No one rides the bus

"Oh, but no one rides the bus. Maybe down in the city, but out here in Independence? No one rides it. Unless they don't have a car, I suppose."

"Oh, well, but no one rides the bus, really. It used to be a really good system, with street cars and almost light rail, but now it's just buses, and no one rides them."

I spent a week in June in Kansas City, Missouri (turns out, it DOES exist!), riding the bus. I was in town to do some research. I couldn't afford a rental car, and I hate driving in an unfamiliar city anyway. Before I left home, I checked Google maps and the Kansas City Area Transit Authority for information about the buses. The bus map looked fairly comprehensive - I could fairly easily get to where I needed to get to, with only a short walk at either end of the bus route. However, when I mentioned my plan to my hosts, the immediate response was "Oh, but no one rides the buses!"

Let me tell you, lots and lots of people ride the buses in Kansas City and Independence Missouri.[1] Over a week, out of 18 rides, I rode a total of only three buses which were not full for most of the trip. The first was the bus from the airport to downtown Kansas City. For $1.50 (actually, only $1, because I was short $.50)[2], I rode a route that would have cost me at least $50 by taxi. On that trip, with my driver telling me about the city, we picked up one other person. I don't know how she would have gotten downtown if the bus had not been running, but she clearly knew the bus was coming, because she was waiting at one of the stops. The two of us rode the bus all the way downtown.

The second time I rode an almost empty bus was on Tuesday morning. I spent Sunday night with a guy in Independence, about two miles from the library, and on Monday morning I walked to the library. Monday night, I relocated to stay with a lady actually in the city, which meant a totally different bus. The bus that goes between downtown KC and downtown Independence is the #24, and the route is complicated - the #24 doesn't go the whole length of its route every time it leaves downtown KC. On Tuesday morning, I managed to catch the bus that goes half of the way there, and then tranferred to the bus that goes 3/4s of the way there, and finally ended up on a little jitney bus[3] that toodles around Independence. That bus was mostly not full - I think one other person got on the bus with me at the beginning of the route.

The third time I rode an almost empty bus was on Friday, and everyone that got on the bus was surprised that it was almost empty. It may have had something to do with route changes caused by construction and major events in downtown KC. So. If, over the course of week (during which I rode four buses a day, for about three hours a day) only three buses were less than full, that must mean that for most of the week the buses were full. Clearly then, people ride the bus in Kansas City and Independence. Who does rides the bus?

People of colour ride the bus. Lots of African Americans and Latin@ people, but also Asians. Kansas City has a highly diverse racial mix - that mix is not fully represented on the buses, because, mostly, white people don't ride the buses. Unless they are young (college students ride the bus), or poor (people in fast food restaurant uniforms ride the bus; people in ragged, dirty clothes ride the bus; people in the universal uniform of the blue collar worker ride the bus), or disabled (people with walkers ride the bus; people who talk to themselves, or twitch uncontrollably, or have the physical signs of Downs Syndrome ride the bus), or old (people with grey hair and wrinkles ride the bus).

So, when people told me "but no one rides the bus!," what they really meant was "but no one [like me and you] rides the bus!" These were very nice people, socially aware - one was a lawyer who has a small practice because, after working at a big money firm, he's realized that he doesn't need marble on the floor or mahogany on the walls. Another is a member of the local Unitarian Universalist church, and deeply engaged in social justice work. But they don't ride the bus.

This is a problem. Obviously, it's a social blindness issue - it's easy to say "no one rides the bus" if the speaker does not ride the bus - and, in saying it, it becomes easier to render the people who DO ride the bus into "no one." I certainly don't think either of my hosts consciously was doing this - the work they do speaks to the contrary. Still, it's easy to think of a whole group of people as "my clients" or "the people the church helps" instead of "my friends," or "my fellow congregants" - especially if the only time you are likely to see them outside of the "client" relationship is on the bus, which you don't ride.

This is kind of a meta-problem as well, because it's also a problem for bus companies. Bus companies need people like my hosts to ride the bus. Bus systems cannot afford to continue running on the income they get from fares but they can't raise the price to ride the bus too much, or they will lose their riders. This puts bus companies in a Catch-22 situation - if they act to become profitable, they will lose riders, and go out of business; if they act to retain riders, they will cease to be profitable, and they will be driven out of business by people who see profits as the highest good.

That's only one of the catches though Bus networks don't always go to where people want them. My morning trip involved a half hour wait for the right bus plus a twenty minute walk at the end of the ride. So if the bus ran to exactly where I needed to go, it would run empty for that last leg of the run most of the time. At least, unless there were other people who would have taken the bus, except they didn't want to make a twenty minute walk at the end of their trip - but how can you possibly tell? And until people realize that they can take the bus to where they want to go, the bus runs empty.

Buses run to where their riders are. And, because the sort of person who rides the bus often doesn't have a lot of money, the sort of places the bus drives through are - less than scenic. I saw a lot of industrial stuff, and a lot of run down buildings, but not a lot of the sort of thing tourists might be interested in. Perhaps people don't ride the bus because it offers an impression of their city that they would rather not have.

Further, the buses run smoothly … on paper. In the evening, the second bus I caught (the one that, on Friday, was almost empty) was not on schedule even once. Every evening, I watched my bus take three changes of the light to clear an intersection. That's almost five minutes to travel a stretch of road twice the length of the bus itself. Why? Cars turning through the intersection made it impossible for the bus to go straight. That, I think, is the ultimate irony here - more people don't ride the bus because too many people don't ride the bus.

The solution to this problem is complicated, because the problem is vast. Indeed, there may well be lots of solutions. Here's one: Ottawa has a world class bus system (or, at least, it had - I haven't had a chance to use it recently). All through downtown, it has dedicated bus lanes - even whole streets that are reserved for buses at certain times of the day. Outside of the downtown core, it has a Transitway - a backbone system of high-speed buses travelling on a dedicated network of roads between the suburbs and downtown. In the suburbs, smaller bus routes connect into the Transitway and thus provide transportation within and between suburban communities. It is entirely possible to take a bus in Ottawa to pretty much any other place in Ottawa, for a tiny fraction of the cost of a taxi, with a minimum of waiting.

True, there are still places that it's hard to get to and certain times - I remember running out the door of a workplace (to disastrous results - there was an injury as a result of my hurried negligence, and I lost the job) in order to catch a bus so that I wouldn't have to wait at an unsheltered bus stop for an hour for the next bus. I also remember working until well past two in the morning one Canada Day[4] (different job - a one-time thing slinging hot dogs), and having to walk home because the buses had stopped running at convenient times. All the same, I didn't get a driver's license until I was in university, and then it was mostly so that I could drive out of the city to visit friends who were not on the bus route. I continued to use buses for most of my transportation needs until my wife and I left the city - and we've used the buses since then when visiting.

Building a network like this requires a lot of advance planning - where to put the Transitway, which routes to have running at which times, and no doubt many other problems that I simply not thinking about. It also requires a lot of political will to keep running - as far as I know, Ottawa Transit doesn't turn a profit. Despite this, the buses were always clean, well maintained, and comfortable. The drivers were courteous and efficient; also (perhaps, because), well paid with good benefits.

KCATA is part of the way there. The buses I rode were all comfortable modern buses, with nicely padded seats. They were clean and well maintained, inside and out. The drivers were pleasant, and both willing and able to provide me with information that I needed to get to where I needed to go, even while being very busy driving buses.[5] Along the main routes in downtown KC, there were big signs at each of the conveniently placed stops, letting riders know when the next bus was coming, and which bus it was. Many of the bus stops had bus shelters (important in the rain or the snow, of some benefit in the heat and the cold.) And, for the most part, the buses were full.

Gas prices don't seem likely to go down significantly any time in the near future (if at all), so I predict that the residents of Kansas City and Independence will increasingly ride the bus. And I think that will probably result in a better Kansas City. To the extent that other big US cities adopt similar public transit systems, a better United States, as well. I look forward to a day that the phrase "no one rides the bus" will be unthinkable.

--Mike Timonin
__________

[1] Independence, MO, is just outside Kansas City - it used to be a separate community, but has now been subsumed into the Kansas City Area. That was where I was doing my research, at Truman's Presidential Library. ↩

[2] Bus drivers are often really nice about this sort of thing, because they know that their riders sometimes get caught short this way. He probably could have told me to put in a $20 and given me a change card which I could easily have used over the course of the week I was in town. Next time, assuming there is a next time, I will probably do that.↩

[3] By jitney bus, I mean one of those shorter buses that holds maybe twenty people - the sort of bus that you might see at an airport, serving as a shuttle between the terminals and the parking lots.↩

[4] Canada Day, July 1, is a civic holiday celebrating the formal creation of the nation. At least I think that's what it celebrates. Anyway, it's a big holiday, fireworks, concerts, the whole bit. Since Ottawa is the capital of the country, it's a bigger deal there, perhaps, than elsewhere in the country. It's not hard to find a short term job doing concessions downtown on the big day.↩

[5] An anecdote re: how nice the Kansas City bus drivers are: This was on the jitney around Independence, the second empty bus I rode. Midway along the route, the bus driver looked out her window, and shouted a guy walking along the street, asked him if he was headed home, and if he wanted a ride. He hurried over to the bus, holding his too-big pants up, and the bus driver took him, for free, back to his house. From my non-clinical point of view, he seemed to be suffering from some sort of mental illness, in the way that he responded to questions almost as if he were talking to himself.. He and the bus driver chatted about his sister (she was fine), and about whether he was taking his meds (not all of them). When he got off, she told me that he walked, every day, to a diner where they gave him free coffee, and that he had evidently lost a lot of weight; that he wasn’t doing well. I told her it was nice of her to help him out. She said “Isn’t that why we’re here? To help each other out?” Amen, sister.↩

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Comments

[Dav]

I love my bus system. OI ride both commuter buses (mostly white people in poorer positions - customer service, admin - that work downtown or at a university) and non-commuter buses (mostly the categories you mention above). It's challenging, but I think it's good for me. You learn a lot on a bus.

The final loop of the "buses come to their riders" is the "riders come to the buses". When I look for a job or an apartment or a restaurant or a DMV or *anything*, I have to look on the buslines. That means I pay more in rent so I can get decent bus service. It means my hours of social and work interaction are limited because the buses stop running about midnight.

[Robin Zimmermann, who ought to have been catching a bus a while ago, actually]

The transit system in the Washington DC area is no great shakes, but it's been getting me where I need to go for the past decade or more.

But yeah. One thing I've heard people talk about is the relative cost of subsidizing buses and trains versus subsidizing cars - after all, roads, lights, signs, traffic law enforcement, signals, parking, and so forth aren't free, and they cost more the more cars people drive. I think some people have argued convincingly that many jurisdictions can save money by making the bus free, in fact.

[Brin]

Bus service here would be nice. I hear rumours that village-next-door has a bus into the city, but I don't know where. Even it were at the border closest to us, that's three miles just to begin the trip, and I don't know how difficult that is to walk*. I might well be able to manage it, but my non-driving mom almost certainly couldn't.

*Turns out six-dollar pedometers are utterly useless. I know I can walk for about an hour and a half on flat ground before getting tired, but I have no idea how far a distance that is.

[Literata]

TW: Sexual assault

I'd like to point out that there's also a gender element to the "no one rides the bus" problem: if there's a sociocultural assumption that the people who ride the bus are "not like us," then there's often extra pressure put on women not to ride the bus, especially alone, because it's seen as dangerous specifically for that reason. Then women, especially white women alone, don't ride the bus, lather, rinse, repeat. Whether or not that perception of danger is justified, it can be blown out of proportion, just as the danger of stranger rape when walking through certain parts of a city can be blown out of proportion by sociocultural assumptions.

[Mmy]

One of the universities I (attended/taught at) had a deal with the local bus system. On a number (not all, but a large number) of bus routes you only had to show your student/faculty id to ride the bus for free. I don't know what the deal was between the university and the city (which owned the bus system) but I think it was a win/win/win situation. The university (which was spread out in patches around the city) did not have to provide as much parking for students and faculty / students and faculty saved hundreds of dollars a year in parking costs / the city didn't have to deal with the problem of plowing around cars left stranded for weeks on the street by heavy snow.

For my part it also meant I walked more -- because I knew that if it started to snow/rain I could hop the bus.

The university also had a "special snow day parking policy." When extremely heavy snow falls were predicted the university would let students park their cars overnight for free in the university parking garages. That made plowing the streets faster/easier for the city.

The city has also instituted a free "center of the city" systems of bus routes in the summer. If you drive downtown and park your car in one of the lots you can ride for free on the bus lines that just serve the restaurant/shop/business areas.

Businesses love the service because there are many people who don't like walking in the heat. Apparently these people won't go to shops that don't have parking close by but will shop at stores if the bus stops are very close. The city centre buses will often stop right in front of the shop the passenger wants to go to (the driver will ask) and will stop for people who flag them down.

[Mike Timonin]

One of the universities I (attended/taught at) had a deal with the local bus system. On a number (not all, but a large number) of bus routes you only had to show your student/faculty id to ride the bus for free. I don't know what the deal was between the university and the city (which owned the bus system) but I think it was a win/win/win situation.

Yeah, that's true here in Binghamton too - the big university has a deal which allows free bus service for all students during the school year. In the summer, you have to pay full fare, though - I think it's $1.50? Which isn't awful.

[MaryKaye]

I had your *exact* same experience (my white hosts told me that no one rides the bus, I rode the bus, it was stuffed with non-white people) in Raleigh, South Carolina. A newspaper article during my say said that the bus system was endangered because ridership was flat--the Research Triangle boom in population, which was clogging the roads horrendously, had not led to any increase in ridership.

I don't remember the year--maybe 1996? I wonder what the buses are like there now.

Seattle's system has some issues but it has allowed me to be car-free for twenty years (admittedly I live 1.3 miles from work) and all kinds of people ride it. The risk of assault, sexual or otherwise, is non-zero but not high enough to worry me. After all, people are assaulted when they drive, too. A well-used bus stop might be safer than a parking lot. And you opt out of one entire class of crimes, very common in my neighborhood--car break-ins and thefts.

One thing that really annoys me is that the press--even _The Stranger_, which is usually more liberal--tends to make offhanded comments about how awful buses are because you might meet a mentally ill person. It's true, you do. But (a) it's not the end of the world and (b) pretending they aren't there is crappy social policy. Cars have become these big metal protective suits, and that's not good for our cities.

[Mmy]

@MaryKaye: One thing that really annoys me is that the press--even _The Stranger_, which is usually more liberal--tends to make offhanded comments about how awful buses are because you might meet a mentally ill person. It's true, you do. But (a) it's not the end of the world and (b) pretending they aren't there is crappy social policy. Cars have become these big metal protective suits, and that's not good for our cities.

Among the many, many FAIL aspects of the "mentally ill" charge is the fact that cars are, in a sense, as deadly weapons as are guns. Someone who is angry, confused, upset, frustrated and full of "road rage" is a truly scary person with whom to share a road. Why should we be afraid of the "mentally ill" person on the bus and not afraid of them if they are driving a car? Or is this an issue of class yet again?

[Literata]

Mary Kaye, perhaps you mean Raleigh, North Carolina, near the RTC area?

[Leum]

The main problem with the buses here is that they're so damn infrequent. If you miss a bus, you have to wait a whole hour for the next one to come by. And since they aren't all that reliable in terms of arriving on time, it becomes really impractical to ride them. That said, with rising gas prices, I plan to ride the bus more this winter and bike whenever possible this summer.

[sarah]

I ride the bus quite a bit here in Philly, though I mostly use the trolley because it basically goes right past my house. I don't own a car. My housemate does, which is great for things like grocery shopping and going to things on the other side of the city. For the most part, I do public transit. I'm usually one of the only white people on my particular trolley, especially once it goes past Drexel. But on a lot of other buses and trolleys, you see people of all different ethnicities.

I'd say the "no one rides the bus" thing is less prevalent here. Philly's got a fairly extensive bus system. Grumbling about SEPTA (Southeast PA Transportation Authority) seems to be a universal thing for Philadelphians--we all stand around at the stop and look at our watches and mutter about how late the bus/trolley/train is. The thing about buses (and trolleys, to some extent) is that they tend to be less reliable than the subway/el, especially in the evenings and on the weekends.

[Dav]

Leum, I pay an extra 100 a month to live in a place where buses run a minimum of every 30 minutes (and during commuter hours, it's somewhere between 8-15). Worth every single penny, and a privilege a lot of people don't have - especially the commuter lines. It makes HUGE difference - basically when I go to work, I just go stand at the stop and pick up the next ride. Even when they're not running on time, it's never more than 35 minutes.

[Laiima]

When I worked in the Loop in Chicago, many years ago, I took a bus for commuters to the train station, commuter trains into and out of the city, and a commuter bus back home. I knew plenty of people who took city buses, but I mostly walked everywhere I needed to go, while downtown. Occasionally I worked a Saturday on the north side, and took the el up there. My family was horrified that I would be so reckless with my own safety , but not only did I never have any problems on the el, I quite enjoyed the diversity of riders.

Whenever Spouse and I have visited Chicago, we take the el, and have also taken city buses.

I did take buses and the Metro when I was in greater DC for a business trip 5 years ago. Driving in DC is as undesirable as driving in Chicago. We take the Metro whenever we're visiting the capitol, like last weekend.

I was really excited to move to the Baltimore area, since they have mass transit, and we are very near the end of the line stop for Baltimore's light rail. Spouse actually took the train to and from interviews for the job that got us out here. The train was almost empty, and it went through some really sketchy neighborhoods. And apparently it is not reliable at all. Such that people who would use it for commuting to their jobs would probably lose those jobs because they would be late so often. So we've never ridden it together, and I haven't ridden it separately. (Not that I have any need to go to Baltimore city.)

But now I'm wondering if there are buses going somewhere I'd like to go that I could be taking. Food for thought.

[Lonespark]

Damn, this is a beautiful post.

I love public transportation so much! It makes me happy every damn time I ride the T, although it upsets me that the fares keep going up. Even unemployed I can afford it. The people who really, really need it can't.

My brother rides the T, including several buses, to get everywhere.
Now we got him my recently deceased grandmother's ancient Subaru, and that's convenient when he needs to drive to gigs in central MA and such.

I frequently hope I will meet Izzy on the subway, but I'm not sure I'd know it if I did.

[Lonespark]

My impression is the Phoenix has (well, had) a pretty decent bus system, with lots of nice express buses. But the roads seldom had cutouts for the bus, which seemed dumb since so many of the roads were relatively new. And the lightrail was great, too.

My Angry White Dood co-workers rode the bus. They were extremely underpaid government workers who couldn't afford not to. But they hated it and resented the people they had to share the ride with. My husband rode the lightrail to work every day until the hospital told him that only day-shift nurses were allowed to use the special subsidized passes. I would have ridden it, too, except it didn't stop near my kids' daycare and there weren't any nearby park-and-rides. Plus parking in Phoenix alarmingly cheap compared to Boston.

[Mau de Katt]

That's the same problem here where I live (Denver), too. I've taken the bus as my regular mode of transportation many times, and the demographics and schedule/traffic problems are very similar to what you've said.

The buses are always jammed SRO during the peak hours (getting-to-work & going-home-from-work times), so I *know* they are being used, a *lot*. But the roads are also crammed with traffic, and at least 2/3 of the cars are SUVs & big-ass pickups. (We Coloradoans LUUUUVVVVV our SUVs and pickups.)

Fortunately we do have a growing Light-rail system (at least it *was* growing, before Bu$hCo policies), and it had expanded to run down into the big Tech-industrial "showpiece" white-collar business districts. But the buses *still* don't go where they need to go a lot of the time, and they are intensely time-consuming. My evening errands, which would take me an hour-and-a-half tops by car, took me over four hours to complete by bus. Most of that time was spent waiting for buses and connecting transfers, and in all kinds of inclement weather as well.

But any *real* public transportation planning, and most importantly FUNDING, is Socialism OMGZ! And probably French and Gay, to boot. So nothing continues to be done at a very fast pace.

[Mau de Katt]

Actually, I should change that. The buses in the suburbs are the ones that have the problems with transfers, wait times, missed connections, long waiting & travel times, etc. If you live right in downtown Denver, the buses and the main lightrail are actually pretty easy to get to and use, I've been told. Of course Downtown Denver suffers from the twin problems of high crime danger and way-too-expensive costs-of-living, so that really doesn't help, either; most of Denver-Metro is suburbs.

[Josh (Enigma32)]

I can only speak from the experience I've accumulated where I'm from, but the bus system here is crappy. It's crappy in a way that shouldn't be legal. I recall riding the bus too and from school (it wasn't a city bus, but it was a school bus run by the same company, MTA) that had a massive hole in the floor, allowing you to look down and see the road. The seats are often uncared for, the floors often unclean, and depending upon what part of town you're in, you run the real risk of being mugged, shot, or both if you're by yourself.

I say this is ironic because we value cars so much, but at the same time, our roads are even worse than the buses are. You can lose your car in a pothole on our roads. Signs that that say "Bump Ahead" are referring to the half-foot hole in the road you can see from a quarter-mile back. You may think that the driver ahead of you is drunk, swerving suddenly into the neighboring lane and then back, until you go over the pothole that they avoided. And you feel it, trust me. The absolute only way this makes any sense is if you look at it from a classist perspective:

In the United States, the car is king. The car is independence; it's individuality, it's a display of wealth. And as was pointed out in above post, the bus is for "other people" - i.e., "poor people", who aren't independent, who don't have that display of wealth. I went for the longest without having a car and having to be driven everywhere, and while nobody came out and told me that, it's certainly subliminal and ingrained in modern American culture. You don't feel like a full person; it's like you're seriously missing out on something, that you're somehow "not like the others." the Othering there is incredibly strong for those who use mass transit, or don't have a vehicle to be driven around in, and it all goes back to the fact that most Americans will value having a car - regardless how crappy the roads are - over using mass transit.

[MaryKaye]

Literata writes: Mary Kaye, perhaps you mean Raleigh, North Carolina, near the RTC area?

Yes, I do. Sorry. I should have looked it up.

[Will Wildman]

In spite of my previous complaints about buses in Ottawa, I'd have to more or less agree with this. Compared to many other places, we're doing quite well. (Well, the waiting if I want to transfer between buses can be bad. I have not seen the system excel there.) The bus lanes can also (when not filled with buses) serve as a bike lane, which I (new appreciator of cyclery) am all in favour of. Mostly I just wish they'd invest in more rail.

I only have a partial driver's license, and on rare occasion I do wish I could drive freely, but I'm pretty comfortable with my car-free lifestyle choice. For one thing, as a relatively unsocial and sheltered individual, one of the things I like about the bus is that it's a point of commonality between myself and all sorts of 'not like you and me' Other People that I'd be less likely to encounter otherwise. I see that as a feature, not a flaw. It's one of my regular connections with the rest of society.

I frequently hope I will meet Izzy on the subway, but I'm not sure I'd know it if I did.

In the distant future, I hope iTunes or something like it will become so omnipresent that everyone in the world gets their own leitmotif.

[Lampdevil]

The busses in my city are pretty decent, and have improved over the 10 years that I've been here. Shortly before or around the time that the recession slammed itself down, the local transit authority started up comex service to the surrounding communities. They're still running, and they're always fairly full when I see them go by, so they're apparently useful to a lot of people. They scoop people up from the surrounding communities, bring 'em down the highway and into the city center, and from there people either go to work in the uptown business center, or hop a bus and ride another 20-30 minutes to where they're going.

They've also put wi-fi in all the busses! Which surprised the heck out of me at first, until they announced their most recent addition, Next Bus when's-my-bus-gonna-get-here service. There's apparently a GPS on all the busses, and you can pop up a website on your cellphone or smart phone or even call a toll-free number, and find out when the next bus will get to your stop. I've only tested it a little, but it's accurate. I look forward to putting it through its paces when winter arrives, and road conditions threaten to leave us all late and frozen.

I suspect some kind of epic Canadian government grant has provided for all of this. The comex busses have the middle white-collar workers who are saving money or the lower white-collar workers who can't keep the car going, but the in-city busses are very much full of the old, the poor, the non-white (mostly students, this being a university city in a mostly-white province) the young, and the mentally ill. Prior to all these updates to the system, there was talk about having to cut back considerably. Maybe they've turned things around? They've had to raise the price of passes (I pay $70 a month for an unlimited adult pass, I think it's $55 for a student/senior all-month pass) but the service has remained the same or improved. Am I right to suspect the government propping things up somewhat? The routes that I take remain comfortably full, perhaps that counts for something...

I love taking the bus. I'm lucky enough that I live in the city center, so there's always a bus for me to hop to get where I need to be, and I enjoy letting someone else worry about all the driving. It doesn't bother me to be in a big metal rolling thing with "other people", because I AM "other people". I had a co-worker that referred to taking the bus as "riding the loser cruiser", and took an eensy bit of offense. It's a cost-effective way to get where you're going, and it's even deductable on your taxes if you buy bus passes! And you'll run into your friends on the way to work and have a chat, sometimes!

I do still intend to learn to drive, get my license, and someday have a car, though. It's a remenant of growing up in the rural parts of the province, where there ARE no busses. If you're going to go anywhere, you need a vehicle. It can be old and cruddy and dangerous and prone to failure... but you've either got a car, or you're on good enough terms with your neighbor or friends or family that they can drive you to work, to the store, to wherever. And then there's the issue of getting referred to a specialist for your medical problem... and the specialist is a 4 hour drive away. Better hope you have someone that can take a day off and get you there, if you want your problem treated. I could never move back to a place like my hometown without first learning to drive and plonking down all the cash for a vehicle. And as mobile as I am within the city, I'm pretty much stuck within its limits. As good as the in-city busses are, the passenger bus service within the region is REALLY AWFUL.

[Timothy (TRiG)]

I love public transport. Tullamore is too small to have a bus system of its own, but it does have a train station, so I take the train to Dublin often enough. In Dublin, I mainly use the LUAS tram, because I find the bus network hard to understand, but if I want to go anywhere off the tram and DART lines, bus is the only way. And the Dublin buses are cheap, clean, and fairly efficient. There are dedicated bus lanes in many parts of the city, including the length of the quays, and O'Connel street is given over entirely to buses for much of the day.

The bus lanes are available for anyone providing a scheduled service, which means that private carriers can use them too, not just Dublin Bus. I'm unaware of any private carriers in Dublin itself, but long-distance carriers traveling to or from Dublin certainly make use of the bus lanes. The main station for the public carrier, Bus Éireann, is Busáras, which is fairly central. Without access to bus lanes, their service would be a lot less efficient.

And yes, access to public transport does affect house prices. Areas on the DART line are a lot pricier than areas off it.

TRiG.

[Mike Timonin]

Damn, this is a beautiful post.

*blush* Lonespark, you just totally made my day!

[Timothy (TRiG)]

"A man who, beyond the age of 26, finds himself on a bus can count himself as a failure."

Margaret Thatcher (attributed; probably apocryphal)

[Izzy]

This is a wonderful post.

I'm in Boston--and would love to run into Lonespark sometime, though likewise not sure I'd recognize her on the subway--and the public transportation here is pretty good as long as you're on the trains. I mean, I get as surly as the next person when a disabled car or a switching problem holds up my commute, but the delay usually isn't that bad.*

The buses are iffier, mostly for the reasons Mike mentions. A separate bus lane would be great. More bus shelters would be *awesome*--a lot of the stops here are on the side of the street, with no overhead shelter at all, which is less than ideal in Boston. And I am a giant proponent of letting anyone work at home who physically can in general, but more so when the weather is inclement--because that means people who *do* have to physically go in to the office will have to deal with far fewer cars on the road, whether they're riding buses or not.

*I get more annoyed at the people who don't get that "stand clear of the doors" means STAND CLEAR OF THE GODDAMN DOORS. Gah.

[Mary Kaye]

I was sitting on a bus once, on the verge of tears, and some guy I never met before asked me what was wrong. I said, I have a lump in my breast, it just got biopsied but I have to wait for the report.

He said, I know exactly how you feel. I had to get tested for HIV and it took days to get the result.

We ended up having a long, intense talk. He was definitely a comfort to me; I hope I was to him as well.

A couple of weeks ago I had a similarly intense conversation, this one political, on a bus coming back from Folklife. A lot of "as a student agitator I think X" "this is how X comes across from the point of view of a faculty senator" and surprising commonalities emerging.

Urban/suburban Americans often don't relate well to people around them. I know I don't have much relationship with my neighbors--ideologically I think I should but I lack the skills and, frankly, motivation. The bus is a place where you can at least make connections, like the library and the public pool, and it's important to me for that.

My local bus stop is also the go-to place for finding out what the area's evil landlord is up to, and that's an issue I should not be ignoring, so that's useful. If he sets up a crack house next to me I want to know before it explodes. If he is tormenting vulnerable renters again, maybe I can do something to help.

[Izzy]

Mary Kaye: And conversely, I--total introvert, not inclined to talk to people unless I know we already have common interests *and* they're a friend of a friend--haven't really had a lot of problems not talking to people on pubtrans. I have a book, I read my book, people don't bother me. If people do bother me, I ignore them and they go away. It's never been an issue.

So it works pretty well, in principle.

That said, in my ideal world, the T would run extra and separate train cars/buses for Red Sox games, and for drunken teenagers in general, because Lord, do some of the local college kids have glass-breaking hyena laughs. Y'all, I get that it's Friday and you're twenty and you're trashed, I support that, but could you...not? For ten minutes?

[Bronwyn]

Ottawa's bus system has a bit of tier system going on, actually. Transitway buses come frequently (5-10min in daytime) and go fast, for the most part, and often have the newest nicest buses. One or two run all night, and many run til midnight or 2am. Cross-town routes that aren't Transitway, or only use it for a moderate chunk, are more like every 15-30min, have slightly less nice buses, and run until midnightish. But local routes, the ones with 1xx numbers that serve the many suburbs, those are slow, infrequent, may have icky old buses, and stop running anywhere between 9 and 11pm.

Living on the Transitway or a crosstown route means you probably can live without a car, if your major destinations are also on those. But if you live or work on a local route, you're probably going to buy or borrow a car, because bus service is too bad to rely on, and that creates a downward spiral for those routes. At the same time, OC Transpo is trying to run more Transitway service out past the Greenbelt, and they're starting to suck the resources from some of the inner-city routes to do it, which also doesn't seem like a good idea.

Part of the problem, of course, is that Ottawa doesn't have much of a street grid, especially not out in the suburbs.

[ShifterCat]

@Lampdevil: There was a student who had set up a system for tracking Ottawa's buses... only to get it pulled, likely because OC Transpo wanted to find a way to make a buck off it. I've sent the url for NextBus to the OCT site, but I don't know that it'll do much good.

Possible good news: Ottawa's mayor has, grudgingly, admitted that building a subway system for downtown is actually feasible. There's no guarantee this will materialize into actual plans, but the possibility is at least on the table.

[John Mark Ockerbloom]

I visited Raleigh a few years ago and decided to ride the bus to the airport. I don't remember a lot of details, but it did feel like a reluctantly funded welfare program. The route coverage and frequency was much less than I'd expect for a metro area that size. I think I was the only white person on the bus out of Raleigh. Perhaps it's gotten better since I rode it, but it felt odd then.

The transit system in Philly, where I live, could certainly be better, but it does seem to be treated as a more of a common resource than a "welfare" resource. And that sense seems to be quite a bit stronger still in the Canadian and European cities I've visited. That seems to make a big difference in ridership and support.

[Amaryllis]

Outside of the downtown core, it has a Transitway - a backbone system of high-speed buses travelling on a dedicated network of roads between the suburbs and downtown. In the suburbs, smaller bus routes connect into the Transitway and thus provide transportation within and between suburban communities.
* drools *

I'm so jealous. It's possible to use public transport to move around the city near which I have the honor to reside. But the suburbs, even the inner suburbs, are totally car-centric. I would love to take a bus to work, but there just isn't one.

I think some people have argued convincingly that many jurisdictions can save money by making the bus free, in fact.
Said city is currently experimenting with a couple of free bus lines through the downtown area, mostly aimed at getting tourists and center-city workers out of their cars. I don't believe they've done a cost-benefit analysis yet, but anything that puts less strain on those roads has got to be a good thing.

I'd like to point out that there's also a gender element to the "no one rides the bus" problem: if there's a sociocultural assumption that the people who ride the bus are "not like us," then there's often extra pressure put on women not to ride the bus, especially alone, because it's seen as dangerous specifically for that reason.
I was sitting in a light-rail station in my suburban neighborhood, waiting for a train, when a flustered-seeming woman with two kids in tow walked onto the platform; apparently they were making a rare trip downtown to see a baseball game. She looked at me incredulously and asked, "Aren't you nervous being here alone?!" I answered that I'd never had any problems, which is true. And I thought but did not say, "I'm a lot more nervous driving on some of the roads around here."

It's true that here have been a few highly-publicized incidents connected with the light-rail; it's true that people, women especially, can't be faulted for performing a risk assessment, so to speak. But the actual risk of the system in general is a lot lower than the hyped risk.

As for those incidents: for example, a few month ago, a man was attacked, beaten and robbed, a block away from that same station. There was an immediate assumption (I'm not sure whether it was ever confirmed) that the perpetrators had arrived and intended to escape on the train, and there were calls to close the station entirely. Because, who needs trains, they only bring "those people" into our town to commit their crimes. The occasional baseball game isn't worth it! Close it down!

Meanwhile, in the same week, someone was attacked, beaten and robbed in a parking lot of a hotel near the entrance to the highway that runs through town. The perpetrators are know to have escaped in a car right onto that highway. I didn't hear a single suggestion about closing down the highway ramps. Still annoys me.

@Laiima: that is, in fact, the Baltimore light-rail. It has occasional reliability problems; I got stuck for an hour one Saturday afternoon. But in general, I haven't heard that the problems are particularly frequent; then again, I've never had to depend on it to get to work. (I only wish it did get that far out; I'd ride it in a heartbeat.)

As for safety, yes, some of the neighborhoods it passes through are a little rough around the edges, and I'd use the usual cautions if I was alone at night in some of the parking lots. But I've taken the light rail for years, by myself and with my daughter when she was little, and never ran into any problems.

Are you going to Artscape next weekend?

[MercuryBlue]

I used to live in Pittsburgh. I miss being able to hop a bus to get to my job or the library or the mall or the college. Of course, when I lived in Pittsburgh, there was a bus stop right outside my apartment building. Now I live in a suburb that's several miles from the nearest bus stop. (Also a food desert. The nearest source of fresh food is the farmer stand a ways down the road, which is not a year-round thing and only has whatever the guy grows in his a large garden or very tiny farm; the second nearest is Walmart, which is on the far side of a four-lane highway.)

[Laiima]

@Amaryllis, I love art fairs, but I do not love art fairs during Maryland summers. I attended an art fair near us last summer, early July? We were there for maybe an hour, I was completely incapacitated by the heat (I think it may have been heat exhaustion as a matter of fact), and it took me two days, lying in bed, to recover. Artscape has the added complication of being very well attended, so I would have to deal with masses of crowds as well.

Unless we have a freakishly cool weekend in July, I will probably *never* be able to attend Artscape. (which totally sucks)

[Aaron]

Laiima, I took the Baltimore light rail to work for a year and a half (Cold Spring Lane to Pepper Road, or "from about the middle to right up near the top") and the only times I was late to work were the times I was late to the station. I've also taken the light rail to the courthouse for jury duty, and I didn't end up serving thirty days for failure to report, so that should count for something as well.

When I moved here, I too had a lot of people telling me that the light rail was untrustworthy -- unreliable, unsafe, full of criminals and unsavory people -- and that I should avoid it almost as assiduously as I should city buses. That was ten years ago, and since then the light rail has made me a perfectly acceptable means of getting from place to place for a dollar and change a time. I've never had a light rail car to myself, either, so I'm sure I'm not the only one getting the benefit.

(And as far as the supposedly unsavory denizens of Baltimore mass transit are concerned, the closest I've got in ten years was one skeevy guy who asked me my sign while I was getting a sandwich at Subway -- yes, I'm not even kidding, he asked me my sign like something out of some awful old movie about overheated fantasies of the 1970s. He had a big clunky "gold" chain around his neck, too. So that was honestly a lot more amusing than frightening, at least in the middle of the afternoon with plenty of people around and a creepster not sufficiently determined to follow me three blocks home. But that has nothing to do with mass transit, which is pretty much the point, and anyway where was I?)

No, it's not "reliable" in the same way that driving your own car is reliable; it won't go wherever you want it to, and it runs on its own schedule (or a few minutes to either side) instead of simply being there when you need it -- but there's never yet been a train of which those things weren't true, and I dare say there never will be. Why blame a train for being a train? My experience of Baltimore's buses has also been pretty good; I haven't used them to commute to work, though I gather many do, but when I have used them they've got me where I was going in reasonable time and without undue fuss.

As far as I've seen, the main difference between light rail/Metro and city buses is that "no one rides the bus" people will more easily assume you have a legitimate reason for using the former. Consider those billboards along 83 South that exhort commuters and sports fans to use the light rail -- "to save on gas and beat the traffic"; that is, because you're smart, not because you're poor. Those billboards are a rather clumsy attempt at social engineering to get around the problem Josh (Enigma32) identifies: they might as well just say "REAL PEOPLE TAKE LIGHT RAIL TOO, WE PROMISE". Meanwhile, when you ride the bus, "real people" who know you have a car assume there's something wrong with your car, and "real people" who don't know you have a car -- or, worse, know you don't have one -- assume there's something wrong with you.

As far as I'm concerned, though, you know what a serpentine belt is? (Neither did I until a month or so ago.) It's this thing in your car, see, and if you don't know what it is it eventually comes apart, and that's a few hundred bucks if you can live without the A/C, or a couple thousand if you really have to have it -- which isn't at all impossible, considering that it was already getting up to a hundred degrees back in May and that next month will be even hotter than this one.

My serpentine belt cost me $302 and change plus half a day's lost wages*. There are lots of things I'd rather have done with that time and money. I also had to pry the remains of it out of the engine compartment with a knife and a pair of needlenose pliers, and it took three days to finish scrubbing all the damn grease off my hands; I don't mind getting dirty in a good cause, but this was more like a battlefield amputation performed with a hacksaw. The more I use light rail and buses, the less of that kind of shit I have to deal with, and that, in my reasonably confident opinion, can only be a good thing. (Also gas is super expensive.)

Oh, and speaking of trains: if there is any way at all you can manage to take Amtrak instead of flying next time, by all means do so. I did -- my spine, my knees, my wallet, and my dignity took turns thanking me the whole way there. God willing, I'll never board an airliner again.

* And that only because I was able to poke at Google and then ask the mechanic "hey, somebody on the Internet said you could use a shorter belt and bypass the A/C pulley and then I don't need two grand of new compressor, is that completely ridiculous or is it something you could maybe do?" In other words, some random Indianan's complaint about car problems saved me like fifteen hundred bucks getting my own car fixed. (And all thanks to some random car-talk forum none of the glitterati would so much as sneeze at. Facebook, Foursquare, eat your heart out!)

[Mike Timonin]

Oh, and speaking of trains: if there is any way at all you can manage to take Amtrak instead of flying next time, by all means do so. I did -- my spine, my knees, my wallet, and my dignity took turns thanking me the whole way there. God willing, I'll never board an airliner again.

Your spine, your knees, and your dignity I can see, but your wallet? Anywhere that I've wanted to go, Amtrak cost as much, if not more, than flying, and took days rather than hours. We've looked at it several times, and it's just not worth it.

Light rail in the Northern Virgina/DC Metro area is very nice - I use it when I'm doing research in DC. But I have a friend who lives within a decent walk of the Manassas Park station - decent being about 20 mins downhill in the morning, and 25 mins uphill in the afternoon - and parking is an absolute nightmare. I gather that MARC (Maryland Rail something or another - the light rail that connects the Maryland part of the DC suburbs to downtown DC) is equally nice if you can get to it.

[Laiima]

Thank you fellow Baltimoreans for educating me about light rail. I've been thinking for some time that I should try it out, despite Spouse's misgivings. It's just that I really don't have any need to go into Baltimore city. The last time I had a job down there was 2 1/2 years ago (and I drove to it). But I will keep my eyes peeled for some opportunity.

We are a few miles north of the Hunt Valley stop, near Wegman's.

[P J Evans]

I've heard those things about the bus and light-rail system in Los Angeles, too. And it isn't true here either. In fact, at the company where I work, most people use the various bus and rail systems. (We're downtown, street traffic is difficult, and parking is expensive.)

One of the better trips I had was last New Year's Eve, when there was some kind of problem near the commuter railroad, and I ended up with a lot of other passengers, taking a bus across the San Fernando Valley. It was a trip orchestrated by Murphy, and by the time we got to the last station, some of us were laughing at everything. (Can a bus go through a drive-thru? We were considering it.)

[Robin Zimmermann, already back home again]

(Can a bus go through a drive-thru? We were considering it.)

I don't know that I've seen a drive-thru that a bus could fit through - but I don't see why not, otherwise. ;)

[Laiima]

Mike, we would love to use Amtrak as well, but like you say, the time it requires is a limiting factor, not to mention the cost. We can't afford to fly either. We drive, or we don't go.

During my last job, I had to go down to DC during the week, so I took Amtrak from Penn Station (Baltimore). That was super comfortable, way more than the Metra commuter trains I was used to in the Chicago suburbs. Otoh, the Amtrak fare was $30 for one day (vs. $10 for a roundtrip on the Burlington Northern). I don't know how anybody can afford to commute with Amtrak unless they are making a *ton* of money. (I definitely was not.)

[Nev]

I'm not sure if there isn't the same stigma attached to the bus here (where we also have a subway and streetcars), or I just don't hang out with a high enough class of people, or enough people from the suburbs (where you need a car to get around).

[Mike Timonin]

Hmmm. 5 days of VRE (Virginia Rail Extension) from almost one end to the utter other end (Union Station is very pretty, incidentally) is only $67, I think. But I think it cost more to do 5 one day passes?

I've considered taking the train from here (upstate New York) to DC at some point in the future - driving for long distances is not fun with the infant (who hates the car) and the no cruise control. I know that some people do commute via Amtrak - I think it works out when you're travelling middle distances; New York to Boston, for instance, or Newark to DC.

[Aaron]

I just took the train up the coast to Connecticut for a funeral; I am at this point, by way of their ticketing website, rapidly gaining a better rounded appreciation of Amtrak's shortcomings. Baltimore to Memphis via Chicago? If that were parody, I'd call it strained to the point of caricature.

[J. Random Scribbler]

Right after college I lived in DC for three years, using bike, bus, and Metro (the subway/light rail system.) The first time I took the bus was also the first time I'd ever been the only white person in a crowd; that was quite a shock. I was really scared, and my nice middle-class liberal "I'm not a racist" illusions got blown right out of the water. after the fear I was ashamed to realize how far I still had to go if I was going to live in inner-city DC for a couple of years.

The thing is, I was probably safer on that bus than I would have been in a car by myself, and certainly safer than on my bike. It just took a while to unlearn that subconscious fear.

I don't know how it is now, but back in the early nineties DC's system was pretty useful, fairly regular, and covered a lot of area. I never really felt the lack of a car except when I wanted to go someplace out of town.

Speaking of out-of-town, the whole "Nobody rides the bus" thing seems to go double for national systems like Greyhound. That's probably a whole different topic, though.

[Amaryllis]

@Laiima: sorry, I'd forgotten about you and summer heat. If you have difficulties with heat and crowds, yes, you should stay far far away from Baltimore during Artscape weekend.

(I wonder what this ridiculous Labor Day street-race weekend will be like?)

We won't be "artscaping" as much as we used to, either, but I'm going to try to get down there for at least one afternoon. I'd hate to miss it entirely after all these years.

[Dav]

The day it took Amtrak 14 hours to get me 110 miles, and they did not so much as offer me a Coke, was the day they lost my business forever. (No, wait, it was the *next* day, where they offered to give me a $10 coupon. Good for Tuesday, Wednesday, OR Thursdays.) A bike would have been faster.

[Laiima]

That sucks, Dav!

Amaryllis, if you go, I'd love to hear about Artscape.

[P J Evans]

Dav, you should hear what some of my commuter-train conductors have said about Amtrak. (They'd worked as conductors there, first.)
My commuter pass will get me onto Amtrak for my usual trip, if that's a useful option. Otherwise, I haven't ridden it. We have express-sorta buses (the middle section is express, the ends aren't) from my home train station to downtown, and it's a viable alternative.

[Madhabmatics]

The last time I went to Atlanta, I took several hours out to just ride the MARTA around. I almost cried, public transportation is seriously the best thing, especially when you can compare it to living out in the boonies where if your car breaks down you are screwed when it comes to working, buying food, doing anything.

[Nenya]

I ride the bus constantly--at least twice a day. Victoria, BC has quite a nice bus system. I mean, yeah, you still get buses that are late (and I totally want one of those "Where's my bus at?" apps now!) but in two years, living in five different areas of the city (on two major bus routes), plus taking the bus to the university, the airport, and the ferry terminal, I've had a consistently good level of service. Most of my problems have stemmed from my tendency until recently to arrive at the bus stop about 45 seconds before the bus was due, which, shock, tended to mean I sometimes arrived 45 seconds *after* the bus had left. :P

There are indeed a lot of older riders, disabled riders, poorer riders (that'd be me), and non-white riders. There are LOTS of college students, partly because the cost of a bus pass is included in your student fees for the two biggest colleges/universities here. So you do get a lot of fashionably-dressed teens and twenty-somethings. There are a lot of young parents with children as well--kids under 6 ride free, and the dedicated space for wheelchairs is also open for strollers. There are days when the press of humanity gets to me, but most days I really like getting on the bus and smiling at people and wondering what the lady in the pink shirt is doing with her day, or guessing how old the baby is, or whatever. And there's little old lady who, whenever I take the bus to my brother's place, says hi, and tells me about her youth in Nova Scotia.

Anyway, I love the bus. Love. It was one of the things I looked forward to most when I moved back to Canada, after living in a town of about 40,000 in Tennessee that really didn't have good public transit at all. You HAD to have a car there--although my parents, now, are taking advantage of its occasional bus service when their car goes on the fritz, so the bus exists there, I guess. I remember visiting Boulder, Colorado for a few weeks in 2008 (and meeting Nicole LeBoeuf-Little and Consumer Unit 5012!) and just being delighted with their bus system. I love public transit. :D

[Swiss Railways]

Man, you people are going to be astonished if you ever come to Zurich ... http://www.zvv.ch/en/

[Mike Timonin]

Isn't Boulder one of the places where the bus system is competitive? In that, independent businesses are allowed to start bus routes, willy nilly? Which results in bus routes where no routes were before, until the company goes bankrupt, and then the city has to step in to save those routes and add them to the city run network?

[Rowen]

Growing up, both of my parents worked, so, starting in middle school, when I went to a magnet school (how do they work?! . . .?), if I couldn't make the school bus, I had to take the city bus. Usually, this meant that after school, if I wanted to be on the swim team or be in a play, I had to take the bus home, cause my parents couldn't take me.

Same thing in high school, at least, until I learned how to drive, and my mom let me use her old truck to drive around in. I was lucky enough, cause in Houston, the bus system either works really well, or you're SOL. Same thing after college, when I was working in the medical center and living, first in West U and then in the Heights. Both places had a bus that picked me up a few blocks from my house and dropped me off either a few blocks or right in front of work. I loved it.

I think that's one of the things I REALLY love about NYC, is that I don't need a car. In Houston, and here, I can get on the bus/train and take a nap, read a book, crochet, or just stare out the window. It was either later in Houston or at one of my jobs in NYC where I heard the joke, from a POC, that went, "You know why they make the windows so big on the bus . . . so that you can see who's riding it." and that struck me as a little odd, but I've never had to worry about people considering me "poor" or at least, when I'm poor, it's a bohemian, young white male sort of poor, something that causes middle aged men to recall their days of living off cheap beer, ramen, and the love of many women, as opposed to reality.

The one bus I have a HUGE issue with in NYC, and that's the M60. It goes across Manhattan through Harlem, and to La Guardia airport. There's a LOT of people who take this bus, either to catch a flight, cause they work at the airport, they need to get from Harlem to Astoria, whatever. Yet, the MTA uses the TINIEST bus for this job, and the schedule is set so that it's a 20 minute wait between buses. I'll wait for this one in Harlem and see THREE each of the Bx15, Mx100, and Mx101, none of which are half way full before one, tiny, already overcrowded M60 shows up. And then the rest of us try and pack in. Oh, and if there's too many people, the bus driver either lets everyone on, and then bitches that we have to push back (like there's room) or makes you wait for the next one, 20 minutes later.

[Account Deleted]

Great post.

I grew up in Kansas City (in a (in)famous & relatively rich suburb of the metro area called Johnson County, to be accurate) and can attest to the author's experience. NO ONE I knew took, needed to take, wanted to take, or knew how to take the bus. Unfortunately, due to historical reasons, Kansas City is an exceptionally well-segregated city (and by 'well' I'm referring to the extent of segration and not how I feel about it). It's quite sad. You can easily live your entire life in areas that have everything and never even know that there's another side that exists. The worlds are uttlerly & completely separated.

Even having grown up in a family very open & supportive of those different from us, I remember being shocked -- and I mean -- by learning to drive and discovering major and entire parts of the metro area that I hadn't known even existed. In other words, I happened to see the blue-collar and immigrant areas. Where did these places come from?! How come I hadn't heard of them?! Again, quite sad.

Point is, segregation as law may have disappeared, but it is still alive & kicking in our urban designs and cultural attitudes. Our cities & attitudes encourage our ignorance. The bus riders are "them" and we our "us", and never the two shall meet.

Some extra points that are important to me:
1. This cultural separation is completely analagous to the separation between the middle & upper classes (or upper & ultra-rich classes). It's all about separation and walling yourself off, whether literal or otherwise.
2. There's some great history -- perhaps someone can recommend a resource -- that covers the death of trams & buses in the US. And, more importantly, the evidence shows that this was a conscious effort on the part of car companies. Step 1: Get people off of trams onto buses. Step 2: Tear up tracks so there's no going back. Step 3: Market cars. Step 4: Let the buses fall into disrepair and push people entirely to cars. (From what I understand, this was a particularly important part of the past of New Orleans, which used to have many, many tram lines.) And, now, we're culturally obsessed with cars. That obsession didn't come from nowhere.

[Ross]

It bugs me that the sort of people most liable to ride the bus or the light rail are also the sort of people who would be least able to say "That's okay, there will be another bus along in half an hour," or "That's okay, I'll just call work and tell them the train got stuck in the tunnel and i'll be an hour late."

With a lot of other things, we see this weird inversion where things like cooking for yourself on a stove or not-having-a-cell-phone actually become the luxuries (Even while stodgy business columnists continue to berate the poor for having the audacity to own frivolities like a microwave or a cell phone), but not with public transit.

(I could easily see that inversion happening with trains -- train travel has a kind of old-timey or old-worldy opulance about it. But the US passenger rail system is so crap that, no. Train travel combines all the worst parts of bus travel, is slower than driving, and ten times as expensive. Seriously, wtf.)

[Heatherkay]

The implementation of the MAX buses here in Kansas City has done some work to changing the perception that "no one" rides the bus. MAX is two express bus lines, with new buses, aesthetically pleasing stops that tell you when next bus arrives, and (theoretically) the ability to hold a green light to get back on time. The first MAX line runs between downtown and the nicest neighborhoods in KCMO. The mix of people riding the bus is pretty impressive for a town where nobody rides the bus, with baby lawyers and civil servants sitting in front of folks headed to their next spare change gig. Tourists take it running back and forth from the convention center to the tony shopping area (tourists from places where people ride buses). And it's always full during rush hour (really the only time I ride it).

It needs a lot of improvement--it needs to run later, on straighter routes, more frequently, and use the green light hold more often--but it's a step in the right direction.

[Mike Timonin]

Yeah, I liked the MAX buses, and that green light hold thing is neat (didn't see that in operation, as far as I can tell). Even the non-MAX buses were pretty nice, in terms of seating and such.

[Gyrofrog]

(Pedantry alert)

MARC, Metro and VRE are all heavy rail. DART in Dallas is light rail.

(All that aside, point(s) taken.)

Pedant signing off...

[Julie paradox]

train travel is slower than driving?

Good lord.

(took the train to London for my birthday - just over 3 hours in the end because lightning slowed us down. That's 270 miles and takes 5 hours to drive.)

[Mike Timonin]

What's the difference between heavy and light rail?

[Laiima]

Light rail has wires at the top, and heavy rail doesn't? that's my guess.

[MercuryBlue]

Wiki says the difference is passenger capacity. Heavy rail can handle more people than light rail.

[Brainz]

To paraphrase the great Yogi: "Nobody rides the bus -- it's too crowded."

[Laiima]

MercuryBlue, that's definitely true.

[P J Evans]

Light rail is trolleys. Heavy rail has locomotives. I'm not sure where subways fit in, but I think if it doesn't have a locomotive on at least one end, it's 'light' rail.

[P J Evans]

Nickdag, in Los Angeles they didn't actually pull up all of the tracks - they paved them over. (I saw a backhoe trying to take up rail that was under the street in front of the building where I work.) Now they're rebuilding the system, using the old right-of-way when they can. (The Orange Line busway is on old railroad right-of-way. And the north end is being extended to my train station, much to the annoyance of everyone who has to drive through the miles of construction zone.)

[P J Evans]

Ross, I think part of the reason why Amtrak is more expensive is that the politicians who are responsible for creating and, at least in part, funding it don't want to do so: they think it should be profitable without their help. They also ignore how thoroughly subsidized airports and highways are - if they weren't, they'd be as expensive as Amtrak! (There isn't a 'Passenger Rail Trust Fund'; there's a trust fund for highways, and there's a fund for airports, too.)

[Westporter]

As a resident in the urban core of KC, I'll tell you why I don't ride the bus.
Actually, I do ride the bus, if I need to go downtown or to one of the shopping/tourist districts mentioned previously. Anywhere else, I stay in my neighborhood and walk. KC also has a serious crime issue, and it's mostly in urban areas like my neighborhood.
BUT I don't ride the bus because in order for me to get to work 2.5 miles away, it would take me 30 minutes and 1 change, and this is from one urban area to another, so it's not like I'm going to the burbs.
What KC needs is:
1. Some sort of light rail system running north-south from the Airport to the Plaza, the Plaza to South KC (MO side).
2. Efficient busses with park/ride lots to carry people to the light rail system, moving them from one part of the city to another.
3. Non-lazy (middle class and up)residents who would get off their lazy butts and walk places.
Just my two cents, I have tried, I really have, but as a female not living in the safest of neighborhoods, it's just not worth it for me to walk alone, wait for god knows how long for the bus to arrive, then change busses, wait again, and then get to work.

[Inquisitiveravn]

My understanding of the difference between light and heavy rail is that heavy rail runs entirely on dedicated right-of-ways while light rail runs part or all of its routes in the street. So, subways and els are heavy rail, and Philadelphia's Subway-Surface is light rail. Note that the Subway-Surface is actually running trolley cars. The Norristown High Speed Line is weird. It runs on a dedicated right-of-way, but uses trolley sized cars, although sometimes two of those cars are hooked together.

I ride SEPTA far more now that I actually live in Philadelphia than I did when I lived in the suburbs. I only ever recall riding the suburban trolleys when I had jury duty and didn't want to deal with parking at the County Seat. I hate driving (and more to the point trying to find parking) in Center City though, so if I have any reason to go there, I'll take transit. I have an embarrassment of riches when it comes to mass transit where I live. I live between two north-south bus routes, and between the eastbound and westbound legs of an east-west route. I'm also a short walk from the Broad Street subway. This makes using transit incredibly easy.

For all the people dissing Amtrak, there's a reason I tend to refer to it Amcrap. Nevertheless, it's my preferred method of getting to Boston for three reasons: 1) my mom lives within walking distance of the train station, 2) she doesn't cope well with the traffic around Logan Airport, and 3) much less security theater than the airport(although not none, they have dogs patrolling and check IDs at 30th St Station. I've never seen that level of security at Back Bay though.) Oh, and having driven to Boston, I can assure you that Amtrak is faster, at least if you're riding on the Northeast Corridor. Assuming that you don't pack your own, the food's better if you drive, though. Seriously, the café car provides overpriced crap, and the only place I've ever seen with soft drink prices even close to what Amcrap charges is Seattle-Tacoma Airport. I've been known to get off the train at New Haven to buy a soft drink because the vending machines on the platform charge less for a 20 oz bottle than the café car charges for a 12 oz can. If you're driving, well, the food at the service plazas is both cheaper and tastier than anything I've ever found on the train if you're on a toll road, and if you're not on a toll road, you can usually find some decent local food, especially given highway signs flogging the local eateries.

[hapax]

I wish that I could take Amtrak to the places I want to go. I am *seriously* claustrophobic, and any plane trip over an hour or so finds me a quivering ball on the seat, whimpering that "I have to get out of here RIGHT NOW please."

I'll be off to San Diego this August for a wedding, and once again I tried very hard, and failed, to find a train route that wouldn't take me an entire week to make the round trip and cost more than three times the airplane tickets.

[Luna]

I live in a weird amalgam of cities. The bus situation is rather bad, but not terrible. My husband can hop a bus to work from here and get there in the same time it takes us to drive. But for my daughter to get to the university, which is only 15 minutes further by car, it takes an extra hour. The buses are frequently jammed so full that they leave people at stops, with a wave and a point at the sign that says "full".

And if you happen to be a parent with a stroller, you can wait for several buses. I waited with a two-year-old in a stroller while 3 went by (in the pouring rain). So that was a 45 minute wait before one stopped. Another day, a driver tried to boot a woman with a stroller off because she was taking too much room. About 10 passengers offered to get off in her stead. No way. He'd have none of it. She was so embarrassed, she just left.

I have two little kids, and they both have Autism. No way I'm taking the bus with them and the stroller issue. But my older daughter takes it okay and my husband does fine with it.

[storiteller]

In terms of D.C., everyone has a love/hate relationship with the Metro. Actually, most people hate more than love, but have much less hate than for driving, which is truly hideous. What's most unfortunate about the Metro right now is that decades of under-maintenance have led to it falling into disrepair and now that everything is broken, everyone is complaining. If we had just supported it consistently in the first place, our current situation would be much better. The best part is the fact that the federal government subsidizes public transportation, which leads to higher ridership and as an effect, more concern about the Metro in general. As for our bus system, usefulness is pretty high but reliability is sporadic. There's one line I take, where in the afternoon going north, there's always a bus in less than 10 minutes. In the evening, going south, the bus is not even close to on-schedule. Interestingly, the suburban buses here seem to be slightly more reliable.

However, my favorite bus route was in the Albany, NY area. It was a commuter bus that was a dollar, stopped in about 4-5 places in Schenectady, hopped on the highway, and dropped off at 4-5 places in Albany. It was only late 1-2 times out of the five months I used it.

[truth is life]

I'll be off to San Diego this August for a wedding, and once again I tried very hard, and failed, to find a train route that wouldn't take me an entire week to make the round trip and cost more than three times the airplane tickets.

Where do you live? If you're not in California or maybe Nevada or Arizona, I'm sorry but you're never going to have a train that can get you to San Diego in less than a few days, unless we build some kind of evacuated tube maglev network where all the trains travel as fast as jetliners (which would be ridiculously expensive). The best you could do would be to have a kind of luxury liner on rails, but even that would be troublesome (also expensive).

A better high speed rail system (ie., one that had more than one route) would be very nice, but the key thing to remember about HSR is that it's regional, it's just that European countries are regions while in the US that's states or small groups of states.

Light rail is trolleys. Heavy rail has locomotives. I'm not sure where subways fit in, but I think if it doesn't have a locomotive on at least one end, it's 'light' rail.

This isn't quite accurate, at least from the definitions of the terms I've heard. Light rail is non-grade separated and usually uses rails in the street for at least part of its right-of-way, heavy rail is separated (ie., subways or els) and uses heavier vehicles, while commuter rail is the kind that uses locomotives and usually travels over multi-use track (track that belongs to a railroad per se, or which carries freight trains). The key difference between heavy and light rail is frequency of operation, heavy rail is so frequent you don't need a schedule, light rail you might have to wait a while for vehicles.

train travel is slower than driving?

Good lord.

(took the train to London for my birthday - just over 3 hours in the end because lightning slowed us down. That's 270 miles and takes 5 hours to drive.)

I could really get into the reasons for this, but I won't. Suffice it to say that there are strong structural reasons for the US to have a rather lousy passenger intercity train system (albeit a superb freight system--and that's one of the strong structural reasons).

[P J Evans]

The light rail in Los Angeles is mostly trolleys on their own rights-of-way - they're separated from vehicles except at crossings, and mostly on routes that were railroads before. It was a lot less expensive that way, and there are fewer crossings to deal with.

[Mike Timonin]

Suffice it to say that there are strong structural reasons for the US to have a rather lousy passenger intercity train system (albeit a superb freight system--and that's one of the strong structural reasons).

I don't think the strong freight system is a necessary structural reason for the passenger service to be lousy. I mean, I agree that the conflict between stuff and people on the rail lines is one of the major reasons that our passenger train service is less than optimal - when the passenger train has to pull over to let the freight train through, travel is delayed. But I don't think there's a compelling reason that we couldn't have dedicated passenger lines so that freight and people were not in conflict.

Point taken re: HSR and its regional character. The US is really big in comparison to European countries, or even Europe as a continent - we're never going to have a true high speed connection from the East Coast to the West. Even so, our system could be better - a really high speed (like TGV high speed) connection between New York and DC, or even points south; another between New York and Chicago, maybe Toronto - those would, by themselves, change travel in the US.

[kisekileia]

Toronto is getting a rail line in a few years that will be mostly underground, and it's referred to as light rail. I'm not sure how that fits into the definitions of heavy/light rail being given here.

[hapax]

Where do you live? If you're not in California or maybe Nevada or Arizona, I'm sorry but you're never going to have a train that can get you to San Diego in less than a few days

Surprisingly enough, I do understand that. Which is why I included the part about *cost*. I would be quite willing to trade off time for money, and I imagine I'm not the only one.

(And no, bus service is even slower, and works out to about the same cost as trains, while offering none of the advantages of train travel to the claustrophobic.)

However, it's all moot, because I can't find a passenger train that will get me out of this state in less than two days and three transfers.

Maybe, like Woody Guthrie, I should wrap myself in brown paper and tie myself up in strings, and *mail* myself to California...

[Lonespark]

I rode the T to an interview today, for which I got to get off at Central Square and walk to the MIT museum building, leaving and returning outside rush hours. The weather was great and I got dropped off an picked up at the station, which helps a lot, but anyway...

It was a beautiful experience. I almost cried with joy. There were people of every kind going every sort of place, and a lovely woman singing lovely music whom I was unfortunately unable to tip because I am an idiot who forgets to carry cash. There goofy young student types sort of injecting energy and enthusiasm in to the atmosphere. There were several women, including student types, in various kinds of hijab, and ladies in African dresses and numerous rastafarians(I assume?) with nifty hats/headcoverings...

So yay, public transport, showing me my beautiful metro area.

Also I visited Asgard and ate lunch. It is apparently an Irish pub? I could obviously not pass such a thing up and feel it must be a good sign.