Note- This is the third of five public statements to be
issued by Best Friends of Public Transit to prepare the community for
Saturday’s ConChaCo event, a Charleston City Wide Transit Focused Festival
along the #20 Upper King / Meeting Bus line linking the Farmer’s Market,
Awakening Motion, The Greek Festival, the ConChaCo Pub Crawl & Restaurant
Hop and the Night Market. Full information can be found in this previous media
release. The Statements will be titled by our organization’s Motto: Together We
Go Forward & ConChaCo and will announce a 6 pm event each day to help
create better transit in the Lowcountry. Tuesday’s word is “Go.”
The Past- How Charleston Used to Solve Transportation Problems
Children modeling a Lowcountry Transit System |
Can the Lowcountry Go Go to better transit or is it doomed
to gridlock and cultural frustration which takes out civic leaders like tundra
rodents when the winter comes sudden and early. Americans have always been a
nation on the go. Settlers arrived in Charleston in 1670 and soon turned the
waterways of the lowcountry into a transit system which used the tide and home
made barges to link the growing plantations to the city’s port. Slaves steered barges down to Charleston full
or rice, local produce and naval stores with the falling tide, They returned returned
upstream with the flood tide on the Ashley, Stono, Cooper and Wando Rivers with
imported goods, alcoholic beverages and the primitive machinery like steam
powered rice mills which revolutionized agriculture.
By the 1800s as Americans pushed the frontier westward,
Charleston found it’s rivers didn’t go far enough inland to assure its prosperity.
Savannah had a river which reached far inland. The Savannah could serve the
rapidly growing cotton trade which pushed further westward every year burning
up land, humans trapped in bondage and the frenzy to acquire that assembled the
core of America’s national capital. It’s port flourished at the Port of
Charleston’s expense. Charleston’s businessmen built the Santee Canal, which
joined the Cooper to the Santee and Congaree but they couldn’t keep it wet. In
1827 men who had never seen a locomotive decided to build a railroad with the
goal or reaching Augusta and drinking Savannah’s milkshake. On Christmas day,
1830 the Best Friend of Charleston reached ten miles an hour, the fastest
anyone on board had every travelled. Soon there were six powerful and primitive
engines running on the line and you could travel from Charleston to Summerville
faster than than you can today at rush hour, boarding the trains where the Charleston
Visitors Center is Today.
Why We Don't Have the Get Up and Go Now and Who is Going
A year ago I took Skyelynn, one of the volunteers working
with Best Friends of Lowcountry Transit to see the replica of that train. This
is a ritual that is part of training every volunteer and staff member which
works with our organization. The Best Friend is part of a big story which
begins with those determined slaves moving barges on the tide to Charleston’s port
before the Revolution and ends, sort of, with Neal Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin
landing on the moon. The point of the story is that Americans, even
Southerners, used to be serious about gong places and we built the
infrastructure and vehicles we needed to get there. I am sure that the people that
saw the Best Friend roaring across it’s strap iron railway up the Charleston
Neck 188 years ago felt the same thrill I did when I heard, “Tranquility Base
Here, The Eagle Has Landed.”
Skyelynn saying goodby to Charleston |
Skyelynn doesn’t have a memory to march on like that. Her
America is a world of snarled traffic, roads with potholes, rising seas which
flood East Bay Street deeper and more often and excuses. She worked with us for
three years, becoming one of our most effective paid staff members. She labored
in our food and beverage industry, biking to work. She got screamed at every
day for being in the street on her bike. She paid high local rents. After three
years in Charleston, working on many controversial social issues, she took
stock. She considered the tiny amounts of progress older activists like me have
eked out of a lifetime of meetings here.
I can proudly point to 7 bus stop shelters which are the direct result
of my work. Under my leadership, we won 600 million dollars for better transit
with the help of Skyelynn, our field coordinator Nicolas Bell and many other
wonderful young people. Most, like Skyelynn
took easily obtained jobs in our staff hungry food and beverage industry.
Unfortunately, we have not made the progress on transit that
we need or were promised with the referendum. After 3 million dollars in
studies, we are in the midst of at least two more studies which I’ve been told
will be consolidated into a third, even bigger study. While we’ve done these studies, the cost of
the promised BRT system to Summerville continues to rise by about 2.5 million
dollars a month or roughly 54 dollars a minute. Despite routes proposed in the I26alt study,
we have no bus service to any local beach. 11 million dollars to improve CARTA
bus routes now has been diverted into an interest free fund for road
construction. When we get it back for transit 12 or so years from now, it will
buy half the bus service it could today. Vic Rawl calles it the “Pay Go” program
because it cuts down on bond costs by sacrificing improved bus service to build
turn lanes and maybe 526. We call it the
“We pay, you go” program.
CARTA is
threatening another round of cuts in service while they’ve piled up a million
dollar surplus this year by giving the Lowcountry less bus service.
Skyelynn has had enough. On Saturday she turned in her gold,
Best Friends of Lowcountry Transit shirt and told us she was going to find a
place to live where rent was lower, pay was higher and transit was better. She is
headed to Austin, LA, Portland, Seattle and Vancouver, BC to determine which
city deserved the time, energy and creativity which will constitute the remainder
of her life. Charleston has lost its
most gifted Anglo American maker of Kim Chi. Let’s hope Momma Kim doesn’t get
the itch for light rail and social progress too or we’ll be completely out of locally
made high quality Korean style pickled cabbage.
At least Skyelynn didn’t explain her leaving the way one frustrated
young artist did to me a few years ago, saying, “I don’t want to waste my life
in Charleston like you have.”
Transit Complete the Penny Campaign Staff, Election Night, Nov 2016 |
Of the 12 young people who worked on our Transit Complete
the Penny Campaign in November 2016, at least six have left Charleston. One, Muhiyyidin D’baha, went to New Orleans last year to find and
bring back a model for producing social change which might work here. One night
in February he was shot and killed in New Orleans. Charleston always tells
young people who want something fairer and better that they should leave. Plenty
do.
The Best Friend of Charleston no longer runs West, but there
are lots of ways to leave. Nicolas Bell got on his bike and pedaled all the way
to Tallahassee Florida where his hip gave out. He hitched a pickup ride the
rest of the way to the Big Easy to find out of Law School would provide the
hammer he needs to change the world before it dies.
Charleston needs to go somewhere before the people we need to
make it go all leave. A city of the retired rich, tourists, students and the
poor can’t survive.
The promised Bus Rapid Transit system could open up land
along 18 miles of transit corridor for affordable housing, transit enabled
living and economic opportunity. Young people like Skyelynn and Nicolas could
find affordable housing that they could own in high density buildings in places
along Rivers Avenue and Highway 78 which only grow weeds now.
In Vancouver, young people could buy a shoebox studio condo in a 20 story building linked to
the Skytrain transit line by a covered walkway for under 36 thousand Canadian dollars
when we visited there in 2008. If it was
pouring rain they could reach downtown in 15 minutes without ever getting wet.
Bus Rapid Transit is the third world’s answer to light rail
but it works if its done right. (It fails if you fake it by cutting corners
like wasting the railroad line into Charleston which people are calling the low
line for a dog walking park while you force people to crawl through traffic in
shuttle buses for 25 minutes to reach jobs in our tourism district.)
Gambling on CARTA & Transit- Going Somewhere
Charleston needs to Go Forward. A city nobody local is willing
to visit and which it’s residents plan escape vacations for their weekends isn’t
really any more alive than Main Street USA in Disneyworld, which has a much
better transit system that we do.
#ConChaCo Buttons |
On Saturday, we’ll present ConChaCo to Charleston a day long
festival built around the free #20 CARTA bus line. The Recovery room will celebrate
the day by participating in the Pub Crawl to benefit our Food and Beverage
workers. They’re playing CARTA Kino on the front patio. You get a ticket and pick the time you
believe the next north bound 20 will pass. Then your wait with your neighbors
in Charleston’s iconic local dive bar, which sold more PBRs than any bar in
America a few years ago. When the bus
appears, everyone rings red cow bells and the winner is decided for that hour.
We celebrate the Northbound bus because that
is the ride home for many F&B workers lucky enough to live a short bus ride
from their jobs and they’re on their way home after work or perhaps on their
way to the Recovery Room, a dive bar so dark tourist rarely dare go there.
Charleston can go forward. We’re gong to push it Saturday. If
you want to know more about our efforts see www.bfltransit.com.
END END END
For more information contact Best Friends of Lowcountry Transit
wjhamilton29464@gmail.com or
(843) 870-5299.
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