The voluntary mass transit rider
I’m trying to wrap my head around this one. On the one hand, I can see where other people are coming from on the situation. What I’m doing isn’t supposed to be “normal”, so it evokes sentiments of pity from others since I’ve apparently had to have gone through some sort of hardship for my life to come to this. The issue? I take mass transit.
Hopping a bus isn’t exactly a hardship, per say. It did take some adjustment on my part. After years of just encasing myself in a thousand pounds plus of steel and immediately bombing down the road in my solitary confinement on wheels, it takes a little time to get used to actually interacting with other people while in transit. And there is the time factor without the convenience of the car lurking in the driveway, just waiting for me to need to go somewhere. On a side note, it’s no wonder that so much fuss is being made over trying to save the American car companies since stereotypical American culture is the car: It’s such a wasteful extravagance for all that material to just be moving one person, not to mention the environmental impact, but, oh, just think of the freedom it gives you! I’ve actually had to start wearing a watch again so I can catch my bus promptly, besides scheduling my time around when I can get a ride. This is especially tricky, as anyone with a toddler knows that toddlers don’t adhere to any sort of tight schedule. Mostly, though, I’ve had to slow my life down a bit, enjoy the stroll to the bus stop or find an extra five minutes of browsing at the store before I need to meet the bus.
There is a bit of a stigma to riding the bus, as I’ve heard that primarily “poor people” and “drug dealers” use all that dirty mass transit. Such misconceptions are so ridiculous that I don’t care to acknowledge them. But I will concede that diesel fumes are unpleasant, so we should go ahead and get these light rail lines going. Now.
The lion’s share of the decision was due to personal finances. There was a three-month span in my family’s life where we bought a house, brought a child into the world, and went down to a single income. So having a second car sitting around while my wife took the other one to work seemed a bit unnecessary, especially after we made the conscious effort to purchase a home where so much of what we needed was nearby. So, in that respect we’ve eliminated the upkeep and insurance for one vehicle from our budget.
And then there’s a much grander financial reason behind taking mass transit. Through the tax dollars we pay, we’re subsidizing both mass transit and automobile travel. Sure, everyone talks about the burden that mass transit puts on the government coffers, what with having to pay for all those vehicles and also to ante up for people to drive these poor people around, but most fail to realize that autos are also highly subsidized. Sure, there’s a tax on gasoline to pay for roads, giving the impression that funding is taken from a sort of user fee, but so much more funding comes out of property taxes and income taxes and the like. In the end, it costs just as much if not more for the highways we drive on than it would on, say, high speed rail. On top of that, there are steep user fees for utilizing these roads: The cost to purchase and maintain your vehicle. For as little as I would drive a car, $1.75 a trip to take a bus seems pretty economical, as well as a good use of my tax dollars.
A third benefit is clearly the environmental one. In becoming more of a mass transit user than a car user, I’ve found that along with that I’ve had to become more of a walker and a bicyclist. So, I am not only cutting down on greenhouse gasses and waste through the use of mass transit, and you can’t tell me that sitting by yourself in a car spews out less crap from the tailpipe than multiple people sharing a bus or train, but I also cut down on my environmental footprint by using my own two feet to get around.
I will admit that we do still need a car. My wife needs it to get herself to work in a timely manner, as there is no transit link from our house to her office. And we are still in the suburbs where our little urban enclave is surrounded by twisting side roads and split-level, 2-car-garage sprawl. Then there’s our friends and family that live even further out from the city than we do, and with transit links fading away to nothingness as you travel outward from Minneapolis, not to mention the virtually nonexistent suburb-to-suburb service, well, to not have a car would really keep us trapped in our little haven where we don’t need it as much.
My life as a transit user will get easier around, say, 2015 when the Southwest Light Rail line comes through my town. And life would be a little easier if the busses would have more frequent headways in the meantime, say if the bus into Minneapolis came faster than every half hour and the local shopping circulators came sooner than every hour. Other than that, I really can’t complain too much. I really feel like I’ve made the right choice, despite what you nay-sayers tell me. You may say that your car gives you the freedom to go where you choose, when you choose, but keep in mind that I’ve retained much of that freedom anyway without the burden of the cost. How’s that for freedom?
