The State of South Carolina’s $450 million incentive package to recruit Boeing is probably only the beginning of the costs associated with bringing badly needed industrial production jobs to the Lowcountry.   With starting wages of $14 per hour and benefits which probably won’t match the generous allowances of years ago, many of these new jobs are not the lucrative economic drivers the higher pay and better benefits were at the Navy Yard years ago.

While fond hope must reside in the hearts of real estate developers and car dealers that this will revive the auto centric suburban sprawl of years past which left Mount Pleasant with 1500 empty houses, these wages aren’t going to support purchasing homes on Mount Pleasant’s suburban fringe, putting a child in daycare and covering a car payment.

Making a job at Boeing work on these wages will require providing residents with a life which is faster, more efficient and cheaper.

In Washington State, robust bus transportation supports employment in the aviation industry. They run big articulated buses carrying over 100 people.  There are large shelters which can keep over 50 people out of the Seattle rain.  You also see well developed networks for cycling and a marvelous ferry system, with on board WI-FI.   While Seattle has lagged on rail transit development, with a failed Monorail plan and a controversial light rail system, a lot of people working in the aviation industry there don’t drive a car to work.

The automatic assumption prosperity equals two cars in every garage is headed to the rusty junkyard of history in the Pacific Northwest. With wages declining and the cost of car ownership rising, people are choosing lifestyles which allow them to spend money on other things.  They still have plenty of traffic and plenty of cars in Seattle, but an industry struggling to produce an airliner made of reinforced plastic to evade the rising cost of fuel is filled with people who are used to making critical decisions about weight, speed, time and money.

A new Swift Bus system using new hybrid diesel-electric buses is planned to go online in the Seattle area in November. Fares are paid before boarding the bus, which speeds up stops and schedules as do three boarding doors.

There are interior bike racks which are faster to load and have more capacity. Wheelchair tie down can be accomplished without driver assistance. Boarding platforms reduce climbing and speed up loading.  Schedules and stops are synchronized to the traffic lights. Traffic lights can be optimized to enable buses to make a crossing, in real time. Someone from the aviation industry has clearly applied aviation’s priorities to the speed, cost and efficiency challenges of transit.

If we plan from the beginning, the Lowcountry can offer similar opportunities to the people who will work for Boeing and near by, as we’re already doing for employees working at the downtown medical and educational complex with CARTA’s express bus system.

A new transportation hub is already planned near Dorchester road in North Charleston, to link CARTA, Amtrak, taxi and park and ride options. It should have frequent bus service to the airport and Boeing site a short distance away. From the transportation hub, Express Service to places like Mount Pleasant and stronger local service to affordable neighborhoods in North Charleston can be provided.

If the commuter train system to Summerville and downtown is ever established, with transit based development along the line such as is proposed for the Magnolia development, a radical reduction in the cost of living for employees at the aviation manufacturing complex could be achieved.  Careful synchronization of connections can squeeze waiting out of the system and adjustments in shift changes can put buses on the road at times when roads are slightly less congested, reducing the cost of additional road construction.

Boeing’s real payoff has to come from satellite production by suppliers and makers of parts, and the high tech spinoffs from there. The smart people who make those things work sometimes drive Teslas and sometimes take the bus or their bike. Their lives are too valuable to spend sitting in traffic watching the bumper in front of them.  They have $600 I-phones on which to arrange their social lives, Kindel’s to read and exercise to get.

William J. Hamilton (www.wjhamilton.com) is an attorney who lives in I’On Village.