Last Month's CARTA Fixed Route Advisory Committee Meeting wrestled with the hard questions ahead for our area's growing transit system.

The good news is that despite the recession, ridership on CARTA continues to grow. CARTA has seen a spike in ridership in the past year, setting records. More than 381,000 people rode CARTA in April, an increase of almost 14 percent year over the previous record year. Ridership is up 9.5 percent in 2010.

Eleven new busses are on the way. The New Flyer buses, purchased with stimulus money, will be more fuel efficient and require fewer repairs than CARTA's aging fleet, most of which meets 1996 clean air standards. They have improved systems for passenger comfort and safety, such as back doors which open without the passenger having to push a handle. This will make it easier for passengers to dismount while carrying packages or holding the hands of children. The buses are also much lower to the ground, making getting on board easier for the disabled and elderly.

Half of these new buses are expected to enter service this summer. Some CARTA routes will continue to be served by the older buses, necessary on some downtown routes where flooding requires a higher bus.

Work on the North Charleston transportation center, which will bring together Greyhound, Amtrak, CARTA, taxi and airport transportation services for our region together at a single hub near the intersection of Dorchester Road and I-526 continues to advance.

CARTA hopes to stretch the #40 local route as far as the new Roper St. Francis Hospital past Highway 41 in Mount Pleasant and possibly even as far as the Entrance to Wando High School if time permits. The route currently ends at the Super Walmart. The #40 has shown steady growth in ridership for several years. In May 2006 it carried 8502 passengers in 996 hours of total bus operation. This year it carried 11,931 riders in 814 hours of operation, reflecting some evening runs trimmed from the route which shortened operating hours.

The system needs to shed hundreds of thousands of dollars in costs even though the number of riders continues to climb due to a decline in half penny sales tax revenue which helps support the system. Options range from ending Sunday service everywhere to cutting some low performing routes. Over the past few years, CARTA has gone from reluctantly cutting weak routes to aggressively pruning the system and using the liberated resources to try promising options elsewhere. Unfortunately these cuts won't work that way. However, CARTA has one of the highest cost recovery ratios of any transit system in the United States.

East Cooper's services outperform many other parts of the system, so it is unlikely routes and service here will be reduced with the possible exception of Sunday service. The durable delusion that people living in Mount Pleasant will not ride the bus has now been refuted by four years of steady growth in East Cooper Ridership, including large numbers of people riding the popular Express Bus system which links stops at Super Walmart, K-mart, downtown and Citadel Mall.

Study continues on improved options for service to the Coleman Blvd. area and Islands. Currently these areas are served by the Flex Bus, CARTA at Night, and Tel-A-Ride for disabled passengers. The separate Links rural bus route system now has better connections to the CARTA system, enabling bus travel all the way to McClellanville, Cross SC and even Summerville. Some of these rural trips are for the heroically patient.

I've ridden on fancy, impressive public transit systems all over the world. I'm sure it's fun to plan and cut ribbons on shiny new trains and monorails, however working on CARTA is and has always been about hard choices to squeeze more efficiency out of the system. That effort continues East of the Cooper and throughout the system.

(William Hamilton (www.wjhamilton.com) is an Attorney who lives in I'On Village.)