WALL OF TEXT: PUBLIC TRANSIT

 

 

WALL OF TEXT: PUBLIC TRANSIT. My new apartment is within walking distance of two major bus lines in Columbus, OH, so I decided to see how it is to navigate the city by its public transit system. My first attempt was easy enough: one bus into downtown for a wine bar and back. COTA (Central Ohio Transit Authority) uses the Transit app. Not only does it have all the information about bus schedules, but it uses real-time reporting to show you where your stop is, how long you can expect to wait, and when you should be at the stop. Type in a destination, and it will find you a route from your current location, guiding you to each stop along the way. It’s so much easier than consulting schedule charts and figuring out which bus stop is which. (It also helps that I already know my way around the city.) My second trip saw me go further out for breakfast. The bus took several turns that weren’t on the route, which confused me, and apparently the app got confused, for at one point it told me to walk my ass from my current location to my destination. Just huff it for an hour. I refreshed, and then it found me a bus line where I wanted to go. I don’t feel bad about that. I wanted to know how easy it is to get around by bus, and the best way to do that is to get stranded and then find a bus that gets me un-stranded. The Transit app linked me to a route with only a 15-minute wait. For the most part, Transit did not steer me wrong. It got me where I needed to go, and I was home more or less when I hoped to be. It took longer than driving, and had a great deal of uncertainty, but it worked. I dislike needing a car—they do nothing but cost money—so from August 10 through the 18th, I decided to find out if I could get around town using nothing but the bus system, including to and from work. Verdict: I can go anywhere in the city by bus, and the Transit app helps me make sense of the system. The app was accurate every time except once, when the bus did not show up and I had an extra-long layover after work, which I passed at a nearby café. The down side, of course, is it took 3 times longer to get anywhere. The Transit app became my life; I had to use it to plan every movement to the bus schedule, but I could do it, and it’s not so bad. Although I spent more time on the bus than at my apartment, it’s a comfort to know I can live without a car in Columbus, Ohio, if I had to. How does this bus system cost $200M per year, and how do fares not pay for it? Why charge fares at all when those only account for 10% of COTA’s public transit funding? Aren’t you spending more money enforcing/accommodating payment rather than just eliminating fares and making it purely taxpayer funded? How much faster would buses run if there was no point of sale slowing the process down? How much less overhead would the city have if it didn’t have to print transfer tickets or update the buses to accept app payments? Man, if we had light rail, or the trolley system that got torn up in the 1950s... If car companies hadn’t lobbied local and state governments to kill public transit to boost automobile sales, we could have free and easy transportation everywhere, but no, we are dependent on automobiles. Americans have a car culture, and it’s time we rethought it. Considering it didn’t happen naturally—that rich and powerful people deliberately killed other options to create America’s dependence on automobiles just to line their own pockets—we should ask if the solution to traffic woes is not to build more lanes and bypasses but to take cars off the road. That should be the goal of public transit. American perception of public transit is that it’s something only poor people need to use. It’s time to change the perception. You don’t feel connected to the city you live in until you must use its public transit system. I’m seeing the city now. I’m seeing the borderline senile and the working poor. We need the bus because despite working all day and spending half our free time commuting home, we can’t afford a car. Do these people deserve to be homeless and/or poor? Other things are going on, and American society is not addressing them. Maybe nobody deserves poverty. Maybe nobody deserves to be where they are in life, and we cannot progress as a society until we accept this. One of the good things about the internet is that Americans can hear from people in other countries, and that things are not bad elsewhere. The USA is not the only country that has freedom, and somehow other countries pay taxes to fund socialist programs, such as healthcare and mass transit, and those countries are doing just fine. Americans are waking up to the reality that they are missing out on some great things. Where are their tax dollars really going? Why do Americans pay more in taxes but get less in return? Mass transit would reduce pollution and free people from the burden of vehicle maintenance. I know the struggle: every time you get a little bit of money saved up, the car needs a new alternator, or a new distributor cap, or a new brake line, or some other damn thing, so you end up making just enough to afford to keep your car working so you can keep going to work so you can keep your car working so you can— Public transportation would also reduce traffic and the use of oil. Reducing oil usage is win-win for consumers. I deliberately used my city’s transit system for these aims. In Columbus, it’s not as convenient as driving my own car, but if enough people used it, politicians may start funding public transit with the goal of reducing privately owned vehicles on the road. When everyone uses it, it will become as convenient to get from point A to point B as privately-owned vehicle, if not better. I’m doing my part. (But we shouldn’t kid ourselves; politicians are not responding to public demand; they respond to the interests of large corporations that want to increase usage of oil and the number of cars on the road; if we want change, we must demand it, and the voting power of our wallets is an illusion.) Americans can have good things if we demand that our tax dollars pay for things that benefit everyone—that relieve us of individual burdens—instead of our tax dollars benefiting large corporations, funding the lifestyles of the rich and famous. Hollywood writers and actors are on strike to demand it. We already found out what happens to the economy when most of the USA shuts down for a pandemic. Think what we could get if everyone did it on our own. No individual trade unions. Capital is a global force of consolidation. As a counterbalance to corporate power, Labor could consolidate globally as well. It may very well be the only way to end the squeezing.