[Cirrus]

Highway rings around downtown have had very destructive histories in cities all over the world. They cut downtown off from the surrounding neighborhoods, making downtown function like a separate place as opposed to an integrated part of the city. That makes it impossible (or at best unpleasant) to walk or bike from the neighborhoods into downtown, which in turn increases the driving rate and decreases the transit rate. You end up with a snowball effect where more and more people drive, and where the infrastructure changes to support cars more and more over time, with things like parking lots and surface streets engineered to be traffic sewers.

In many cities, building transit systems like light rail is part of the process of fixing that mistake, because transit can stitch downtown together with the surrounding neighborhoods without requiring all that car infrastructure that's so destructive.

Now, in Charlotte things are a little bit different, because Charlotte was not a particularly large city before its highways were built. So there simply wasn't much for them to destroy. But Charlotte did absolutely grow up during the 20th Century primarily around highways, and is now urbanizing, with the light rail a key part of the urbanizing strategy.

So the idea that a ring of highways is damaging, and light rail a strategy to fix it, is absolutely correct. Although the details of Charlotte are a bit abnormal.