Note- this draft is in development. Comments are welcomed. Change should be expected. We're dealing with a very complex and in some instances, dishonest situation.
It is going to be a longer ride to the beach than we expected.
In Charleston County, SC, we are surrounded by angry, frustrated people and a government no longer capable of making an honest decision. Unless ordinary people accept the degraded state of our governance and reassert the power of their citizenship, no possibility of anything as simple as a turn lane or functional bus route will be possible for us. We shall sit, fighting each other over the miserable crumbs shaken off the table of our corrupt and incompetent politics until the ocean finally covers it all.
The Long Journey to Now
For the past twenty years, while consuming at least two and one half million precious dollars wrenched from the thin lowcountry pocketbooks, politicians have talked about building a regional mass transit system. There have been at least five major proposals and studies, not one of which has yet been to a public vote. In that same time over five billion dollars has been spent on road construction which has fed sprawl to the point where there is no prospect of ever building roads sufficient to accommodate the 60 people per day who move here or the 300 thousand people expected to move into greenfield mega developments like Nexton, a suburb which will eclipse the historic community of Summerville, which already contends with snarled traffic seven days a week and several hours per day. If you want to drive from Summerville to Charleston (nearly nobody does, they just have to) it frequently takes over an hour and a half.
Between 1830 and 1960, you could have taken a train from Summerville to Charleston on what was the nation's first Passenger railway. Within three years after the Best Friend of Charleston began operating on Christmas day, 1830, service was running along the line at a speed of 30 miles per hour, burning wood cut by slaves who never saw a light bulb or a computer. You can't make the trip that fast in your car today even though we're all supposedly free and have computers we carry in our pockets.
People say they want to drive, but they're lying. Last week a man in their car slammed into the back end of the CARTA DASH bus I was riding in on John Street as part of my morning commute. Their car hit the solid wall of steel which is the back bumper of the DASH bus, a massive steel plate welded on to a girder. The bus weighs about 20 thousand pounds and is 23 feet long. The car weighed about 3 thousand pounds and was two feet shorter after it hit the bus. Whoever was is the driver's seat of that car wasn't really driving when they hit the 10 foot tall bus in front of them. Their foot was on the accelerator, but they were doing something other than driving. As I dismounted the bus and walked to my office, traffic throughout Charleston's narrow, historic streets locked up.
Massive opposition to all development is erupting across the Lowcountry, mostly driven by older, long term residents who can't deal with the stress and congestion of traffic and who fear cultural displacement by the legions of people from elsewhere coming here. Those older residents have the free time purchased by real pensions and retirements the people chasing jobs at Boeing and Volvo will never have. Their racial prejudices prohibit them from sharing buses with black people. Organizations like Save Shem Creek are screaming for a return to the past until more road projects can resolve the traffic and give them the quiet, free flow traffic conditions of Mt. Pleasant in 1975 when the now 15 mile long city of 85 thousand people covered five miles end to end and was home to ten thousand people.
Of course roads won't solve this problem any more than distributing free crack in North Charleston cures drug addiction. Our coastal environment of wetlands, rivers and soft soil makes road construction exceptionally expensive. Adding two lanes and an interchange to 4.5 miles of Highway 41 in Mount Pleasant will cost about 125 million dollars. The planned Highway 41 project will take at least five years. Every elected official in Mt. Pleasant spends at least 20% of their time with the public talking about that one road project. They strip budgets to feed it with $400 thousand for planning and more for turn lanes to deal with the current mess. Meanwhile, the Town's only community theater has closed. There are no funds to run a shuttle bus to get elderly shut-ins to the Senior Citizens Center (the most breathtaking example of socialism ever erected by a group of Republicans.)
Since elected officials can't or won't spend time mastering facts, planning for roads and transit gets delegated to the Charleston, Berkeley, Dorchester Council of Governments. They've studied light rail from the time the cost was 1 billion dollars until it rose to the last price tag of 2.4 billion dollars. They studied and built a large scale model of the Futrex Monorail System. They planned a commuter rail system running on the existing, historic CSX rail line, the exact same rail line the Best Friend of Charleston ran on in 1830. They studied buses and established the #3 Express Bus line, a line which in three years of operation has never rated a bench for people waiting for the bus to sit down on because people who have never been on the bus or watched people wait for the bus believe everyone can just wait in their cars in the decaying parking lot of the rotting Dorchester Village shopping center, five miles from Summerville. The elected officials don't know that Uber drivers earn their livings running people from their homes to that stop where bus riders stand, waiting in the dark and rain, less than a mile from where people a century ago waited in a comfortable train station at Ladson to go to Charleston.
Local officials spent 5 million dollars on site preparation for the Charleston Intermodal Transportation Center before they discovered CSX wouldn't let them sit on the main rail line to board passengers and had to abandon that project and start over in the less well located site of our existing, decrepit Amtrak Station which features separate waiting rooms for black and white people.
After all of this, in the face of these failures, needs, and conditions the only real progress we have to show is the fact that now, black and white people can use either of the two formerly segregated waiting rooms they would like to spend the time between when our unreliable rail system, congested traffic and unreliable bus system finally intersect.
The 300 Year Wait
What we would like in the SC Lowcountry is to have public transportation almost as good as they have in Dhaka, Bangladesh. I've known since visiting Europe ten years ago, that my country was far behind in public transportation infrastructure. To ride the French TGV railroad system at 180 miles an hour and then a month later take the day long trip on Greyhound from Charleston to Atlanta, is a humiliating, soul crushing lesson in why we are no longer the nation which flies Apollo missions to the moon. We're no longer the America which build the Panama Canal and drove the golden spike which completed the transcontinental railroad. We’re not even the country where you can go to Summerville at 25 miles an hour on a railroad so primitive that the tracks are made of wood and scrap iron as we could in 1830.
Why? A virulent anti-government streak runs through South Carolina politics which appeared during reconstruction when a Yankee military occupation of the humiliated South forced things like public schools and desegregated public transportation on the birthplace of the defeated Confederacy. The car took over the South at the time when the Federal Government was again forcing desegregation on an unwilling white population which found the automobile the perfect tool for escaping now integrated public spaces and transportation on the way to white flight communities like Summerville where they, their cars and all the other people coming to make plans for Boeing would live happily ever after, paying low taxes forever. Thanks to the Tea Party, no Kenyan-born socialist would ever force them to change.
Of course, enduring dysfunction must be a multi-racial, bi-partisan affair if it's to last for forty years and through the South's political transformation from segregationist Democrat to Walmart Republican. We have Democrats who take money from developers who demand roads to support their new subdivisions without admitting that these roads will merely move cars from cul-du-sacs to highways we can't widen that are now parking lots. We have black leaders who take money too, but they also oppose everything because each change seems to erode the chances their communities have of surviving. On our beach islands, no longer connected to our inadequate transit system, thousands of parking spaces have been eliminated in the last year. Even those with cars can no longer go to the beach because traffic dominates every decision and the traffic we have is directly linked to our culture of racism and classism.
In 1995 SC Electric and Gas, which ran the bus service as part of its contract with the City of Charleston, a legacy of the days when trolleys ran on electricity, managed to offload the transit burden to the newly created CARTA, Charleston Area Regional Tranist Authority. CARTA continued it’s struggling, underfunded history until it ran out of money in 2003, following the fallure of a funding referendum. Service stopped on nearly all bus lines. A few routes ran by going into debt all the way to seven million dollars. People lost jobs. Some where hit and killed by cars on their long, dangerous walks home. (Charleston has one of the highet rates of pedetrian and cyclist fatalities in the US.) At least one person committed suicide after their bike was stolen, they lost their job and their family left them There was no bus service in my community of Mount Pleasant, at all, for two years.
Now that some people can't escape urban areas populated by people of different races because traffic is too snarled, they're preparing to take over urban areas and drive the poor out by closing their schools, shutting down the Meeting Street BI-LO Grocery Store, and turning every community service business from Hughes Lumber to Morris Sokol into tourist hotels and luxury housing, while driving the homeless out of their tents under bridges.
All of this is being done to cram the last half million people into a historic group of communities which ought to be figuring out what to move uphill before sea level rise covers most of the region. The City of Charleston has a limited plan to reduce the impact of a higher ocean for the next 25 years. It was 40-year Mayor Joe Riley's parting Christmas gift to incoming Mayor John Tecklenburg. There is no plan for Mt. Pleasant, James Island or North Charleston in the next 80 years when, at a minimum, another 18 to 30 inches of water may be expected, possibly a lot more.
The BRT Solution to Gridlock
The cheapest, most efficient way to ameliorate the worst elements of this problem is Bus Rapid Transit, large capacity buses running in dedicated lanes or on guideways with traffic signal control and prepaid boarding between stations you pay to get into, instead of paying when you get on the bus. You can see videos on how BRT works. It's a third world approach that fits our third world culture and economy here. No one is going to find a cheaper way to move more people by any means.
There are some places where high speed ferries, combined with public transportation to get them to the dock, could also move people along our waterways.The trip from Daniel Island to Charleston could go from a miserable, congested drive of 16.7 miles to a ferry voyage of one mile. Thirty thousand more people will be using those roads in ten years. No public transportation currently links Daniel Island to Charleston, even though the city and developers promised that it would 20 years ago before they sold homes to hundreds of people who hoped to retire to “life in an island town.” Now they're 85, can't drive, and their Fantasy Mayberry Island has become their traffic walled Alcatraz.
Two years ago, over my intense objections, the COG began another study of our transportation problem. It featured poorly attended public meetings at which 70% of the time was devoted to incomprehensible discussions of federal financing qualifications of absolutely no interest to the public. We worked to get people to attend with some success. Even though there are hundreds of clear videos about Bus Rapid Transit systems on Youtube, none were shown to the public.
I felt we needed to fix the basic problems of our struggling CARTA bus system. We had demonstrated that public education and bus stop improvements, over a period of seven years could triple transit ridership in a conservative Southern suburb like Mt. Pleasant. This was achieved at minimal cost to everything but my nights and weekends. We spent less than four thousand dollars to accomplish that, half of which came out of my pocket, a thousand of which came from Town Government and another thousand from national transit advocacy groups. Nearly all of it was spent on educational materials and plastic door hanger bags. It was grinding, grassroots work founded on what I had been taught by DFA and Wellstone. We just decided to treat Mt. Pleasant's transit system like an election and bus rides like votes. It works if you work at it.
What You Get for A Half Million Dollars
The result of the half million dollars worth of meetings and studies was some unpersuasive pamphlets, another study with the miserable autocentric name I26-alt. The study supported constructing a Bus Rapid Transit system from Summerville to Charleston to relieve traffic congestion on the interstate. The half million dollar plan for public transit was named after a highway choked with cars, and was devoted to improving life in those cars. It was like having a pimp found a brothel to provide sexually-abused teenage girls with a safe house.
Snarled in this was the decade long war over building I-526, part of a 1970s planned ring expressway for Charleston now reduced to a 45 mile per hour ground-level parkway from Citadel Mall, across a once-rural corner of Johns Island to suburb-saturated James Island. It has been planned to go to a half-finished interchange on traffic-choked Folly Road. That interchange is the end of the James Island Connector, fought over and built between the 1960s and 1993 to solve James Island's traffic problem. That traffic problem is now worse than ever.
The CARTA bus on James Island runs once every 90 minutes. A commute-oriented express bus service runs more frequently in the morning and afternoons. Another study, also costing hundreds of thousands of dollars, proposed rebuilding Folly Road for cars, transit, bikes and pedestrians and has gone nowhere.
The reason everything fails is because an unsupportable portion of the local economy depends on real estate and resort construction . All of this money must be made on the fringe of our rapidly expanding urban fringe. Developers, who buy politicians by the carload by donating to their campaigns, hiring their family members, or just hiring politicians as consultants or contractors, just need the last few miles of road running to their raw land to open it for development. They have no interest in increasing transportation capacity in or out of the urban core, which is already developed. It's complicated and conflicted since some newer developments like the Lorelei will bring 12,000 new residents to brownfield locations within our urban areas. They need transit to develop but no one wants to go near the politics of transit here if they can avoid it, so they pretend that robot cars and Uber can do it all.
Since our campaign to pass the referendum started a month ago, on the personal assurance from County Council Chairman Elliott Summey that the referendum guaranteed over 600 million dollars to improve public transit, I've spent less time on the bus than I usually do. I'm legally blind and I can't drive. That problem can't be fixed. I'll never drive. I know too much about computers and the internet to trust a robot car as well. We've put over 1500 miles on our family Prius. We drive about 500 miles per month on average. I do not understand how anyone can stand it. I'm devoted to public transit, but if I had to ride to Summerville in a car every day to get it, I would grab the wheel and steer the car into an interstate guardrail to end the misery.
Nobody here over the age of 25 loves driving their their car any more.
The Best Friend Goes off the Rails
The confusing series of three meetings about the referendum went down to the wire with a final, unexpected meeting on August 9, 2016 which followed a meeting where the referendum had been voted down. The full meeting is available online as video. Not obvious at the meeting was the fact that all the particulars about transit and individual road projects had been deleted from the proposed ordinance. What was left was 1.9 billion dollars for transportation and drainage projects to be used in whatever fashion County Council considered appropriate, and a concession to environmental groups of 200 million dollars for protected green space. I was told, repeatedly, by public officials and government representatives that this referendum appropriated over 600 million dollars for transit projects. They continue to tell me that.
On September 15, after our grassroots Transit Complete the Penny Campaign had spent 4,000dollars, opened an office, hired four paid staff members on the hopes of meeting payroll, incorporated and engaged 50 volunteers for 500 hours of outreach work, Colleen Condon, a member of County Council and a transit support, sent me this cryptic email, “Jack- Half cents (sic) sales tax is dead. 526 is now somehow funded with no additional funds. Nothing to trust. Nothing to promote. Colleen.” This came out of a closed door, executive session from a Council Member who is leaving office. Apparently Colleen couldn't stand it any longer.
At the time that email was received Transit Complete the Penny was running a phone bank in Charleston and doing sidewalk outreach during the Third Thursday festival in Summerville with a total volunteer hour expenditure of 35 hours, 150 miles driven and 200 dollars worth of staff time and supplies expended for the four efforts executed that day.
We immediately called for a protest and demonstration at the next Council meeting at which the contentious Legare Bridge Bike Lane, I-526 and Transit Funding might be decided. We did that even though the agenda isn't released until Friday afternoon, so we don't know what the general council meeting will actually discuss early enough for the public to prepare. Facebook signup for the Demonstration and Protest on September 20.
On September 16 in a Facebook message Elliot Summey, after seeing we had scheduled a protest before the next council meeting wrote, “Mrs. Condon is over reacting. I love her, but she's upset right now on where things stand with the negotiations with SIB over 526. Those negotiations are far from over. Nothing has been settled and they are far from over. I didn't get a chance to finish talking to her last night. No matter what happens, the 600 million for transit will stay in place and the BRT will be a reality. So, hopefully once she calms down, we will have an opportunity to talk further. I feel we are going to get this sales tax passed. William- stay the course. We are winning on this campaign and are close to having the money for a real transit system in the Lowcountry.” Later that morning he wrote, “We have a complete streets requirement and have for years. This 526 thing isn't over and we have to keep the eye on the fact we need these other projects no matter what happens with 526 “
With the validity of all of our efforts in doubt, Jack the activist had to sit down and Jack the Lawyer had to stand up. This was made easier by the fact that my wife and volunteers demanded we stop selling the referendum and get to the bottom of what was going on. We drove to the election commission and picked up an actual copy of what County Council directed be put on the ballot, which wasn't available online until we put it there. Here is that document: drive.google.com/... In response to the rising doubts and protest, we were provided with a copy of the ordinance as well.
The full video of the final County Council Meeting at which the ordinance was approved can be veiwed at www.ustream.tv/.... While it's not clear to anyone in the room, some time during the process, on the drafts council members have in their hands everything specific about traffic and individual road projects has been deleted and a blanket appropriation for transportation-related projects and drainage has been substituted. There is a vote to amend, but the substance of that amendment is never clearly revealed to the public. That process appears to be a cooperative effort between Elliott Summey, who voted in favor and Vic Rawl, who voted against. Both have extensive real estate interests which may be positively impacted by transportation improvements near their land. I've known, trusted and worked with these two men for over ten years.
I was wrong.
Should we Throw the Referendum Under the Bus?
It's possible that whoever actually controls government in Charleston county never wanted this referendum to pass. The effectiveness of our grassroots campaign was clearly an unwelcome surprise to some of the people who claimed to support the referendum. It may be that a failed referendum was merely a way to let failed planning for both development and transportation off the hook. It would allow local officials and staff to say the public rejected the solution, while they continue to build developments full of people who aren't going to be able to move in a few years.
Failure on that scale would enable organizations such as Americans for Prosperity funded by men like the Koch brothers to come in and move their long term plan for transportation privatization forward. Their goal is to get governments to lease the roadways to private operating companies who will rent them back to the public by the lane and mile using now-cheap internet, cellular and GPS systems. Enabled by modern technology, they will auction off road capacity to those who can pay. The rich will travel in a fast lane at rush hour, while workers will be crammed into cheaper slow lanes and the working poor will wait until the price goes down to whatever they can afford. It's like Uber with rate boosts for road space. The SC Dept. of Transportation already has a project working on standards and practices for such a market-based road access system. The Koch-owned CATO institute has been promoting it for years. See www.cato.org/....
This plan will work for the rich. Higher costs will drive motorists off the roads. Congestion will clear. Taxes will go down while the cost of moving goes up. It's possible that once the cost of driving a private automobile gets high and unpredictable enough that we'll have privately-provided public transportation owned by a billionaire who will charge us whatever the market will bear. It's likely it won't even be possible to walk, though it's hard to imagine anyone trying to meter a pedestrian: the population would probably start walking in large numbers whatever distance was required to reach the people responsible with whatever heavy, blunt or sharp objects they can find.
But Freedom!
September 17 is the anniversary of the US Constitution and Citizenship day. As I write these words, thousands who have struggled through our miserable naturalization system and passed a test on what government and liberty in America are supposed to mean are being sworn into the once-proud country and can now boast they are American Citizens.
As a man legally blind from birth, I know how much the freedom to move matters in America. Getting where I need to go is the greatest struggle of my life. I already live in an America where going somewhere is expensive and that cost is in the hands and power of others. I will never fully escape it. I've been to Europe. If Humphry Bogart and Ingrid Bergman will always have Paris in Casablanca, I will always have the Paris Metro and the gleaming Trains of Great Velocity (TGV). Those of you who can drive in SC do not want to live in my world with my memories.
That's why I've fought for better transit here for 20 years and until Thursday, I thought that finally we had a way to get it.
What we have, I believe, is a deeply flawed referendum which depends on trusting the untrustworthy to work. We must find a way forward, but it will be complex and require us to relearn what our new citizens being sworn in today have fresh in their minds.
We Will Be Citizens
On Tuesday, we'll descend on County Council at 5:30 pm with all the energy and wrath that our depleted civic capacity will surrender to this emergency. Join us as we protest outside the meeting. Bring a sign, bring your drum, bring your T-shirts and get loud. We don't want anyone to get arrested Tuesday. Never escalate too soon. Sign up to join the Demonstration on Facebook.
At 6:30 we'll march into their meeting and during the public comment use the two minutes each that survives from the once-mighty right to petition our Government for a redress of grievances, to urge them to fix this referendum so we can promote an honest vote in favor of mass transit. That's a hard fix. It's too late to amend it. We'll have to try for some sort of resolution passed by council which addresses our concerns. We'll see what they're willing to do after the hell-raising machine we've put on the ground from Richardson Square in Somerville to Washington Park in Charleston goes into overdrive. We've got millionaires and homeless people fighting together. We'll see if that is enough. Tuesday is the start, not the end of that fight.
After they've had a reasonable chance to do something which might satisfy the public, we'll try to make sure everyone gets a chance to consider it. We'll pass out copies of everything we can get to everyone who can stand it. We'll Facebook, Twitter and radio whatever they give us for about one week.
That's all the time we can spare.
Then we'll hold a meeting, like American Citizens do. It will be a long one. I'll drag out my tattered copy of Robert's Rules of Order because Crazy Fingers Occupy Style doesn't get it done. We'll move, second, amend, call the question and vote like Mrs. Harper taught me to do at Wando High School in speech class in 1976. Maybe we'll repudiate the referendum and fight to kill it alongside the Tea Party. Maybe we will accept the promises Council is willing to make and, trusting in our own strength to enforce it, urge people to vote for the taxes and appropriation. Maybe we won't be able to agree and everything we've done for the past month will end up in shattered pieces scattered over the ground because our capacity to rule our government has been destroyed.
If that happens, we'll reorganize. Pick up our blue conductor's caps and signs and start over with the people willing to remain here another year or decade for the next shot at getting it right.
We will move forward, somehow, and keep moving until a 13 year old girl in St. George SC can travel to see the Atlantic Ocean at the Isle of Palms in less than two hours. It will be hard because the tightening manacles of oppression are never cut through without pain and sweat.
On the day when that little girl arrives at that beach, we'll be the old folks with the tattered blue hats sitting in the chairs under the blue pop-up canopy. We will rise from our chairs with the pain and disappointments of old age and long struggle in our bones and hand her a glass of lemonade.
The next generation will smile at us and relate the adventure of her first long Bus Rapid Transit trip without her parents to the Sea. We will be able to look at her and all the young people that will follow her in the eye with pride and tell them quietly, “This, we built for you. Let's go somewhere together.”
END END END
Tuesday, Sep 20, 2016 · 11:47:45 AM +00:00 · PeninsulaProgCHS
SC Law Regarding Sales Tax Referenda
Local officials have claimed that the refrendum had to have vague, not specific wording to survive legal challenge. They claim this is the result of a lawsuit from the 2003 referendum. We have that case from the SC Supreme Court and that isn’t what it says. Here is the full text of that opinion which covered legal issued related to referenda extensiveley. www.judicial.state.sc.us/...