Underfunded Greenlink not keeping up with economic growth.

As the central city in a region of growth, Greenville is coming down with Atlanta-like symptoms.

One of them is a sort of interconnectedness that causes, among other things, more people to travel for work from one town to another, or one county to another.

No one seems to think the city's public transit system, Greenlink, will be a magic solution not for congestion and not for workforce mobility. But a lot of people think it has a key role to play in both. It's a system everyone wants but no one has been willing to pay the price to enhance it and certainly not the price to be out ahead of community growth, according to Jason Zacher, senior vice president for business advocacy for the Greenville Chamber.

"We don't have a history of spending on the transit system," he said. "We don't have a commitment to it."

The Greenville Chamber has made better funding for Greenlink its top local legislative priority. Those priorities were decided after polling business leaders and a series of meetings and talks. To them, a better system makes sense for everyone, not just bus passengers.

"Expanding Greenlink is a critical business recruitment and retention issue," Zacher said. "Mass transit is not a social service. It is critical infrastructure and should be treated as such. Greenlink is drastically underfunded compared to our peer communities across the Southeast. In a metro area our size, it is essential that we are able to move residents to work, education and healthcare."

One challenge for Greenlink is doing a better job moving people along 11 routes with the 19 buses they have. Another is expanding and adding routes and even linking to transit systems in neighboring communities.

Nicole McAden, marketing and public affairs manager for Greenlink, said the system has plans for both, but can't do either without more money, especially the latter challenge of expanding or adding routes.

According to data compiled by Piedmont Health Foundation, Greenlink is not even close in funding to systems in some peer cities identified for similar size, and singled out by the Greenville Chamber because they compete with Greenville for some workers. On a per capita basis, Greenlink gets $3.80 in public funding. The second-lowest city on the list was Nashville, at $27.69, and Chattanooga, Tenn., beats that by $3.50 with $31.19 in per capita funding. Columbia was the highest of the group, at $56.05.

Zacher said those numbers fluctuate some years because some of the cities...