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The story
As with many communities across the United States, Charleston was served by streetcars that were operated by electric companies. Charleston's streetcar system was operated by the South Carolina Power Company, a predecessor of the South Carolina Electric & Gas Company (SCE&G). Charleston's streetcars ran until 1938, when they were replaced with buses. The switch to buses was widely viewed as a modernization of the transit system at the time; the president of the South Carolina Power Company argued that buses were "faster, more comfortable, and easily adjustable to emergencies" compared to streetcars.
Over the next few decades, SCE&G sought to reduce bus service and divest itself from the bus system. This culminated in negotiations between SCE&G and the City of Charleston in 1996 to transfer responsibility for the bus system to the city. In 1997, the City of Charleston, the City of North Charleston, the Town of Mount Pleasant and Charleston County joined together to create the Charleston Area Regional Transportation Authority (CARTA) as a formal political entity.
As part of the negotiations between SCE&G and the City of Charleston, SCE&G was to pay for the operation of the CARTA system for seven years. During this time, CARTA struggled to find new sources of funding to replace SCE&G's funding. A series of half-cent sales tax proposals, which would have provided funding to CARTA, were proposed but shot down in 2000 and 2002. As a result, CARTA was forced to reduce service in October 2002 and cease most of its operations in January 2004; during this time, it relied on emergency funding from state and federal funding streams to keep it from being liquidated. In early November 2004, a new half-cent sales tax referendum was passed, providing CARTA with the revenue to relaunch many of the services that were eliminated or consolidated due to insufficient funding. CARTA even added new routes and services throughout their rebuilding phases, as was the case with the launch of CARTA Express in January 2007.
From 2004 onwards, CARTA's ridership increased year-over-year. In 2012, CARTA reported its busiest year of operations, with nearly five million riders and a weekday average of over 15,000 riders.
From Wikipedia’s article on Charleston Area Regional Transportation Authority, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.3