EDITORIAL: Too Quick to Pull Plug: MB Council Should Give Beachside Bus Lanes the Fair Test They’Ve Never Had

By The Sun News, Myrtle Beach, S.C.

Mar. 28–Myrtle Beach City Councilman Phil Render says the Ocean Boulevard transit lanes "were perhaps a worthy experiment that’s had its day." That’s debatable.

Render and other council members stand ready to eliminate the bus lanes today. Before they act, they should consider whether this concept in people moving through the downtown beachside district has had a fair test. A good case can be made that it hasn’t.

The tourist season bus lanes, readers will recall, began on the watch of former Waccamaw Regional Transportation Authority director Benedict Shogaolu. The idea was that for $1, beachgoers could ride trolley-style buses up and down the Boulevard rather than drive to downtown shops and attractions. Shogaolu promised to flood the lanes with buses but didn’t deliver. That caused intolerable wait times for prospective passengers and emboldened Boulevard business owners to declare the experiment in mass transit a failure.

There followed in 2004 the series of newspaper articles that exposed the authority’s shoddy handling of money and contracts, leading to Shogaolu’s firing — and to a punitive reduction in local governments’ support money flowing into the authority. This local support cutback, in turn, triggered cutbacks in state and federal matching money, blowing a hole in the side of the bus agency’s budget. Agency leadership was in chaos until the board hired General Manager Myers Rollins Jr. to take the agency’s helm later in 2004.

Rollins and the Lymo board responded to the agency’s money crisis with bus route cutbacks and, on the Boulevard, a doubling of passenger rates to $2 — just in time for the 2005 tourism season. As a result, Boulevard ridership plummeted below the rates for previous years — further emboldening Boulevard business leaders who never liked the transit lanes to demand that the council remove them.

The sadness is that the issue comes up just as Rollins and the board seem finally to be getting it right on Ocean Boulevard. The $1 fare has been reinstated. And the authority, with help from federal grant money, is building bus shelters along the Boulevard. Rollins has pledged to supply Boulevard buses in proportion to demand and run regular, on-time routes.

All other things being equal, these steps should help the tourist-season Boulevard bus routes reach their potential at last. If the council mandates an end to the transit lanes now, they’d effectively be making Boulevard buses fight it out with into inevitably increasing car traffic. There would be almost no hope that beachside bus service could keep a regular schedule — or that it could ever become a viable alternative for moving people along the beach during high season. Moreover, the return of car traffic and, possibly, temporary parking would render too-narrow downtown Boulevard sidewalks more hectic for pedestrians, undermining the city’s ongoing effort to give the Pavilion area a more friendly feel.

The better course for City Council is to give Rollins and the agency a chance to prove that the Boulevard transit lanes can succeed. Council members today should leave the transit lanes intact at least until mid-July, when they can revisit the issue to see whether changes are in order. That way, members can avoid the perception that the only beachside constituency they care about is the business owners — while giving the city’s original vision for Boulevard mass transit a fair test at last.

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Copyright (c) 2006, The Sun News, Myrtle Beach, S.C.

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