West Columbia OK’d a new bus stop. New crime data has made them reconsider
After giving initial approval for an Atlanta-based charter bus company to move across the river from Columbia, the city of West Columbia could send the company back to the drawing board.
Southeastern Stages took riders from its stop in north Columbia to nearby cities like Charlotte and Myrtle Beach before a recent expansion of the Stanley Steemer that shared the building with the company caused the company to look for a new home, representatives for Southeastern Stages told the city’s board of zoning appeals in February. The bus company must be out of its Columbia location by the end of this month, a representative told The State.
The charter bus group thought it had settled on a new home in the old Steve’s deli at 1471 Platt Springs Road after it got approval in February to be used for selling tickets and picking up bus riders. But after the city’s police chief, Marion Boyce, sent a letter to the planning director with concerns about crime rates at the company’s former Columbia location, the board unanimously voted Tuesday night to reconsider its initial approval at its next meeting in May. The move came after the board voted earlier in the meeting to amend its bylaws, giving it the ability to reconsider previous approvals if new information is presented.
Robin Jones, a representative for Southeastern Stages, said the company has begun looking for other locations outside of West Columbia as a result of the vote.
“We were completely blindsided by this and we are just trying to figure out what path we need to take at this point,” Jones told The State.
According to data provided to West Columbia by the Columbia Police Department, the existing Southeastern bus stop saw 528 reported incidents, which included public disorderly conduct, drunkenness and loitering, from January 2022 to 2025. The police department received 155 calls for service between March 2024 and 2025, the letter from Boyce said.
“Given the history of incidents in Columbia, this information may be relevant for considerations regarding licensing, regulation, law enforcement monitoring or other relevant concerns,” the letter read.
But the company tells a different story. Jones said after the proposed bus stop in West Columbia was given initial approval, the company reached out to the police department about adding a substation nearby to mitigate any safety concerns and that the department was “on board with it.”
“We’re not bad people, we’re just trying to operate a business like everybody else. We wanted to bring bus service to the city of West Columbia. We weren’t trying to cause any problems,” Jones said.
When reached by The State, Boyce indicated that there has been no movement on potentially adding a substation near Southeastern’s proposed location.
“The West Columbia Police Department currently has no substations in the City of West Columbia nor are there any plans to add substations in the City of West Columbia,” the chief said in a statement.
Aside from the city’s concerns about crime at the proposed location in West Columbia, the S.C. Department of Transportation said in a letter that it would require a traffic study be completed in order for the project to move forward.
“Looking at the site, it appears there is limited room for vehicle and bus parking. So we will ask that the study evaluate on-site traffic flows and parking to ensure that queues entering the bus depot don’t spill into the roadways,” a memo to the city’s zoning board said.
