Transit Reality Check

Public Transit. I believe in public transit. I did not get my driver’s license until I was 26, and I’ve lived in Boston and Portland, so I have ridden a lot of buses in my time. I enjoy a good bus ride—stare out the window, eavesdrop on the gossip behind me, meditate on the nature of the universe of dinner plans—it rarely  feels like  a waste of time  to ride the bus, when it is on schedule. I’ll give an extra 35% of travel time gladly for a bus ride. However,….

Last week, I decided to take public transit to visit my friend Amy, who lives in Milwaukie, Oregon. It is almost exactly two hours to drive my VW van door to door, but the Ark had developed a hiccup that could lead to a stop by the side of the road, and I did not want to deal a visit to the repair shop instead of dinner with a friend. I walked out of the door at 11 AM, heading to the Corvallis transit center a mile away. At 11:25, I climbed onto the Linn-Benton loop, rode for 15 minutes to the community college, transferred to the Albany bus, and rode another 12 minutes into the Albany transit station, arriving at 11:55.  Although my bus to Portland left at 1:05, I had to arrive an hour early because the loop bus takes a lunch break for an hour. I packed my own lunch and a book, and ate on a bench outside.  At 1:05, my bus pulled into the station, loaded up, and headed north. It arrived in Portland about five minutes late—no big deal. I grabbed my backpack, walked to the near-by tri-met stop, waited for the orange line, and climbed aboard. This new line travels all the way to Milwaukie, which is very cool. I admired all of the new public art along the way and studied the complex green paint for bikes around some of the stations. We came into town a little after four and I walked the last mile to Amy’s house, landing in her yard just before 4:30.  It took two local buses, one regional bus, and a light rail ride and two walks five and a half hours to travel a two hour car drive. And that was with every bus on time.

Recently, I broke my arm. I am fine, but I have been going to physical therapy 2.5 miles away.  To walk would be an hour and a half there and back—if my ankle was ok that day. To take the bus would be even longer, and would involve hours of waiting because the local buses run once an hour.  The ideal is riding a bike, which I now do, but that was out when I was in a cast. We drove for the first month.

These are just two examples of the problems we face when we begin to think about how to move people from one place to another without individual cars. When we say “just don’t bring your car to campus” or “you don’t need a car in Corvallis—you can get everywhere on the bus. Its free!” we are not considering the absurd amount of time and effort it takes for healthy people to commit to public transit.  Buses need to run every 15 minutes, day and into the late evening, to be user friendly on a broad scale. They cannot take lunch breaks. Bike lanes need to feel safe on busy streets. Walkers need paths to cut through long blocks. Everyone needs better signage to calculate distance and location. This is more than a cultural mind shift—it will require a complete shift of how we fund transportation and road design. It needs to happen; we need to begin today. Otherwise, in a few years, we will all be trapped at home, unable to visit a friend in Milwaukie.