[lrt's friend]

My question had nothing to do with the prosperity of the overall city. My question was asking whether LRT was having a beneficial effect on the downtown area.

As Cirrus indicated, ring highways typically segregated downtown areas from the rest of the city and encouraged the predominance of car travel and parking lots in downtown areas at the expense of density, pedestrian traffic and general liveliness. That may not be case in Charlotte but I have no way of knowing.