Image courtesy: Sleepless in Turtle Island
This is a guest post from our star volunteer Alison Turner
Last week Danny Westneat wrote an article ($) about his attempt to go car-free this summer, and his experience riding this bus instead. His conclusion – being car-free is terrible. We disagree.
Living car-free is very much about being pragmatic, multi-modal and flexible. Which Westneat is obviously not.
Westneat never mentions trying any other mode of transportation besides riding the bus — biking, using car2go, Lyft, a taxi or carpooling, for example. What about going in early to beat the rush? While there is plenty of room for improvement for bus service in Seattle, the reality is that the system is starving. Metro is cutting 400,000 service hours when they should be adding 500,000 service hours just to keep up with existing demand. As Seattlish and Publicola point out, there was no mention of this and the fact that his employer, the Seattle Times ($) editorialized THREE times against supporting more revenue to keep buses on the street.
But going back to Westneat’s complaint. To accurately gauge the quality of a trip you need to consider the time it takes, the monetary cost, and the stress you endure on the way. How you weigh all of these items is a personal choice — one that Westneat doesn’t seem to realize he’s making. The bus is a great choice if you are looking for a cheap and relaxing way to get around. If time is a constraint, car2go,Lyft or a taxi would have been a better choice. Or even a bike since it was a beautiful summer.
It’s a bummer that Westneat’s experience riding the bus made him feel like a second-class citizen, but that is an unfortunately common experience. The overcrowding and unreliability of buses in Seattle is a legitimate problem. However, the answer to this is not to buy a car (Westneat’s conclusion), it’s to improve bus service. More cars means more traffic for everyone. If riding the bus makes Westneat’s life so hard, his conclusion should be to advocate not just for new bus service but to keep current routes from going away.
“A developed country is not a place where the poor have cars, it’s where the rich ride public transportation.” —Enrique Peñalosa, former Mayor of Bogota, Columbia,1998–2001
