Greenville transportation planners looking to win big

The vision is both ambitious and agonizingly doable, but it all depends on beating improbable odds.

Imagine a fleet of buses powered by electricity, forming a regional transportation system spanning Greenville County.

There would be Gold Line from Travelers Rest to Fountain Inn and a Blue Line from Greer to the former Donaldson Center, both intersecting through the downtown core of Greenville.

The system would connect people in poor neighborhoods to jobs they struggle to reach today.

The Swamp Rabbit Trail would run for more than 20 miles alongside the line's north-to-south stretch, with bike-share stations placed along both lines to encourage transportation that saves energy and protects air quality.

The problem isn't one of feasibility. It's one of intense competition.

The federal government has set aside $500 million in a special fund for projects like this.

But when a coalition of city of Greenville and Greenville County leaders present their case later this month, the project will be but a fraction of what is sure to be an overwhelming flood of applications.

Get the money: The vision — shovel-ready — is realized.

Lose out: The plans are filed away for another, uncertain day.

"This is a one-time shot," said Mark Rickards, director of Greenlink, the city-owned entity contracted by the Greenville Transit Authority to provide public transportation in the area.

Greenlink has joined the city and county in an application to the U.S. Department of Transportation for the federal agency's so-called TIGER funds, a pot of money dedicated to fund "transformative" transportation projects that are otherwise difficult to pay for.

Last year, when the city and county failed in a solicitation of TIGER discretionary grant funds to improve the Swamp Rabbit Trail, 797 applicants from every U.S. state and territory competed for $600 million — a total of $9 billion in requests.

Only 72 projects received funding — though South Carolina did receive one, a $10 million grant to revitalize of a 1.3-mile stretch of Columbia's North Main Street.

"It's a good, big shot in the arm, at one time, that can be transformational for the area," said Julie Horton, the city's governmental relations manager.

Still, leaders here say they have learned from past mistakes.

Mainly, stay focused.

The project

The plan is laid out in a simple map that resembles the transit systems of larger metropolitan areas.

The system would depend on buying nine, no-emission, electricity-powered buses and two EV charging stations to create an express bus service complemented with bicycle travel.

The Gold Line would start in downtown Travelers Rest and run along the course of the Swamp Rabbit Trail through Furman University and Cherrydale Shopping Center.

It would pass through the West Greenville community, on to the Greenlink Transfer Center downtown and then through the East Washington and Ackley/Nicholtown communities en route to a new central transfer station at the University Center.

From there, it would run generally along a planned extension of the Swamp Rabbit Trail to Haywood Mall, Verdae, CU-ICAR and through the central business districts of Mauldin, Simpsonville and Fountain Inn.

The CU-ICAR stop would connect with the current bus route to Clemson University.

The Blue Line would run from downtown Greer through Taylors, passing by Bob Jones University and the TD Covention Center before meeting with the Gold Line at the University Center.

The Blue Line would continue on to Greenville Tech and the Augusta Road neighborhood and end at the South Carolina Aviation and Technology Center, formerly known as the Donaldson Center.

Electric bus stations with electronic pay equipment would be spaced along each route. Out of 24 total stations, all but eight of them would feature bike-share systems.

The current bus system stretches outward from Greenville to farther reaches like Furman, Taylors, Simpsonville and SCTAC.

The new system would reduce ride times by half and extend hours of operation to accommodate shift changes and workers with flexible employment hours.

"There are a lot of jobs that go unfilled because people simply can't get to them," Horton said.

The strategy

The group working to get the funds has had to act quickly.

Three weeks ago, they learned of a May 5 deadline to file a pre-application and a June 5 deadline for a final application, said Butch Kirven, the County Council's vice chairman and chairman of the Greenville-Pickens Area Transportation Study Policy Committee.

The grant fund is a vestige of the federal stimulus money set aside amid the Great Recession for "shovel-ready" projects. The program has doled out more than $4.1 billion since 2009.

Urban projects submitted must be for a minimum of $10 million.

The group filed a $13.7 million project application last year for money to improve the 18-mile Swamp Rabbit Trail.

In addition to the improvements, money would have gone to buy three electric buses manufactured by Greenville-based Proterra to operate on Laurens and Haywood roads.

In a letter as part of that grant application, Proterra said it would provide buses at a discount so that it could showcase its product in its hometown.

This time around, after conversations with the U.S. DOT about what the grant evaluators are looking for, the focus is narrower and dedicated to transportation.

"They don't mean speculative and experimental 'Jetsons' cars and all that," Kirven said. "What they mean is something practical that will have an immediate impact on the community. In the past, we've been too expansive, throwing a lot of things in there that would be nice to have but maybe not essential."

The area has been successful once, on a smaller scale. In 2010, the city of Greenville received a $1.8 million TIGER "planning grant" to fund what has become the West Side Comprehensive Plan.

The application for this round of money will connect with the findings of the West Side plan, which calls for greater connectivity for an area in need of transportation.

The submission also incorporates the planned $6.3 million extension of the Swamp Rabbit Trail from Cleveland Park to CU-ICAR along an abandoned rail line.

The city has already pledged $2.5 million to the project with the expectation that county would pay for the bridges need for the 3.4-mile extension.

The grant application brings together more than 40 public, private and not-for-profit regional partners.

Last week, the Greenville Chamber of Commerce circulated a request for organizations to sign on to a letter addressed to U.S. DOT Secretary Anthony Foxx.

In a letter to Foxx, Verdae Development president and CEO Richard Sumerel wrote that plans to develop the 1,100-acre Hollingworth property always assumed that a multi-modal transportation corridor "would be an integral part of the development scenario."

The company plans to invest $1 million to build at least two stations to provide connectivity for pedestrians, cyclists and golf carts, Sumerel wrote.