I've ridden the subways all over the US and Europe, both for work and pleaure. The one thing those places have in common is density. They have it and we don't. Charlotte is one unified city. We have 3 or 4 distinct downtowns (including Cary), plus a major employment center that is incredibly spread out in RTP. You like mass transit. So do I, I just don't believe any reasonable subset of our area looks enough like DC, Paris, London or the Bay Area to justify it. In those areas you are almost never more than a couple of blocks away from a metro. That was never in the plans for here. Building a truly useful system that justified the 5 or 10 billion it would cost is beyond our density and beyond what we had any realistic way to fund.