Trimet Max Train (Photo credit: EnvironmentBlog)
Driving forty-five minutes to work every day really irks me. It’s one of those things I said I’d never do, but here I am. I’d much rather be cycling to work than driving, and if I can’t be on a bicycle, I’d rather take public transit. Buses, light rail/subways, and intercity rail are important because they are democratic, in addition to being energy efficient. Public and mass transit evens out the playing field for those who can’t afford to buy, maintain, and insure a car, those who can’t drive, and for those for which owning a car would be impractical. Of course, much of this goes against the individualistic ethic in America, in the same way that an urban apartment goes against the dream of a house in the suburbs.
Nationally, we spend about 1.6 TRILLION dollars a year on transit. Of that, $1.3 TRILLION is spent on automobile transit, $55 Billion on public transit, $69 Billion on rail, and $183 Billion on air. We have 32 Thousand square miles of transportation infrastructure. Transit covers about 30% of cities. That’s a lot of money and space given over to transit, most of which is used by cars. These are the figures given by William Millar, former president of the American Public Transportation Association and former CEO of the Port Authority of Allegheny County in a lecture on Pitt’s campus Tuesday evening.
Millar is of course a proponent of public transportation, and while he of course might be somewhat biased, he also made some good points. He thinks that there has to be more public transit in our future. While admitting that “there’s enormous pressure to keep on doing what we’ve always done before,” he thinks that pressures such as “mother nature” and increasing population will make public transit a necessity.
Detail of the Futurama exhibit at the New York World Fair 1939-40, showing a street intersection in the City of Tomorrow. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
He spoke of many things, such as transit-oriented development, public-private funding, energy efficiency, and better transit capacity. But he also pointed out the need to capture the public’s fancy. The Futurama exhibit at the 1939 World’s Fair captured the public’s imagination. It, and the ideas behind it, may have led to some of the worst development decisions ever made, but car culture captured our imagination.
“But life goes on and on we go, spinning along the coast in a violet light, past Howard Johnson’s and the motels and the children’s carnival. We pull into the bay and have a drink under the stars.”
– Walker Percy, The Moviegoer
Romantic indeed.
Of course, some forms of transit do easily capture the imagination. Trains for example. Of course, the trains that capture our imaginations are the high speed European trains, or perhaps the cross-country Amtraks threading their way through the Rocky Mountains. Not the beat up Chicago Metra commuter trains. The street cars of San Francisco are romantic, the Metro of DC not so much.
The question, then, is how to make public transit something people want and prefer over private automobiles. Millar said that transportation plays a large role in deciding where one will live, and encouraged the audience to choose to live near public transit. But the crowd was mostly already believers in public transit. How do we make public transit a viable option, a factor in people’s housing and work decisions, and to appear as the asset to the community that it is?
