment system would require "the majority of CATS riders, which are the cash-paying riders, to pay double for a transfer trip." It is a disagreement about whether the same outcome — the elimination of cash transfers — counts as a hardship requiring mitigation, or as an acceptable design choice within an FTA-compliant program. CATS staff has answered the second way. Cohn was asking for the first answer to be reconsidered, or at least for the agency to deliver the response on alternatives it had told him was coming.

The Other Speaker, and the Ones Who Didn't Come

Six names were on the public-comment sign-up sheet Thursday. Two people spoke. The chair called the absent four — Maya Williams, Joseph Godoy, Ben Khat Bala, and Stephen Weldon — twice, and they did not appear.

The second person who spoke was Mary Thomas, a self-described fixed-income rider whose comment Altman noted at the top of the meeting was outside the noticed subject matter. The chair allowed it anyway. Thomas's complaint was about a CATS bus driver who, she said, ignored a stop request from a passenger using a wheelchair. She told the MTC she had filed a written complaint about the driver "the other day" and had not heard back from interim CEO Brent Cagle.

"That sign that you got on the bus, see something, say something, that needs to be taken down because there's no truth in it," Thomas told the commissioners. The connection she was drawing — between a fare modernization program meant to streamline operations and what she was experiencing on the buses themselves — was implicit. Her closer was not: "I just thought I'd give you something to think about when you're making all these crazy rules."

It was the kind of public comment that doesn't fit a fare-policy hearing. It also was the only other one the MTC heard.

Twenty Days

Altman closed the meeting by reminding attendees that "our next and final meeting, final MTC meeting, will be Wednesday, May 27th at 5:30 PM." The phrasing was technically accurate. When the MTC convenes that evening, the Metropolitan Public Transportation Authority is roughly five weeks from assuming operational control of CATS under the PAVE Act statutory framework approved by Mecklenburg County voters last fall. The MTC's role transfers to the new authority on July 1.

That makes the May 27 meeting — if staff's anticipated request to the MTC is honored, and if a vote follows — one of the last substantive policy decisions the existing oversight body will take. The transition itself has been the running thread of CATS coverage since last summer. Fare modernization, by sequencing, is the policy decision that gets made on the way out the door.

Twenty days remain for CATS to give Carson Cohn his answer. Whether the agency delivers it before the chair calls the May 27 meeting to order is, at the moment, the open question of the program.