Transit- Security and Peace for Ukraine & America Built With Transit

Charleston, SC- It is easy to feel helpless when you are powerless and alone. A two year pandemic has taken our friends, emptied our buses and disrupted our lives. All of us hoped for better days, a spring which opened into peace and happiness. We haven't surrendered the hope of getting there. As always, it's a longer, harder bus trip than we hoped for, but if you have your transfer, you may get there. 

Our Transit Planning Children's Activity

Image, left, children from 4 continents, speaking 7 languages helping plan a model transit system, N. Charleston Farmer's Market, Fall 2019, Some of these children have cousins in Eastern Europe now.

Putin’s invasion of the Ukraine reminds us while we may volunteer to clean up a bus stop or help an elderly passenger on board, there are still brutal, cruel forces in the world who force suffering upon the innocent to gratify their insatiable egos. They burn their name into the tortured memory of history. They want to join the men we are eager to forget, but which perpetuate themselves in our schoolbooks: Genghis Khan, Francisco Pizzaro, King Leopold, Hitler, Putin.

Best Friends of Lowcountry Transit now functions as a component of a national network of Transit Advocacy Groups leading the effort to rebuild safer, sustainable cities like Charlotte, NC, Atlanta, GA and Indianapolis, Minn. with powerful, community uniting transit systems. Yesterday, our corps of conductors completed a canvass of every hotel in Mt. Pleasant to get tourists out of their cars, on to our buses to help ease congestion on our highways and streets.  Last night we challenged Congresswoman Nancy Mace to take a stand regarding the status of our rapid transit system. She didn't answer, but being Americans, we'll go back until she does. On Tuesday, March 1,  we'll stand, speak and sing at Charleston County Council to try to end the go nowhere excuse based planning which has failed the commitment voters made in 2016 to fund a rapid transit line linking Summerville and Charleston. 

Made in SC, USA Proterra Battery Electric Bus

Our own Christopher Jackson, founder of the legendary lightning crew which took door to door transit information to thousands of homes in Dorchester County now drives an 18 wheel, over the road tractor trailer. When he stops, he reaches out to communities across the US helping start and encourage transit improvement efforts. He calls it the Continental, Together We Go Forward Initiative. Chris is out pulling the national supply chain and bringing people together to begin the journey for better transit. 

Putin has made it clear we can’t stay where we are. We can’t live with his target on our backs. Charleston has been at the forefront of America’s defense since we repelled the British at Ft. Sullivan in 1776. We built the ships which liberated Europe at our Navy Yard in N. Charleston during WWII. We stood the long, terrifying watch of the Cold war with our Polaris Submarines at the Charleston Navy Base. 

When I was a boy, Soviet boomers patrolled just off our coast and American Attack subs from our Navy Base, armed with nuclear torpedo's, shadowed them in hopes of blowing the red sub out of the Atlantic before they could fire on Charleston. Now those Russian subs are probably back, just off our coast. I grew up with that. I remember the horror of learning what was going on and what the Sub Captain that was our backyard neighbor was doing. Evidently, he did it right. We've lived up to now. It's not polite to talk about that reality in Charleston. I've seen the shock of young people today learning how this works. I can't decide weather I should tell them or not. For Charleston, still on the target list due to our Air Force Base and Nuclear storage facilities which may or may not still have missiles, it will could be over, without any warning in an instant. Most of us will never even know.  

Charleston once attacked America when we fired on Ft. Sumter and started the American Civil War. That time, Charleston learned the hard way fighting on the wrong side of the long struggle for human dignity and freedom against the United States of America means losing. My ancestors learned that at Missionary Ridge on Nov. 25, 1863. So will Putin when his day comes. 

However, thanks to the efforts of thousands of people (from lonely transit advocates leafleting rainy bus stops to President Biden signing the infrastructure bill) we have not arrived at this dark day unprepared. America and the West are no longer barreling towards an auto dependent, petroleum fueled future where Putin’s status as ruler of the second largest petroleum exporting nation makes us his slaves. 

In Greenville SC Pro Terra manufactures the finest battery electric buses made anywhere in the world. We have over a dozen running right now in Charleston, SC. In Mt. Pleasant, SC, Hubner makes the complex, robotic articulations which allow buses to bend around corners and put big vehicles with lots of passengers on narrow historic streets like the ones in Charleston efficiently. 

Sr. Citizens visiting Best Friend of Charleston Replica

While all of this conserves fuel, it also brings people together. Strangers become transit buddies at stops and on buses and trains. They learn that people different from them can still be their friends and that all those friends, together, are Americans. 

The price of gas is going to rise. It ought to. We cannot fill our greedy tanks with Putin’s oil when it buys the bombs and bullets which send death to Ukraine. We’ll need our transit system, recovering from Covid, to pull us together and move us ahead.

It may be that this, with Best Friend’s of Lowcountry Transit’s continuing efforts, will hasten the day when we have our own rapid transit line linking Charleston, N. Charleston, Ladson, Lincolnville, Summerville, Hanahan and Goose Creek. We’ll be able to join the elite group of rising cities moving out of congestion, pollution, and climate killing carbon fuels to a faster, cleaner and more hopeful future.

Right now our CARTA and LINK buses are slower than your car. Sometimes they’re crowded. Some people on board have evident struggles we would prefer not to share. They don’t always go where they’re needed or show up when promised, but each rider on each trip moves us further away from a world men like Putin and the oil funded terrorists of ISIS control. It’s a trip worth taking. It’s time to get on board. If you don't know how to ride, call me. I'll talk you through it. If that doesn't work, one of our conductors will ride with you. Together, We Go Forward!

Join us on the bus. It’s one way Americans Go Forward!

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For information on Better Transit in the SC Lowcountry see www.bfltransit.com or contact Executive Director William Hamilton at (843) 870-5299 or wjhamilton29464@gmail.com.