Students lead the way

By Temple Ligon
July 26, 2013

At the College of Charleston, a student’s ID is good enough to jump onto a city bus to go anywhere on the route structure during any hour of operation. This is true for the faculty and staff, too. The students’ free rides are not really free. They’re covered by a fee paid at the beginning of the school year. Why does a student at the Columbia campus of USC not have the same deal? Is this a novel concept unproven elsewhere?

Just about every major university in the United States has student access arrangements worked out with the local transit system. And it doesn’t have to be in a city. The students at Clemson have a similar advantage.

In 1990, when I first suspected SCANA was nowhere near meeting its bus service obligations upheld by the 1931 United States Supreme Court, I studied the bus system in Austin, Texas. Austin, I decided, was what Columbia wanted to be but would never pull it off.  

Besides UT’s own 80 buses operated by the city system, the students all had pre-paid access to the city’s bus service. The Austin bus system on a per capita basis in 1990 had about six times the bus service we had in Columbia. It gets worse. Today Austin has fixed light rail on top of its superior bus service, and both have a hand in student recruitment, not to mention serving as a major draw for industry and an expanding population.

Austin’s transit service population is almost 1 million, and Columbia’s is about 420,000, a k a the urbanized area population. Austin has more than 400 buses, and Columbia has fewer than 40. Austin’s annual transit operating budget is almost $200 million. Columbia’s appears to be $12 million while it decides what will be available as its 29% share of the one-cent sales tax just getting started.

Fine. This means Columbia has compared grossly unfavorably with Austin well before 1990. We know that. Since we don’t have the money, what can we have that Austin has?

We have tens of thousands of students hungry for adequate transit.

Where the USC free-ride shuttle buses pull over on Sumter Street in front of the Horseshoe, ground zero for 30,000 students and another 10,000 in faculty and staff, Columbia’s proposed free-ride downtown bus loop intersects. The downtown population served by the loop is not much less than the USC count.

Of course, access to Columbia’s bus transit system is available to any school’s negotiated position. Free rides for the kids at Benedict College, Allen University, Columbia College, Lutheran Seminary, Midlands Tech et al. are all part of the plan.

For the younger set, there is another plan, this one statewide.

For every kid in South Carolina between the ages of 12 and 18 the Highway Department can issue a rider’s license, just like the driver’s license. The rider’s license will allow access to any public transit ride in the state. Obviously, the advantage goes to the kids in the larger towns and cities where there is transit, although some rural systems are doing a pretty good job connecting whole sections of the state.

In the cities, though, a young South Carolinian on any afternoon or weekend can have quick and free transport to the libraries, the basketball courts, the malls, the tennis courts, whatever – even the jobs.

Kids not yet 12 can ride for free, but they have to be accompanied by a rider’s license-carrying passenger or an adult.

Parental management policy might be challenged with this new-found freedom, but that can be worked out over the kitchen table.

Again, to get started, look at how Austin put its huge student population on the buses and how the bus ridership numbers skyrocketed. This past year Austin transit riders totaled more than 33 million. Columbia’s bus system probably took in about 2 million, same as last year.

To really make it hurt, look at Madison, Wisconsin, another capital city with the state’s flagship university. Madison has just one-third the people Austin has, maybe a hundred thousand fewer people than Columbia’s bus service population, but Madison last year counted almost 15 million bus boardings.

How many of that 15 million might have been students is only a guess. 

Temple Ligon: [email protected]

 

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