An Inconvenient Truth About Public Transit

One of the benefits of being a card-carrying member of the Sierra Club is that it assuages the guilt I feel over owning a non-hybrid vehicle (frankly, our Honda Element verges on SUV, but we barely drive it, I swear, and it's a total lifesaver at IKEA). Another is Sierra magazine. It arrives every couple of months, which means that I have time to finish reading one issue before another shows up in my mailbox (New Yorker, I'm talking to you).

The current edition has a fascinating feature on ultralight backpacking for those crazy folks who like to hike thousand-mile trails, or blaze their own path from Maine to Washington. I'd totally love to join them on their trek if there were such a thing as indoor outdoors plumbing.

But what I found most intriguing were the results of a climate change poll that took a look at how well people walk the environmental talk. In other words, which potential conservation actions a person believes to be important vs. whether or not they engage in said behavior. For example, 93% of those surveyed thinks it's important to turn off unneeded lights, and 84% follow up by actually flipping off switches. Sixty-two percent believe in composting, only 14% do it.

The greatest discrepancy, not surprisingly, had to do with transportation. We all know Americans are profoundly attached to their cars (I cried when someone smashed in one of our Element's windows last year), here's how much: 73% believe public transit is important, only 10% ride it. Count me among that paltry latter group--I said I love my car, I didn't say I love to drive--but I'm not exactly out there beating the public transportation drum. Why not? Because it sucks.

I suspect a large number of, for lack of a better term, let's just call them hypocrites, eschew public transit for the sole reason that they don't have access to it. I grew up in suburban Ohio. There was no bus system, much less rail. We didn't even have a movie theater. If we wanted entertainment, we got drunk in the bowling alley parking lot. And we liked it that way. When I moved to Chicago (really, can you blame me?) I immediately started riding the bus to and from work and pretty much walking everywhere else. Later I graduated to the El system--once you go rail, you never go back to the bus. For the past 17 years, public transit has been my primary mode of transportation. So when I say that it sucks, I say that with a fair amount of authority.

Here's the trouble:

• For starters, it's inconvenient. Sure, bus routes blanket the city, but to get from Point A to Point B might require any number of transfers from one route to another. If you think a connecting flight via airplane is a hassle, try waiting for that second plane in the rain or snow or blistering heat--for a half an hour. Rail lines are even less ubiquitous, leaving huge swaths of the city unserved. My personal solution has been to essentially live my life along the route of 1 or 2 train lines. And while I've managed just fine with this system, it's been limiting, to say the least, not just in terms of little things like where we dine out or where we shop for clothes, but major decisions like where I've looked for work. If I can't get there via the Brown or Red lines--or on foot--there's a pretty good chance I don't go there at all. I can understand why most people aren't willing to make that kind of sacrifice.
• It's public. I know, that seems rather obvious. But if you're used to driving a car, it's quite shocking to suddenly share your ride with dozens of other people. Most of whom forget they're sharing their ride with you. They clip their toenails. (Yes, they do.) They listen to their headphones, really loudly. They argue with their boyfriends--either in person or on their cellphones. (Oh, don't get me started on cellphones.) They eat fried chicken--though food is specifically prohibited--and leave the scraps on the floor or their seat. They beg for money or run con games. If they're Cubs fans, they tend to vomit after 9 innings of beer consumption. If you don't have to subject yourself to this, why would you?
• It's messy. This point is not to be confused with the chicken scraps or barf. It has to do with walking to and from a train station or bus stop--which are not, make no mistake, situated in your driveway--in any and all kinds of weather. And in Chicago, there is always weather. If it's raining, you get wet. If it's snowing, you get slush all over your pants. If it's windy, your hair is destroyed. If it's hot, you need a second shower before you reach the station. By the time you get to your destination, you look like trash. And all those people in their cars--fresh as a daisy.
• It's expensive. A gallon of gas costs about $3 in Chicago. Even a relative guzzler like our Element can go 25 miles for that amount, or about 12 cents per mile. Now let's price transit: A one-way rail trip, regardless of distance, will set you back $2.25. Same for the return unless you can accomplish your business in two hours or less. So let's say I travel roughly 4 miles to see a movie. That's $4.50 in train fair vs. 48 cents in gas. Even factoring in parking, and Chicago's skyrocketing parking rates at that, driving is still a better deal. Just this past weekend, my parents were in town and we took them to the Green City Farmers Market near the Lincoln Park Zoo. To and fro, with a transfer in between, cost four of us $19 in train fare. Compare that with $12 to park at the zoo. We went out to brunch on Sunday, this time taking our car, and coughed up two bucks in quarters for the meter. Two bucks versus almost $20 for the train, with a sizable walk from the station tacked on at that. My parents are in their late 60s and my dad's sciatica had been acting up all weekend. I look at them and I see myself down the road; I try to picture myself on the train at that age and it's not pretty. Makes me want to move to Florida where the seniors tool around in tricked out golf carts.

That's an abbreviated look public transportation--believe me, I could go on for pages and pages--and all the ways that it fails miserably as an alternative to cars. What I didn't mention is that there's no traffic, at least not on the train, and it's a great place to read a magazine if you can shut out all the distractions. That's pretty much the extent of the positives. For 90 percent of the people, they don't outweigh the negatives. Until they do, I don't see how we're going to move more people onto buses and trains. Sadly, I don't thinking anybody, at the local or federal level, is seriously trying to change that equation.