Since the early 2000s there has been no transit service linking Kentucky from East to West. It is not possible, for example, to go from Louisville to Frankfort.

If Miller Trailways has anything to say about it, that is going to change. However, they need your letters of support to make it happen!

Greyhound abandoned the last East-West service because it wasn't profitable. Congress decided that it wasn't a good idea to orphan all those small communities without any inter city transit, so they created 5311-f funds to subsidize rural intercity transit. Kentucky gets $1.8 million worth of funds, and currently doesn't subsidize any inter-city bus transit of note. Instead, that money is marked as unspent and flows into a larger pot where it is used to subsidize rural on-demand transit services - basically taxis, running with an end-user fare of about $1 per mile.

Saturday's inspection of the P&L Railway between Louisville and Cecilia Kentucky was a resounding success. We now have momentum towards a commuter rail corridor in Louisville!

CART will have a lot more to say later, stay tuned!

When the alarm goes off at 4 a.m., I ask myself, ‘Why am I doing this?’  Nobody would notice if I just went back to sleep and didn’t ride 200 miles on TARC buses for the next 13 hours.  This is brutal.  I don’t know how some people do this every working day. Why am I doing this?  Four years ago I heard about World Car Free Day on the internet and decided I wanted to bring it to Louisville.  I saw the addiction we have for our cars (having been an addict myself once) and thought it would be good for this city to start Step 1 and admit we have a problem.  World Car Free Day started in 2000 in Europe.  It has spread to over 1,000 cities around the world.  It challenges people to go for one day without their cars.  There’s a sure way to find out if your addicted to something – try giving it up for a while.  Four years ago I got CART (the Coalition for the Advancement of Regional Transportation), a local non-profit alternative transportation advocacy group to help me promote World Car Free Day in Louisville.  We posted fliers around town and held a press conference at the boardroom of TARC and no one came.  When I got back to my office, a bit down from the experience, I got a phone interview from a local radio station and we were off and running.  In the following years’ our efforts and successes grew.  We printed fliers, posters, had rallies, and web pages.  It’s a hard event with which to measure success because it’s a non-event.  People do this on their own, riding a bike to work, taking the bus, or telecommuting....

Update: registration is now closed.

You are invited to join us for a ride on Nashville's Music City Star commuter rail system on September 26th. This fun & informative trip includes tickets both for the train itself, and for a charter bus leaving from Louisville. For travel details, see the Nashville Trip page. To buy tickets by credit card, press the button:

 
Image courtesy Metro Jacksonville

CART Members Help Run Futuristic Transit System!

Historic inspection of system by Jefferson, Hardin, and Meade county officials to occur on November 8th. Thanks to the generous contributions of CART members and other concerned citizens, we now have enough money to run an inspection train and inspection bus along the Dixie Highway corridor. For three glorious hours, Louisville will have something resembling a commuter system along Dixie Highway, out to Fort Knox, and south to Elizabethtown.

This day will not have been possible without the generous contributions of the following entitites:

Photo courtesy Brian Wiggins
www.pbase.com/savethewave

If you're only now learning of this fundraising drive, but you still want to contribute, rest assured the CART General Fund has been greatly depleted from jump-starting this venture. By joining CART today, you'll ensure CART has the funds to seize future opportunities to promote public transportation.

The time to contribute money to transit is now. We can take a major step towards improved regional transportation around Louisville. Through the tireless efforts of Metro Council, KIRA, and CART, we are very close to operating two exciting demonstrations:

1. An "inspection train" on the Paducah & Louisville track, going from downtown Louisville out to Elizabethtown KY, a model of what a commuter rail line could look like on that corridor.
2. A city-to-city bus ride back to Louisville aboard a Miller Transportation's bus, a model for a better way of connecting Kentucky's cities.

Click Read More for how to contribute!

If you attended the CART Annual meeting on Wednesday, July 23, you heard the discussion of an exciting proposal to demonstrate that commuter rail is a real possibility in Louisville. 

CART is partnering with KIRA, the Kentucky and Indiana Rail Advocates, to sponsor an “inspection train” down Dixie Highway toward Fort Knox, using the Paducah & Louisville Railway.  It will be a trip for various city officials to see the railway and imagine what the corridor could become. A similar inspection train led to the creation of the Music City Star on the Nashville & Eastern railroad. 

Dear Metro Council Representative:

We urge you to act immediately to increase funding for TARC!

Higher Gas Prices Rob Our Local Economy;
“Keep it Local” Through Public Transit Investment

Ear X-Tacy's concert tonight by Louisville band My Morning Jacket will draw a capacity crowd of 500 people.  The store's owner, John Timmons, suggests in this Courier Journal story that folks attending the show consider taking TARC or carpooling because parking will be scarce.

Washington Post: Stung at the Pumps, More Hop on a Bus, D.C.'s Outlying Transit Systems Rush to Add Capacity; Metro Worried.

Wouldn't it be refreshing if our local transit was similarly reactive to growing demand? Instead we have route cuts and fare hikes. There must be an alternative.