Charlottesville City Council briefed on CARTA’s prioritization study

Charlottesville Area Transit is a wholly-owned department of the City of Charlottesville and is currently in the middle of a four year campaign to add ten drivers a year in order to fully implement a Transit Strategic Plan finalized in June 2024.

“CAT is funded by the governments of the City of Charlottesville and Albemarle County, the Virginia Department of Rail and Public Transportation (DRPT), and UVA,” reads an overview of the system in the CAT Strategic Plan.

Governance is fully up to the Charlottesville City Council.

In recent years, the Thomas Jefferson Planning District Commission has been overseeing an initiative to increase cooperation between area transit agencies. This has culminated in the creation of the Charlottesville Albemarle Regional Transit Authority which was created in late 2024.

“We began meeting in 2025, and mostly what we’ve been focused on to date has been understanding what the region’s priorities and needs are,” said Ben Chambers, the city’s transportation planner. “That is to help prepare us for changes that we may need to make to the enabling legislation in order to change how CARTA is organized or how it will deal with funding in the future.”

Chambers spoke to Council about CARTA at a work session on October 19.

Previous coverage and one resource:

• Albemarle Supervisors vote to join Regional Transit Authority, December 15, 2024
• Charlottesville joins regional transit authority; Council holds first reading on federal transit allocations, December 28, 2024\
• Regional Transit Service Prioritization and Implementation Feasibility Study — August 24, 2026 presentation
• Further work underway to review transit plans to inform CARTA’s next moves, Information Charlottesville, April 26, 2026
• Buckingham commuter bus operated by Jaunt tops initial prioritization list, Information Charlottesville, June 3, 2026
• Regional Transit Authority wants feedback on future transportation funding strategy, Information Charlottesville, July 23, 2026
• CARTA reviews draft prioritization study, weighs roles in future transit decisions, September 18, 2026
• Albemarle Supervisors want say in governance of the future of public transit, September 18, 2026

The main focus this year for the four elected officials who serve on the CARTA board has been overseeing a prioritization study intended to come up with a list of potential routes that would be the subject of a quest for additional funding. This builds on a “Regional Transit Vision” created by the TJPDC in 2022.

Chambers said the prioritization study builds on the vision and incorporates other updated planning studies such as CAT’s Transit Strategic Plan and similar planning efforts from Jaunt. This work has come with a whole new set of questions about what prioritization should mean. For instance, should the focus be on increasing the frequency of buses?

“Versus how much do we want to increase the footprint of transit?,” Chambers asked. “How much do we want to change where the alignment of routes are? How much do we want to add new routes? Do we want to add new hours of operation to existing routes? How do we sort of provide the coverage?”

A final report on prioritization has not yet been shown to CARTA but Chambers said input from the board seems to indicate a preference to improve frequency and intensity rather than expansion.

However, some of what has risen to the top includes an increase in commuter routes including investment in one that would travel from Buckingham County.

“As we’re looking to the future and saying, you know, there’s 50,000 people a day coming into the city of Charlottesville and doubling our daytime population, we need to be able to provide them with different access opportunities to coming into the city,” Chambers said.

Chambers said this allows planners to anticipate potential infrastructure needed in places such as the Hollymead area that do not currently have CAT service but are served or will be served by Jaunt commuter routes.

A goal for CARTA is to have a list of routes for additional funding by next May to set up requests in the 2028 General Assembly. The intention for CARTA has been to be a planning body, but there are some fundamental questions about what the future may be.

“We know what we want from CARTA,” Chambers said. “We want better transit service. But what does CARTA do to make that happen? Are they just going to be a fiscal agent like it’s sort of laid out in the existing legislation? Is there some sort of role for combined planning around transit?… And could it go all the way to the question of, does this regional agency operate the transit? There are different pros and cons to each of those different opportunities.”

City Councilor Lloyd Snook recently traveled to Besançon, France, as part of a Sister City delegation. He said transit there was well-developed but they had advantages Charlottesville does not.

“One is that they’ve got 2.5 times the people in the city and 2.5 times the people in the surrounding areas,” Snook said. “But clearly somebody made some decisions 20-plus years ago that said, we’re, we’re going to go ahead and make the transition from cars to buses and bicycles and things like that.”

City Councilor Natalie Oschrin said some communities have made bold goals and put resources behind them.

“In 2015, Minneapolis made a pledge that 60 percent of all trips would be not in a car by 2030,” Oschrin said. “So they’ve been for the last, you know, decade have been building out their bikes and bus routes probably more than most cities in America.”

City Councilor Michael Payne said he would like to see CARTA eventually operate a combined transit system that includes CAT and Jaunt.

“In my mind, that would just seem to have a lot of efficiencies in terms of not duplicating staff administration, [Human Resources] processes, I think would help us get the most cost-efficient and effective system that we could build,” Payne said.

The item was before the City Council for information and no decisions were made.

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