A letter to my councilman

[nxylas]

Thought I'd let y'all see what I wrote to my Richland County (SC) Council representative:

Dear Councilman Jackson,
I see from your webpage on the Richland County website that among your primary political concerns are traffic congestion and protecting the rural character of the areas surrounding Columbia from urban sprawl. I’m sure that, along with our Governor, you are well aware of the need for smart growth policies and an end to so-called “crayola zoning”, with large blocks of land being marked out for a single use. But the single biggest driver of urban sprawl is the automobile, and I’m sure that the inadequacy of Columbia’s transit system plays a part in this.
I recently attended the “Richland On The Move” public meeting in the library on Assembly Street to discuss the future of transit in the Columbia metro area. Several of the participants wondered why a city this size doesn’t have a transit system to match Portland, or Seattle, or Washington DC, and were told that Columbia doesn’t have the population density to support such a system. I went to the website www.demographia.com , which contains demographic data for hundreds of urban areas throughout the world, to look for a city of similar size and population to Columbia, to see how they do public transportation. The closest match I could find was the city of Toulon in France. Like Columbia, Toulon is not an especially prosperous city, with an economy heavily dependent on the military (France’s second largest naval base being the same sort of economic driver that Fort Jackson is to Columbia); and like Columbia, its transportation system is run by Veolia Transportation. But it has twice as many bus routes as Columbia, and twice as many riders, with a bus fleet five times the size, and many routes that run every 10-15 minutes as opposed to every hour, like the majority of routes in Columbia.
The difference, I believe, is funding. French transportation systems are funded by federal, state and local governments, and with a 0.7% payroll tax which, by my calculations, could raise almost $40 million in Richland County alone, rising to $61 million if applied across the entire Columbia metropolitan area (of course the transit system would have to be expanded to cover the entire metropolitan area in order to justify the latter, but I wouldn’t mind that!). Columbia’s buses already take almost 3400 cars off the road (source: Dollars and Sense). If the people of Richland County are truly concerned about traffic congestion, I hope that they can be persuaded out of their “I don’t ride the buses, why should I fund them?” mentality, and that the County Council will rise to the challenge of providing a transit system suitable for the needs of the city now, not to mention the 25% growth in population projected by the US Census Bureau for 2020. For your information, I attach some statistics for the two cities, based on figures provided by the American Public Transportation Association and the Toulon bus system’s website (www.reseaumistral.com). According to the benefits calculator provided by the Center for Transportation Excellence, if Columbians traveled as many passenger miles on public transportation as Toulonnais, they would save an additional 110,000 gallons of gas a year. With oil consumption being the cause of so many problems in the world, that alone should provide motivation for Richland County to provide Columbia with the bus system it needs.

[nxylas]

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I sent that letter 2 weeks ago.