“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 Bogotá
“When is your
flight home?” my coworker asked, watching my feeble attempts to stuff a
half-dozen brochures, a pair of shoes, and a dirty gas-station coffee mug into
a too-small backpack – all while maintaining some semblance of decorum behind
our conference-booth table at the Alaska Forum on the Environment. I saw her mentally calculating whether anyone
could be spared to drive me to the airport, so I quickly explained that there
was no problem; I was planning to take the bus.
“There’s a
bus to the airport?” She looked
astonished -- and I, as usual, felt slightly deflated by that
astonishment. My depression had nothing
to do with my coworker, who is charming – and, moreover, tolerates me with a
remarkable degree of equanimity. It’s
just that… well… anyone who has known me for more than four minutes already
knows I have a bit of an obsession with bikes -- but now I have to admit that I
also have a chip on my shoulder about buses.
More
generally, I’ve always been perplexed and frustrated by the gap between what we
think we believe and what we actually DO with regard to public transportation
in this country. Those of us who are
liberal, progressive, environmental types all say we want it. Oh,
boy! Buses! Light rail!
Subway systems! How efficient!
How green! But when push comes to
shove, we hardly ever seem to USE public transportation – especially not buses. America’s relationship with buses is like
Roxanne’s relationship with Cyrano: somewhere between disparaging, patronizing,
and oblivious.
Ok, maybe it
was reasonable that my coworkers didn’t know anything about Anchorage buses;
after all, we live in Fairbanks. But
it’s no better here at home. Most people
in Fairbanks seem unaware that we even have a bus system, and if they know it
exists, they don’t know where it goes, or when. We have a grim problem with air pollution
around here, and cars are big contributors.
Moreover, getting a car started – and keeping it running – in
temperatures that plummet as low as -50F is neither fun nor cheap. And yet I know exactly one person who uses
the Fairbanks public bus as his primary means of commuting. One.
Part of the
problem, of course, is a chicken-and-egg thing.
Despite efforts to expand the system, Fairbanks buses have limited
schedules and routes. Trying to take a
bus is pretty darn frustrating if it doesn’t go where you want, or arrives only
once an hour, or both. And the bus isn’t
too likely to go where you want it to, because we Fairbanksans are horrendously
guilty of sprawl. We spread ourselves
across the landscape like syrup oozing across a pancake. The bus doesn’t reach people’s homes because
we’re building our homes way the heck out on Gold Hill, Cripple Creek, Two
Rivers, Moose Mountain, and other fancifully named locales.
In other
towns and cities – cities with denser populations and less ridiculous climates
– the story is of course a bit better.
My sister’s family, in Cambridge/Boston MA, uses the bus and subway
system (the T) regularly. My good friends
in Seattle are well acquainted with both light rail and bus routes. But even in
those locations, where routes are regular and frequent, most people seem to
still be driving most places. Why? Well, I’ve heard a lot of reasons. Convenience (see chicken-and-egg, above). Speed (Maybe -- but put enough cars on the
road, and no one is moving). Autonomy
(I’m biased here, because I kind of hate driving, but on a bus you can relax
and read a book!). And… niceness.
Niceness? Yeah.
Apparently it’s a biggie.
My coworkers
and I had all arrived in Anchorage by plane, and the Downtown Transit Center
was diagonally across the street from the conference center where we’d spent the
past three days. It might as well have
been in another world. A poorer
world. A world in which the smell of
extraordinarily bad pizza and extraordinarily cheap alcohol hung heavy on the
air. A world in which a terribly
young-looking mom with twins in a stroller could not get them to stop crying; a
teenage guy was trying to buy a cigarette from a group of strangers; a whole lot
of young men were amicably and loudly swearing at each other; and someone in the corner was talking to
himself, quietly.
Yelp and
Foursquare offer online info on the Downtown Transit Center in particular, and
the Anchorage People Mover bus system in general. The comments don’t pull any punches. “There are a ridiculous amount of drunk and
disgusting people here,” says someone named Shauna. Crystal P. adds, “Try and get a car if at all
possible. Buses stink and are slow. Plus there are tons of creepy people down
here.”
Creepy
people? Maybe. Are you a creepy person, Crystal P.?
Poor people? Yeah. Of
course. The bus station is heated, and Anchorage
is not tropical. Plus, there are seats
in the station, and friends to hang out with, if you happen to have creepy
friends, or drunken friends, or not-at-all-creepy not-at-all-drunken friends,
who may or may not be planning to actually ride a bus any time soon. Our nation is woefully short of places where
one can comfortably and freely sit with friends and strangers and enjoy a sense
of community, and our nation also has woefully inadequate resources to
alleviate poverty. But that is a subject
for another blog post… or ten.
The idea that
people who ride buses are creepy, dangerous, and just plain nasty is not a new
one. When I was in college in the Boston
area, I needed to visit my parents on Long Island a few times a year. I took the bus. This always surprised people, especially
all-the-way-grown-up white-collar people.
But, honey, why don’t you
fly? Or take the train? While these other options were slightly
faster, there weren’t markedly so; the New York area cannot be traversed
quickly by any means short of teleportation. But, honey, the train is so much more… comfortable. So much… nicer.
Was it? Well, the aisles were wider, and the bathroom
was larger, although not necessarily cleaner.
The train was often, but not always, less crowded. On the bus, I sometimes ended up sitting next
to strangers. Some of them were
marginally annoying. Some fell
asleep. Some fell asleep on me. Some were interesting. I learned about Pakistani culture and the
five tenets of Islam from an international gem merchant, and he learned a lot
about American culture and feminism from me.
In any case,
the bus was cheaper – way cheaper – than the train, and I was nineteen, and a
student. I was scraping together what
income I had by delivering newspapers before class. In the summer, my employment was wallowing in
mud and black flies while moving rocks using only a crowbar and pick. Seriously.
In any case, as far as I could tell, the biggest difference between the
bus and the train was that on the train, the other passengers were almost all
white, and middle-class. On the bus, it
was a mixed crowd, with every possible ethnicity and a lot of different flavors
of poor. I took the bus.
Even before
college, I’d been on Greyhounds, of course.
In junior high, the special enrichment program that I was lucky enough
to be part of involved a lot of extended field trips. Twenty-five twelve-year-olds drove our
teachers batshit crazy all the way from Long Island to Washington D.C., and I’m
pretty sure we loved every minute of it.
And in high school, some of my most treasured memories are from the
three times in which I managed to qualify for the New York Metropolitan All
Stars Mathletes team. Twenty-nine
boys. Two male teachers. And me.
On a coach bus headed to Penn State.
It’s a long, long drive. What did
we do? We played bridge, of course. The year that the bus’s exhaust system caught
fire on the way home and we all had to be evacuated to a rural fire station --
to the confused amusement of the volunteer firefighters -- was just added
excitement in an already perfect sojourn.
We were a joke so good that it
didn’t even require a punchline: thirty pimply
little math geeks escape from a burning bus...
Of course,
city buses and Greyhounds were not the first buses I knew. That honor was reserved for a big, impressive
yellow bus with flashing lights. I can
recall LONGING to climb onto that bus -- just as soon as I reached the exalted
age of five – so that I could join my big sister in all her glory. But my remembered excitement runs counter to
what seems to be the common middle-class wisdom these days. Recently, I’ve heard an unsettling number of
half-spoken implications to the (vague) effect that schoolbuses are just “not
nice”.
The yellow
behemoths, circa 1980, were sometimes a trace Lord of the Flies, there’s no
denying it. Drivers who are
concentrating on the road are hard pressed to deal with ten-year-olds who have
come up with new engineering marvels relating to increasing the velocity of
spitballs. Nonetheless, I have a lot of
great schoolbus memories. Not long after
I attained the lofty goal of riding to kindergarten, I achieved the additional
self-perceived honor of sitting in the front seat, my legs dangling, giving
directions to a substitute bus driver. I
think he was relieved to find that I not only knew the way to Huntington
Elementary School but also reliably knew left from right.
I recall the
little boy who had a crush on my sister, and who thought that he might impress
her by giving me rocks to add to my rock collection. Practically every bus ride, I got another
rock. I really liked rocks.
A few years
later, when we moved to a new house and I was thus on an unfamiliar bus, being
joined in my seat by another fourth-grader who confided that she had just switched
into public school from Catholic school, and was thus new, too. We became fast friends almost
immediately. She patiently taught me to
shoot baskets and ride my bike with no hands, and I tutored her in math. Thirty years later, and she and her wife have
twins – just as Jay and I do.
These days, my
own twins and I walk up to the school bus stop every morning. It’s a half-mile jaunt, because we live way
the heck down a dirt road in the bottom of a swamp. We’re not helping Fairbanks’ above-mentioned problem
with low-density development by living here.
However, in our defense, we chose this piece of land in part because
it’s close enough to town and to our jobs at the university to allow us to be
car-free much of the time.
I don’t mind
the fifteen-minute morning hike. It
serves as the start to my morning run-or-bike-commute, and it guarantees that
the kids get at least a bit of exercise, even on days when the mercury is below
-20F, and recess is cancelled. It also
doubles as time to eat a portable breakfast (usually toast, but sometimes a
more ambitious foray into pancakes, fruit, muffins, oatmeal, or yogurt). We chat about what’s coming up in the day
ahead, note the phase of the moon or the configuration of the constellations, kick snowballs along the icy road, or say hi to the neighbors’ neurotically
excitable dogs. Sometimes we catch a
little aurora, startle a few grouse, or even pause to make way for a
moose. We have our timing down to the
minute; when we reach the stop sign on Gold Hill, we can almost always see red
safety lights blinking in the dark, a quarter mile down the road, at the next
bus stop. The driver pulls up for my two
little people, I kiss the tops of their puffy jacket hoods, and they carefully
wait to cross the road.
In the
afternoons, we complete the same journey in reverse, but usually with higher
energy and more chatter. Afternoon snacks
are clutched in mittened hands – the kids are really stellar at eating with
mittens on – and there is more hopping, skipping, slipping, and sliding than
mere walking. Did Coach Davis set up the Indiana Jones obstacle course in gym
class? Do you actually know the meanings
of all the words in the Star Spangled Banner?
Did you spell ‘maniac’ correctly?
A few days
ago, during one such session of afternoon conversation, one of the kids
remarked (with her mouth full of honey-roasted peanuts) that, “Not very many
kids take the bus.”
I probed. More than half, I asked? No, both twins agreed. Less than half. Maybe a third, if that. More like a
quarter. Yay, fractions! Molly and
Lizzy weren’t objecting to riding the bus, merely stating a fact: most kids are
driven to school. Which of your friends
ride the bus? Reading between the lines,
I began to guess that the economic breakdown among pint-sized bus-riders might
not be so different from that among full-sized bus riders. Buses
are not “nice”.
Granted, the
twins’ estimates may be off, and granted, some kids walk to school. But still, there are clearly hundreds of kids
being driven to University Park Elementary, every day. This means a huge, tangled lineup of cars
trailing exhaust in the parking lot, which – despite excellent efforts on the
part of school administrators – was clearly was not designed for so much
traffic.
So, adults
are not riding buses… and neither are kids.
And… I think that’s a shame.
It’s a shame
for the obvious reasons, of course: environmentalism, efficiency, fuel use,
road crowding, economy, air quality, and so on.
But (as I’ve bored you all with my circuitous bus-reminiscing) I’ve come
to realize that it’s a shame for a host of other reasons, too. Buses are good places for people-watching,
for social mixing, for letting go of road rage, and for doing all the things
that people like to do while driving (texting, putting on makeup, eating a
four-course-meal) without creating a deadly hazard. Buses can be slow, but slow isn’t always
bad. Slowness offers the opportunity to
read a good book, to learn to spell ‘maniac’, to experience a little
parent-free teacher-free subversive conversation, to finish your homework in
bumpy-hurried handwriting, to explain everything you know about women’s rights
to someone you’ve never met before, to take a nap, or to play bridge with the
most heart-stoppingly nerdy boys you have ever met.
I don’t know
how to make buses more popular. I don’t
know how to get rich people to ride them.
I don’t know how to argue with the logic of fellow-parents who tell me, quite
reasonably, that it’s quicker and simpler and easier to drop off their kids on
the way to and from work than to stand at a school bus stop when the mercury is
at -40. I don’t know how to address the
fears of parents who think that the schoolbus is somehow dangerous or “not nice”;
people tend to dance around the subject rather than face it head-on. But I do have my suspicions that if kids aren’t
riding the school bus when they are seven, they will be less likely – and less
willing – to hop on a Greyhound or a city bus when they are twenty-seven, thirty-seven,
or forty-seven.
The bus from
downtown Anchorage to the airport cost exactly two dollars. My bills were a bit rumpled, but the driver
helped me get them into the slot. The
ride was relaxing: perhaps ten percent slower than a taxi would have been,
because of the stops, but at least 90% cheaper, and no less comfortable. I enjoyed it.
And I’d do it again, every time – unless, of course, the option of
riding a bike were available.
