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Visitor Center riding high from revived CARTA
By Dennis Quick
Senior Staff Writer
At the Charleston Visitor Center on Meeting Street, visitors to the city are buying bus passes again.
Last year when budget cuts forced a crippled Charleston Area Regional Transportation Authority to cut back drastically on its bus services, the Visitor Center sold no bus passes, according to John Willson, director of visitor services at the Charleston Area Convention and Visitors Bureau.
This year with funding from the half-cent sales tax revitalizing CARTA and helping the transportation authority restore its services, the Visitor Center sells between 50 and 100 bus passes daily.
“People go to the Visitors Center and ask what’s the best way to get to the market or to the aquarium or to the Battery,” says Willson, naming Charleston’s three most popular tourist destinations. “They park at the Visitor Center and ride the buses. That’s our big goal—to have them come to the Visitor Center, purchase a bus pass and take the bus or the DASH to see the city.”
The DASH is a smaller bus that looks like a trolley car and makes more frequent stops than a regular bus. The DASH is especially popular with visitors going to the S.C. Aquarium, Willson says.
“Our staff has noticed a direct correlation between CARTA’s stops at the aquarium wharf and a surge of visitors to the aquarium,” says aquarium spokeswoman Christine Nott. Although Nott says the Aquarium has no figures showing the number of visitors CARTA has brought to the aquarium, she notes that Aquarium attendance between June and July was up 5% over the same period last year.
The most popular bus passes are the one-day pass for $4 and the three-day pass for $9, says Willson. Other passes include a 31-day pass for $31.25, a 10-ride pass for $10 and a 40-ride pass for $35.
The day passes offer unlimited riding. One-day passes can be purchased with cash or a credit card. The remaining passes are cash-only purchases. Regular bus fare is $1.25 per ride.
The visitors bureau purchases as many as 5,000 bus passes five times a year at a bulk, undisclosed discount rate from CARTA. Last year’s unsold passes to visitors have been selling this year, thus avoiding a revenue loss, Willson explains.
Until receiving a cash infusion from the 2004 passage of the half-cent sales tax, CARTA had spent more than 1 1/2 years operating at 25% capacity due to budget cuts. The number of bus routes got slashed; the number of operational buses reduced.
The impact of CARTA’s cutbacks hit the Visitor Center.
“We saw a decrease in the number of people stopping at the Visitor Center,” notes Willson. “Now they’re coming back.”
The comeback was sparked in June when CARTA received $6.5 million from the half-cent sales tax. The funding increased CARTA’s bus routes from seven to 17, its number of operational buses from nine to 29 and restored previously cut services.
June launched the first phase of CARTA’s rebirth. The second phase will begin Jan. 1, 2006. By that time, CARTA, which will get an additional $9 million of half-cent sales tax funding, will have 17 new, smaller buses designed to serve neighborhoods rather than the region. Commuters can board these express buses from park-and-ride stations. Service will extend to the Charleston International Airport, Isle of Palms, Sullivan’s Island and other high-traffic areas.
Although CARTA’s second rejuvenation phase is aimed more at Lowcountry residents than tourists, Willson says he thinks the Visitor Center will feel the transit authority’s continued resurgence with the bus pass program becoming more popular.
“I think it’s going to grow,” he says.
Dennis Quick is senior staff writer at the Business Journal. E-mail him at dquick@charlestonbusiness.com.
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