When the Metropolitan Transit Commission held its final meeting on May 27, the tributes kept circling the same point: this body built something. It is worth taking that claim literally.
Charlotte was a bus-only city in 1998, the year Mecklenburg voters approved the half-cent sales tax that gave transit a dedicated revenue base. The commission that formed the next year spent the following quarter-century turning that money into infrastructure — the LYNX Blue Line in 2007, its $1.1 billion extension to UNC Charlotte in 2018, the CityLYNX Gold Line streetcar across two phases in 2015 and 2021, the county's first microtransit service in 2022, and, in September 2024, the purchase of the 22-mile Norfolk Southern "O-Line" corridor that the long-delayed Red Line will run on.
Then it handed the whole thing off. In November 2025, voters narrowly approved a one-cent transportation tax under the PAVE Act — 52.28 percent to 47.72 — authorizing a roughly $19 billion, 30-year program and a new 27-member authority to run it. On July 1, the Metropolitan Public Transportation Authority takes operational control of CATS, the same day the new tax takes effect and Mecklenburg's sales tax rises to 8.25 percent, the highest in North Carolina.
That arc — bus-only city to rail-connected region to independent authority, in 27 years — is hard to hold in your head as a sequence of meeting recaps. So we've laid it out as one:
27 Years of Charlotte Transit: From a Bus-Only City to the MPTA, a Timeline
It's a living reference. As the MPTA builds out the Red Line, the Silver Line, and the rest of the 2055 plan, the timeline will keep going — the commission that started it just won't be the one writing the next entries.