The Walk of Shame

I would consider any public transportation system high quality if:

• the first and last stops are within a 1/4 mile of your source and destination
• it's available at least every 15 minutes, and
  
• provides a modicum of safety, comfort, and cleanliness.

That first point is most crucial. If someone has to drive to the stop/station, then they are just as likely to continue to drive all the way to work. It's critical you don't use the car. In my case, once I start the car, I'm taking her all the way into work. All the way, to fourth base. None of this bi-modal bullshit and besides, it's always faster to drive than it is to take the bus around here, always.

Of course...how would you like to live within 1/4 mile from the 19th street Oakland BART station? And even if you didn't, how would you like it if RT/BART/YOUR TRANSIT HERE were to put in a new station 600 feet from your front door? NIMBY-ism. Well, technically, it's NIMFY-ism if we're talking about your front door. But can you imagine? Declining Property values! Increased Crime! Riff-Raff!

There has always been one major problem with public transportation: The Public. My observation: the people on light rail and the bus, mostly, do not look like me. On the Elk Grove busses they're all Asian, on Light Rail they're all Brown. Many are not dressed for success. What Riff-Raff! Commoners! There is such a chasm between what white, middle-class, suburban, three-car-garage property owners think of, and the reality that is, public transit. There was no finer example of this than when my oldest son Ryan was about nine. As I was driving him home from school, we saw a bus at the bus stop and he remarked that only poor people ride the bus.

I was amazed that, at nine, white chauffeured kids at school are already forming opinions about how their poor, brown neighbors were managing. Ryan, as far as I know, has never once stepped foot into an RT bus, never once walked the Walk Of Shame, from the front door to the bus stop. We joke about what he said, now some 11 years later, but a subtle remark by a 9-year-old shows just what's at issue here. This is exactly why we have low-density gated housing suburbs and single use zoning, why the inner tier rings of cities are always dilapidated and why the cancer keeps spreading outward, why port terminals, substations and sewer plants are located where they are, why we don't have neighborhood groceries, why a subdivision can mandate the construction of only 3,800 sq and larger homes, and why transit never 'works'.