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Fri, 11 Jul 2008
Swirling down the drain on the bus
Last week, I was a little startled to get a phone call from my daughter, who is 14. She plays the viola, you see, and is traveling with her high-school orchestra in Europe for ten days this summer, and I'm the kind of 20th-century guy who is surprised by phone calls from Germany.
But it was a happy call, and she reported to me that they were in Berlin, and told me about the Checkpoint Charlie museum (giving me the opportunity to reflect that the Berlin wall, which seemed eternal to me once, came down three years before she was born), and the Fernsehturm, a giant TV tower with a rotating platform from which to view the city. But she also reported that the trains and buses were cool, too. She was thrilled that she and her friends could get wherever they wanted to go -- by themselves. We had a 3-minute call, and probably half of it was about the feeling of independence and how much fun the trains were to use.
Now I'm relieved she's well and enjoying herself, even if I'm not perfectly sure I'm ready for her to be all that independent quite yet, thank you very much. But there you have her take on sensible public transit: fun and liberating.
Meanwhile, back home, the Governor vetoed a bill that would allow RIPTA buses to carry a radio beacon to delay the change of some traffic lights as they approach. (Many police and fire vehicles carry these beacons now.) According to his veto message it's an "increased danger to all motorists" to wait a bit longer at a traffic light, so hooray for the Governor for saving us from the scourge of better public transit.
But this is a shame. Public transit is a way to avoid worrying about parking, avoid wear and tear on one's car, and read or sleep on the way to and from work: less worry, more sleep. Plus, the bus driver on one of the routes I ride gives out cookies at Christmastime. How can you go wrong?
Longtime bus riders like me have viewed the last couple of years with a mixture of gratification and frustration. Gratification because so many former scoffers have seen the light and joined me on the bus. These people have realized they could save a ton of money and time by taking the bus. Of course the frustration is also because so many former scoffers have joined me on the bus. The buses I ride are frequently standing-room only, and on some routes the bus routinely passes waiting patrons for lack of room.
You can see the picture in the statistics. With the surge to $3 gas, RIPTA ridership rose 11.6% in 2006 -- a huge jump -- but only 5.8% in 2007. Now that gas is up past $4 and still climbing, the system's capacity not only hasn't grown to meet the new demand, but it's shrunk and is about to shrink more due to budget cuts.
The problem is that the system is stuck: endlessly starved of resources by a legislature and Governor who don't ever ride the bus themselves and don't see its value. The result: overcrowded and unpleasant riding conditions, schedules so sparse they barely work at all, and unreliable service to boot. The truth is that RIPTA is barely adequate as public transit, and the proof is in the number of cars parked at RIPTA's Elmwood Avenue garage each day -- even the drivers and managers who get a free ride don't take it.
You would think that $4 gas would be incentive enough for drivers to avoid driving, and I've heard stories about families curtailing summer driving trips this year. But are the streets perceptibly emptier? Not really, and the reason is that incentives are meaningless without alternatives.
Are you feeling pressed by high gas prices? Do you wish you had another way to get to work or shopping, to the movies or an evening out? In other places in the world, they have alternatives to cars. (And fewer drunk drivers, too.) Why not here, too? Despite the sprawl of the last 50 years, Rhode Island is still pretty compact. With energy and creativity, we could build a system that was actually an appealing and convenient way to get around the state, but we'd need many more buses on existing routes, and probably some new routes too.
Unfortunately, none of that seems to be in the cards. Is it possible to imagine a more inoffensive and minor way to improve RIPTA's service than to give the bus a slight advantage at traffic lights? Under this administration, even that is beyond the pale.
Robert Batting, the Governor's new appointment to the RIPTA board chair seems determined only to manage the agency's decline in a fiscally responsible way, and pushed through a rate increase as his first significant act. I suppose that's better than being stupid about it, but where is the vision for improving the system to one people could actually use to get around the state? Oh, right. We can't afford it, because according to our current leaders, the most important thing your government can do is less of everything.
My call from Berlin reminds me that a better system is possible. It's not free, but neither is gasoline, in case you hadn't noticed. Your government could help here, but won't.
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