Rock Hill, Fort Mill mayors talk mass transit in York County. ‘We’re 10 years too late’
Mayors in Rock Hill and Fort Mill say it’s past time to nail down a potential mass transit route, and it needs to happen soon or the area could lose an opportunity.
“We’ve got to recognize that at some point in time I-77 is going to be a big parking lot, unless we change things,” said Rock Hill Mayor John Gettys.
Gettys and his mayor counterpart Guynn Savage in Fort Mill, along with York County and transportation officials, discussed the need Friday for a defined route to lighten the load of I-77 between Rock Hill and Charlotte. Officials mentioned setting up a committee, but didn’t take any formal action.
The conversation stemmed from potentially unprecedented work in this area to upgrade I-77 interchanges.
The Gold Hill Road interchange is under construction. Plans are in place for construction at S.C. 160 near Kingsley and Baxter. There are smaller upgrades expected at the Dave Lyle Boulevard exit in Rock Hill. The Cherry and Celanese roads interchange has money slated for construction, and a new exit is on the way to serve the coming Carolina Panthers headquarters.
“Once one finishes it’s really time for the next interchange to start,” said Berry Mattox with the South Carolina Department of Transportation.
Even that large amount of work, though, will go only so far to help with transportation.
“We’ve got projects that are either planned or active,” said administrator David Hooper with the Rock Hill-Fort Mill Area Transportation Study. “These are necessary and, candidly, long overdue.”
An option for mass transit
Elected and transportation officials met as the RFATS policy committee. York County Councilman Tom Audette, also a member, asked if all the road construction and interchange planning involved something like a monorail along I-77.
“If we don’t start now and we wait, we may miss the best opportunity to get the best plan in place,” he said.
Savage agreed that a monorail, or other mass transit options, should be a near-term focus. Officials say if there isn’t a transit corridor or potential plan in place, it’s harder to make what would have to be a bi-state and multi-jurisdictional plan happen.
“It’s not going to be a possibility if we don’t start that now,” Savage said.
Gettys said this area competes with “every other ring city” encircling Charlotte, for resources to make transit happen. There have been studies and more informal recommendations in the past, but not the identified transit track or corridor officials discussed Friday.
“We’ve been waiting long enough to see that happen,” Gettys said. “We’re 10 years too late. We really need to see some progress.”
RFATS administrator David Hooper said there are plans in the works.
A regional transit group known as CONNECT Beyond aims to bring together a 12-county region to develop plans that could include a monorail, light rail, commuter rail or bus rapid transit. The Charlotte MOVES task force is a similar effort aimed at expansion of public transit in the region. The Beyond 77 project tackles transit from Rock Hill to I-40 in North Carolina.
Just last week CONNECT Beyond officials released early work on how to sync bus service for the many communities, like Rock Hill, that offer it in the Charlotte metro. Last fall, the same group identified a list of high capacity transit corridors that included the U.S. 21 area through Fort Mill.
More detailed transit plans could emerge for the RFATS group to discuss this year.
Commuting numbers high
Two reasons mass transit to Charlotte hasn’t happened yet are population growth and funding. Yet York County and northern Lancaster County keep growing.
In 2019, the last year before COVID-19 skewed area traffic count data, SCDOT showed I-77 at Carowinds and the North Carolina border with 176,000 daily vehicle trips. Even if each vehicle only had one person in it, that total would represent more than 60% of the York County population.
South Carolina workforce department data shows 29% of York, Lancaster and Chester county workers in 2010 left the county for work. More than 36,000 of them — more than 12 times any other area — went into Mecklenburg County. In York County it was more than 40% of workers leaving the county, overwhelmingly to Mecklenburg County. York County Economic Development data puts the outflow of workers by 2019 at 34%.
As recently as 2019, the RFATS policy committee looked into transit as the group voted to update a 13-year-old study on possible corridors. A common concern with transit questions is the massive cost that connections into Charlotte would have. Yet, officials say, with expanding populations and only so much even a reworked interstate can handle, other costs have to be considered too.
”The longer we wait, the harder and more expensive it gets,” Savage said.
This story was originally published March 29, 2021 at 2:36 PM with the headline "Rock Hill, Fort Mill mayors talk mass transit in York County. ‘We’re 10 years too late’."
