Charleston, SC- After a month of effort our Transit Rider's organization has been able to get 5 Republicans and one Green Party Candidate in the special S!1 Congressional election to ride our local public transit bus system, CARTA. 10 Republicans haven't taken a ride. One Republican wants to abolish public transit (and privatize the Road System. One of Two Green party candidates has been on the bus. Neither of the Two Democratic Candidates has been on the bus with us.
This morning we sent this message to all ten Republican Campaigns and a similar message to the two Democratic Campaigns. The Green party is working on their holdout candidate for us. We understand the overwhealming pressure these candidates have to raise money on the phone, but talking to voters should still be a part of our politics. Over five thousand people ride the bus here every day. Most of them believe no politician cares about how hard their lives have become, which often include a lont hard day of low wage employment and several hours on the bus commuting to and from that job. Despite this many find the time to vote. Many others regard voting as useless. We're trying to change their minds, the politics of our region and the type of transit that is available to them to improve the quality of everyone's life here and the strength of our local economy.
We'll keep on working to get candidates to ride through to Friday, March 8 when we need to print a bookmark to hand out at bus stops the following week. Here is the message we sent the Republicans
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Members of Hungryneck Straphangers are disturbed by the fact that your campaign has not taken a bus ride while five Republicans have. Larkin, Moffly, Turner, Hoffman and Bryant all met hundreds of potential primary voters during their CARTA rides on March 7, 13 & 28. We've scheduled rides whenever the candidates requested them. We've repeatedly issued invitations to your's and other campaigns. In some cases staff has chosen not to inform the candidates of these invitations. Every Republican campaign was personally given an invitation to ride with us at the Freedomworks Forum in N. Charleston two weeks ago.
Full details on our CARTA with the candidates program can be found at http://busec.org/...
It's clear we need to make Transit a prioritity for the local political leadership which hasn't demonstrated a basic understanding of or interest in it. That has to be a Bi-Partisan effort executed with the models which have worked elsewhere which call for activating the 5 thousand daily CARTA riders, our occasional riders and their families and employers as a voting coalition for public transit.
We've decided to distribute a bookmark type slip at bus stops prior to the primary which lists the candidates which did ride the bus. This will need to go to Press Saturday March 9 so we can begin distribution on Tuesday, March 12. We have fifty volunteers to support this distribution effort.
We'll schedule a ride with your candidate whenever you like, early morning, late afternoon or night up to the time the last #10 bus returns to the CARTA operations Center on Friday, March 8. There are lots of options. Please ask the campaigns which have been on board with us about their impression.