Shared Transport

I'm sitting in an express bus that's half-empty on the way to Boston. It's the right sort of bus - comfortable seats, Wi-Fi. I can do things like blogging en-route. But I was nearly the only person on it until about a minute before it started to move and only a handful of people got on at its only other stop. There is no doubt that the people running the bus will lose money this run.

This reflects the numbers I have seen from just about every form of public or private passenger service. Some people do use it - but not enough. The others drive, complaining bitterly about the conditions of the commute, but they continue to do what they do not enjoy.

I understand why this happens. I have tried to use public transport in almost every place I have lived around the greater Boston area. I have lived in Acton, Lowell, Lawrence, Nashua, and - for the last 20 years or so, Hudson. In every case, aside from the present peculiar situation, getting from where I live to where I want to go has involved a bewildering array of transitions from one mode of transport to another. The uncoordinated schedules have guaranteed that a 20-minute drive would translate into a two- or three-hour commute. The reasons not to do this are compelling.

This bus is different. I still drive 15 minutes to get to the bus I am on now and then walk ten minutes at the other end, but the nature of Boston driving makes the drive-time nearly a wash and the problems of parking in downtown Boston make choosing the bus a no-brainer for me.

Public transportation is an investment problem. It has to go the places people are going and it has to go there often enough to be convenient. A city bus that runs once an hour will only be used by the truly desperate who are willing to structure their entire life around its schedule. A city bus route that runs every 15 minutes stands a much better chance but will be nearly empty unless it runs very close to where people want to go. People will switch buses if they don't have to wait very long and only if they only need to switch once. All of this means that in order to have a thriving public transportation system where the buses actually fill up, a city needs to have a lot of buses with a lot of routes. This is very expensive, and in spread out places with lots of parking, it is completely cost-ineffective.

I think the basic underlying problem of public transportation is that our cities and towns weren't built around it. They were built and rebuilt around the automobile. Public transportation works best when you have a lot of people in one place going to the same other place. Where civic planning has people living in one tightly-clustered area and working in another tightly clustered area, it doesn't take many trains or buses to get them from one to the other.

We didn't build America that way. Americans value privacy and personal space above all else and we apply our money and attention to achieve that privacy. We are ever wont to spread out. In many societies, people will take great efforts to live close to their families, sharing the same neighborhoods together. In America, this is the last thing that we want. Even when we cannot afford an acre of land to call our own, we would prefer to live as strangers among strangers than to live clustered with our families, with our relatives in and out of our houses and our lives on a daily basis. We avoid the pressure of stifling connections of all sorts.

Perhaps I am over-projecting. Perhaps this is a peculiarity of the New England in which I was born and raised. But it would appear just from how people have chosen to spend their money on housing that this isn't limited to a small part of the country.

So what is the prognosis for shared transportation, public or private, in this country? I'm not sure, but it doesn't look hopeful. Economic forces may drive people back to their families. Environmental forces may drive people to consider more efficient ways to live together. If the pressures remain over a couple of generations, it could even change the culture. But until that happens, it honestly doesn't look promising.