Last December, the Albemarle County Board of Supervisors and the Charlottesville City Council finally voted to create a new government entity intended to expand transit operations throughout the region.
The General Assembly had passed legislation in 2009 allowing for the creation of the Charlottesville-Albemarle Regional Transit Authority (CARTA), but declined to allow for the two localities to hold a referendum on a sales tax increase to help pay for expanded service.
The idea was shelved for a while until the matter was studied again by the now-defunct Planning and Coordination Council beginning in 2015. Here’s a story I wrote back then for Charlottesville Tomorrow if you want a sense of the vibe at the time.
An advisory group called the Regional Transit Partnership (RTP) formed in 2017 to serve as a clearinghouse for discussions on the future of public transportation. A key takeaway from a regional transit governance study was to at least go ahead and take the step of forming CARTA.
CARTA’s Board of Directors will meet Thursday at 5 p.m. at 407 East Water Street, the same place the RTP meets. The Thomas Jefferson Planning District Commission plays host to both. Meeting materials can be found here.
This will be the third meeting for the group. One of the items will be on creation of a Service Prioritization and Implementation Feasibility Study. This will build off of the Regional Transit Vision Plan from 2022 and the Regional Transit Governance Study from 2024.
“Following the appointment of Board members for the newly activated Charlottesville Area Regional Transit Authority (CARTA), the purpose of this Service Prioritization and Implementation Feasibility study is to create an implementation plan by identifying costs and feasibility of transit service expansion over the next ten years,” reads a staff report.
Another will be action on the possibility of adding non-voting members.
“Staff recommend that [the Virginia Department or Rail and Public Transportation] and [the University of Virginia] are two of four non-voting members of the CARTA Board, and that the other two non-voting member positions are filled at a later date as the authority identifies future needs,” reads the staff report.
Staff also recommends against individual agencies from being on CARTA’s Board due to potential conflicts of interest.
“Since transit agencies are central to a functioning regional transit authority, their participation would be critical to the CARTA technical and finance committees,” the staff report continues.
We can glean some items from the minutes of the March 27, 2025 agenda.
- No members of the public attended the meeting.
- City Councilor Brian Pinkston said the RTP itself is expected to sunset at some point in the near future.
- The University of Virginia is not a member of CARTA. Scottsville District Supervisor Michael Pruitt said he would like to see conversations about combining UVA transit with other providers into a single system.
- Pinkston said there have been discussions about merging CAT and UVA routes, but the minutes do not elaborate.
- Supervisor Diantha McKeel, part of the RTP since the beginning, said CARTA would be more like an umbrella and no existing services would be merged or dissolved.
Before you go: This particular story should have gone out in the Week Ahead for this week, but I ran out of time that day. However, I’ve realized that one way to fill out Charlottesville Community Engagement is to write the Week Ahead segments that didn’t make it in. This is one of them. It went out in the May 21, 2025 edition of the newsletter.
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