Artists, performers, venue employees and other arts and hospitality workers frequently work evenings and weekends. Many earn local wages while increasingly living farther from Asheville because of housing costs.

Transportation costs—including parking—therefore become part of the cost of working in Asheville.

At the same time, cultural organizations and businesses need audiences and visitors to be able to reach performances, exhibitions and events easily.

Transportation and parking affect workforce recruitment and retention, cultural participation, business activity and the continued recovery of the creative economy after Helene.

The City is currently considering significant changes to its public transportation system.

Through the ART Comprehensive Operational Analysis, Asheville has analyzed ridership, demographic trends, roadway conditions and changing development patterns to determine how the bus network could better serve residents and workers.

The analysis found that Asheville’s transit system is trying to accomplish competing goals with limited resources: providing broad geographic coverage while also offering frequent, reliable service on higher-ridership routes. The proposed network would shift some resources toward those corridors, including 15-minute service on some routes, while reducing service elsewhere. Public feedback has highlighted the tradeoff, particularly around maintaining access to jobs, healthcare and social services.

The City is also balancing transit with parking, walking, biking and other ways of moving around. In the River Arts District, for example, the RADTIP project added sidewalks, bike infrastructure, greenways and nearly 200 public parking spaces as part of a broader redesign of the transportation network.

The challenge is creating a system that provides realistic choices—not simply assuming everyone can drive, or that everyone can use transit, walk or bike.

That program recognizes something important: parking policy affects workers differently from visitors.

As privately operated paid parking expands in areas such as the River Arts District, the same question becomes increasingly important: how do we manage limited parking and encourage turnover for customers and visitors without making the cost of getting to work an additional burden for lower-wage employees, artists and arts workers?

Transportation does not stop at Asheville’s city limits.

Asheville’s transit system was designed primarily to serve trips within the City, while people increasingly travel into Asheville from throughout Buncombe County and neighboring counties for work, healthcare, education, entertainment and services. As housing costs push some workers farther from employment centers, many have few transportation options for reaching jobs in Asheville other than driving.

Yet Asheville operates ART, while land use, roads, regional transit and transportation investments involve Buncombe County, neighboring municipalities, NCDOT and regional partners.

The French Broad River Metropolitan Planning Organization has already studied the potential for cross-county public transportation in Buncombe, Haywood, Henderson and Madison counties, recognizing that access to jobs and services increasingly crosses county boundaries.

Regional transportation also includes Asheville Regional Airport, which is undergoing an approximately $400 million expansion to accommodate continued passenger growth. The airport served more than 2.2 million passengers in 2025 and is expanding its terminal and related infrastructure through the AVL Forward project. While the airport is governed by the Greater Asheville Regional Airport Authority, its continued growth raises broader regional questions about how residents, workers and visitors travel between the airport, Asheville and communities throughout Western North Carolina.

As airport capacity grows, so does the importance of ground transportation—how passengers and airport workers get between the airport and Asheville, Hendersonville and other communities, and whether those trips must depend almost entirely on private vehicles, rental cars and rideshare services.

Another major change to the local transportation network is the I-26 Connector, a roughly $1.8 billion NCDOT project now under construction and expected to continue through 2031. The project will create a new interstate connection across the French Broad River, upgrade portions of I-240 and major interchanges, and add pedestrian and bicycle connections. 

The project will also change the role of the existing I-240/Bowen Bridges corridor through Asheville. Moving interstate traffic to the new crossing creates an opportunity to reconsider how the existing corridor connects downtown, West Asheville and surrounding neighborhoods, including potential improvements for local streets, pedestrians, bicycles and transit.

In the long term, the project is intended to improve safety, reduce congestion and strengthen regional connectivity. In the near term, however, years of construction and changing traffic patterns will affect roads, transit routes, businesses and access to areas including downtown, West Asheville and the River Arts District.

Longer-term regional transportation discussions also include the proposed restoration of passenger rail between Asheville and Salisbury, which would connect Western North Carolina to the state’s existing passenger-rail network. The project is being led by NCDOT and is not currently funded, but Asheville, Buncombe County and regional transportation partners can play important roles in planning, station access, local connections and advocating for state and federal investment.

That means improving transportation cannot be Asheville’s responsibility alone. Buncombe County and other regional partners have a role in building a transportation system that connects where people can afford to live with where they need to work. Regional partners can coordinate transportation investments, pursue state and federal funding, plan connections among local transit, major road projects, the airport and potential passenger rail, and explore the new or dedicated funding sources that expanded regional transit may require.

Asheville controls ART and much of the transportation infrastructure within the City. It can make decisions about bus routes and frequency, sidewalks and bike infrastructure, City-owned parking, street design and how transportation is incorporated into land-use and development decisions. It can also continue exploring ways to make parking more affordable for workers and strengthen regulation of private parking practices within the authority allowed by state law.

Buncombe County already plays a role in transportation and could play a larger one in workforce and regional transportation. Its affordable parking program is one example. The County can also help support regional transit connections, transportation planning and investments that connect people living outside Asheville with employment and services throughout the county.

Regional coordination is particularly important. Asheville, Buncombe County, neighboring municipalities and counties, NCDOT and the French Broad River MPO can coordinate transportation investments, pursue state and federal funding, and plan for connections among local transit, major road projects, the airport and potential passenger rail.

Transportation is also closely connected to housing and land use. Creating more housing near employment centers and transportation corridors can reduce commuting distances and make transit, walking and biking more realistic options for some workers.

The larger opportunity is to treat transportation as workforce and economic infrastructure—not simply as roads, buses or parking considered separately.

Underlying all of this is a regional challenge: housing, employment and transportation are interconnected, but the responsibility for addressing them is divided among multiple governments and agencies.

For the arts and cultural sector, the goal is a transportation system that allows artists and arts workers to get to work affordably and reliably, audiences and visitors to reach cultural experiences, and people of different ages, incomes and abilities to participate in cultural life.