Charlotte: a city continues to evolve.

• Author: Brandon, Lynne
• Position: Regional Focus: SPECIAL ADVERTISING SECTION

In the more than 230 years since its founding, Charlotte has evolved into a leader in business, sports, arts and entertainment. Driving the city's economic machine are many entities: the Charlotte Chamber of Commerce, Visit Charlotte, Charlotte Center City Partners and Charlotte Regional Partnership, among others. Key industry partners such as Duke Energy, Bank of America, R.T. Dooley Construction, realestate company Dickens-Mitchener and others contribute specialized resources to support the economy.

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Charlotte is the nation's 26th-largest city and the South's 10th-largest. An annexation last year gave it a population of 612,592, with projections for 2010 indicating that Mecklenburg County would grow to more than 900,000. Charlotte is the largest city in the Carolinas and the hub of the Charlotte Regional Partnership, which encompasses 12 counties in North Carolina and four in South Carolina.

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With that many people comes a variety of transportation needs. As the largest hub for US Airways, Charlotte/Douglas International Airport offers 550 daily flights to 146 cities, including London and Frankfurt, and carries more than 21 million passengers per year. On land, the city has the nation's largest consolidated rail system, served by more than 200 trains each week. The combination, plus easy access to major interstates, means that, within two hours by air or one day by motor freight, businesses in the region can reach nearly 60% of the population of the United States and more than 60% of the nation's industrial base.

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Center City Partners supports the Regional Transportation Plan to connect downtown with the rest of the region by commuter trains, light rail, buses, streetcars and a trolley system. City leaders hired Parson Brinckerhoff Quade & Douglas, one of the oldest continually operating consulting-engineering firms in the nation, to help design the mass-transit plans. The mass-transit project features two light-rail lines, a commuter-rail line and two bus lines to lighten traffic.

The Charlotte region needs that transportation because it is home to nine Fortune 500 companies, more than all but five U.S. cities have. They include three in the top 100: Bank of America, Wachovia and Lowe's. The others are Duke Energy, Sonic Automotive, Nucor, SPX, Family Dollar and Goodrich.

When Bank of America merged with FleetBoston Financial in...