#transit service

[julianaofborealis]

Bus Driver: You're lucky [the guy in front of you] was running.

Me: (thought: don't much care how lucky I am, as long as I don't miss the bus)

Me: (I'm just happy that I won't be as late to class as I thought I would be)

[counti8]

Transportation planners can fall into the same fallacy by using the terms "choice" and "captive," just as Hess does. In this orthodox binary view, the choice rider has a car in the driveway and chooses to leave it at home, while the captive rider has no alternative but to use transit. The choice rider, therefore, requires a superb service to compete with the car, while the captive rider will keep riding no matter how bad the service gets. The implication is that we’re all in one box or the other. In fact, "choice" and "captive" are endpoints of a spectrum where most people are in the middle, just like the spectrum of income. You may have a car, but perhaps you don’t trust it, or you can’t afford the gas, or your partner needs it some of the time, or you just hate driving, or you can get to work faster on the busway. Or you don’t have a car, but you have a bike and a carshare spot, or an extended network of friends who share rides, or you’ve budgeted to take taxis everywhere. Suppose a family decides that transit is now good enough that they can sell one of their cars. The sudden relief on their family budget will be liberating, even though some binary thinkers will now call them "captives." As @GlobalTom tweeted, in response to the comment debate on my blog: "I choose not to have a car. Does that make me a choice rider or a captive one?"

Jarrett Walker: Why We Should Stop Talking About 'Bus Stigma' - Commute - The Atlantic Cities

I found myself thinking many of the things Walker describes here when I was reading a TCRP paper on public participation that talked about "traditional transit riders" and "choice riders". To me, the framing of traditional really felt like they were saying, "those people who are transit dependent, therefore we can give them any level of service and they'll put up with it because that's all they've got" and I found that framing extremely problematic.

Kudos to Walker for nailing the nuance that, frankly, defines the kinds of conversations about transit in Vancouver that most non-Vancouverites can't get.