On May 22, Rock Hill will end its free, all-electric, MyRide bus service after seven years.
MyRide was the country’s first all-electric bus fleet to have been started as such. But the buses the city bought from Proterra -- which were supposed to last for 10 years -- began to wear out in about three years. And with the Covid pandemic cutting ridership in a third and a bankruptcy by Proterra in 2021, the city was unable to replace -- or even repair -- buses.
Proterra’s proprietary technologies were bought by companies not interested in city bus fleets, leaving Rock Hill to poach parts from its existing buses to keep ever-fewer vehicles rolling. Last year, the fleet dropped from four buses to two; earlier this year, the city cut Saturday MyRide service as a way to keep a pair of patched-together vehicles limping along.
After a 30-day public comment period -- the minimum amount of time required by law to hear comment -- city officials announced that MyRide would end. The city made the announcement on May 12, less than 24 hours after public comment closed.
What had been touted to be a chariot to build the city’s poorest residents and neighborhoods into working, shopping, mobile communities became too big an issue for city officials to resolve. But riders and social services providers in Rock Hill say the city did not prepare for problems with the bus fleet, and that by taking away a free, predictable source of transportation, the city’s most vulnerable people will be forced to figure out yet another thing to patch their lives together to make them work.
MyRide ends this Friday. The following Monday, May 25, riders in the city in search of public transit will have to rely on York County Access (YCA) -- a countywide demand-response service that preceded the city’s public transit option before MyRide rolled out in 2019.
Unlike the free bus system, YCA charges $2.50 per ride. Also unlike MyRide, YCA will take passengers from anywhere in the county to anywhere in the county, as opposed to operating along a fixed bus route in only city limits.
City officials say the new system -- or, rather, the return to the previous system -- of public transit in Rock Hill is better equipped to serve riders.
“ York County Access has been running the entire time that MyRide Rock Hill has been in service, and even before,” said Jeremy Winkler, Rock Hill’s director of government affairs. “It's always been an option for people to use to get to places that MyRide did not get them to, and so that's why we're pivoting to that.”
The city contributes $3.95 per mile to subsidize YCA rides that originate Rock Hill and will continue doing so. Winkler said the total budget for MyRide in fiscal 2025-26 was $1.7million. The city was responsible for half; the Federal Transit Administration (FTA) funded the other half.
“The proposed budget for demand-response service is $1.1million, again with the city being responsible for 50% of that total,” he wrote in an email.
So, the city still has a financial stake in public transit. Mayor John Gettys said “ We're not walking away from the table. We're using the funds we have and matching those funds to continue to make transportation available to anybody who needs it.”
But a lot of people who’ve used MyRide, and who say that they’ve come to depend on it, believe the city is indeed walking away, regardless of its continuing financial obligations to YCA.
“This is going to be a really, really bad,” said Edward Caraway. “It's going to be a travesty.”
Caraway has used MyRide from its earliest days, to get to work -- he helps people experiencing homelessness get back on their feet -- and to other places in town. He said hundreds of people have come to rely on the bus, and that in conversations with several riders, he’s found that most feel as if city officials are going to turn back any progress they’ve made by having invested in the bus.
“I can't really think of the words to describe just how bad it's going to be for this community,” Caraway said. “I personally feel that a city that does not have an adequate transportation system is not a sound city.”
Jack Castle, who is experiencing homelessness in Rock Hill, said employment among those most in need of keeping any work they have will suffer without a bus system.
“The general consensus is, people that are trying to find jobs, or have jobs, are going to be put at a disadvantage,” Castle said.
He also is not convinced that YCA will be able to handle what’s coming. MyRide has provided about 4,000 rides per week since ridership picked up after the Covid lull in 2023 and 2024.
YCA Executive Director Lauren Giles said her agency’s fleet currently provides about 200 rides -- a combination of passengers and stops -- per day and that she expects the numbers to double. That would put YCA in the position of providing about 2,500 rides per week. The agency is adding a few vehicles and drivers to its rolls.
“There are going to be some growing pains,” Giles said. “But … I think that we'll be able to handle that influx.”
Castle, though, said he’s experienced too many delays with YCA service now, without the enormous demand he’s expecting will come from a lack of MyRide buses.
“ It's going to be overwhelmed,” he said of the YCA fleet. “We use the Access bus there at the shelter on Saturdays. And my experience with the Access bus on Saturdays is, we just don't know when it's going to get there. It could be an hour, hour-and-a-half before they get there, and that's sort of like every Saturday.”
Giles acknowledged that communication has sometimes not worked out between drivers and riders. She said YCA gets as many accolades as complaints.
One thing that’s intended to help reduce unanswered calls and missed rides, though, is an online portal to schedule rides, as far as two weeks out.
“Currently, you have to call in with [YCA], speak to someone or leave a message and they'll call you back to schedule a ride,” Winkler said. “With the online portal that'll be much quicker, so you won't have to wait for that call back.”
But like the people they serve, the city’s social services providers are leery about what Rock Hill will be like post-MyRide.
“The problem with calling Access to make an appointment is that most of our guests, the seniors, they don't have apps on their phone,” said Jan Stephenson, executive director of the Dorothy Day Soup Kitchen. “They don't have Wi-Fi. The younger, the unhoused, they have a difficult time keeping up with devices and so forth. It's just a very unfortunate situation.”
Monday through Friday, probably the most crowded bus of the day drops passengers off across from Dorothy Day on Crawford Road. Stephenson said between 100 and 140 people eat at the soup kitchen daily. And she is worried about the visitors she and her staff feed five days per week simply being able to get here.
Stephenson said she is working with YCA to develop a more scheduled pickup route for people who are regulars at Dorothy Day.
Courtney Denton, executive director of Life House Women’s Shelter, said she is working on the same kind of route system to make sure the women Life House serves can get to the shelter and to jobs.
Denton also said the death of the bus system puts service providers in the transportation business.
“Right now, what we are doing is trying to figure out how we could run the morning van in the afternoons, and do we have staff to help do that,” Denton said. “Do we have any bandwidth with our staff that can help do that? Are we needing to look to hire someone to do that? Are we needing to recruit another team of volunteers to run afternoon routes? Are we needing to look at the purchase of another van?”
Another after-effect of MyRide ending, said Stephenson, is that people experiencing homelessness will likely start collecting downtown again. Seven years ago, one of the things having a bus system -- and moving all social services out to Cherry Road -- did was to move people around and away from the Old Town business district.
Business owners downtown have generally supported getting people in need of services to those services elsewhere.
Just outside of Old Town, the Saluda Corridor is home to Clinton College, Dorothy Day Soup Kitchen, community-level medical services, and several businesses frequented by many of the city’s poorest bus riders. Some businesspeople there are concerned that the very people for whom MyRide was a benefit will be hurt by the fleet’s absence.
Ernest Brown, the president of the Saluda Corridor Business Association, said the disappearance of MyRide is a disinvestment in the sector of the community that needs it most, along what was among the most used routes in Rock Hill.
“It’s unfortunate that decisions have been made by people who’ve never been unemployed, who have never been homeless, who have never been sick without any other way of getting to medical services,” Brown said. “They don’t really know what they’re doing to people by taking away just the minimum service that helps so many people.”
Giles said she is sympathetic to the reality people will face by being asked to adjust to a new normal. But she knows what YCA will be up against.
“It’s hard from our perspective, as well, to bear the brunt of, ‘Well, you're the only option, but you're not a great option,’ Giles said. We'd like to be a great option, but I understand why we're not.”
She said it is fortunate for the city that there will be a transportation system in place, but that she knows it won't be an option for everyone.
“Hopefully,” she said, “it'll be an option for most.”
