Transit in Small Towns

Matt Yglesias is pounding the drum for transit again, and once again I think he’s making a lot of sense. I thought I’d throw in a few of my thoughts on transit issues.

I currently live in a country where the level of automobile ownership is much lower than the United States. For the most part, people get around by public transport. Where I live, in a town of about 35,000, there is a bus system with a limited schedule. Most people take taxis where they need to go if it’s further than walking distance. There are four or five different companies, and there are many cab stands throughout the city. There’s an informally agreed upon rate of about a dollar anywhere in the city – further, to one of the many small villages in the area, and it goes to about thirty cents a kilometer. For me, this works great. I walk most places, but if I need to get someplace in a hurry, I can always take a cab. I would prefer if there was a regular bus service to more parts of town (and if you had been on some of the cab rides I have been, you would to). It’s not perfect, but it works. Larger towns have more options: trams, trollys, heavily frequented bus lines.

Between cities, there are two options: trains and buses. I prefer trains, but they have some major downsides. They’re slower than buses, and they don’t go to as many places. I live in a majority ethnic minority area, and it has traditionally not seen the kind of infrastructure improvements that the rest of the country has enjoyed. The end result is that there are a lot of poorly paved roads and very few rail lines. There is a rail line coming to my town (one of the biggest in the region), though, so I’m able to take advantage of it. The trains are cheaper than the buses – they’re less affected by the price shocks caused by oil price fluctuations. I’ve lived in this area for about a year and a half now, and I’ve seen the price of a ticket to the capital go up by half. Trains also run at night, which most buses do not do. Buses are quicker, but they’re also more annoying – the seats are small, they’re unbelievably hot, and the drivers seem to be having some sort of “most reckless” contest. Their biggest advantage is that they go pretty much anywhere. Every day, people use these buses to travel between cities for jobs that, without a car, they could not ordinarily hold.

This is a pretty sharp contrast with the United States. Before I left for the Peace Corps, I worked as a cab driver for a short while. I drove in my hometown, a small industrial city in Ohio. The cabs were used almost exclusively by low income senior citizens, the mentally handicapped being taken from and to adult daycare facilities and people who had lost their driver’s licenses, mostly due to drunk driving charges. You could purchase tokens for two dollars a piece to take you anywhere in the city, but you had to call and arrange for drop off and pick up beforehand. If you didn’t have a token, a fare inside the city was six dollars. I assume in the almost two years since I’ve driven a cab that those prices have gone up. I once took a woman to the airport in Columbus, Ohio, a forty-five minute drive from town – it cost her sixty five dollars. I can take a forty-five minute bus ride here for about four. Inside the city, the cabs were too inconvenient and too expensive for people to take in lieu of their regular car – it’s just much easier to take a car when you have to call a dispatcher and wait half an hour for a cab (containing one or two other passengers).

The United States desperately needs to reinvest in major transit infrastructure. Most of what Matt Yglesias is talking about deals with urban transit. That is certainly an area that needs work, but in small town and rural areas of the US, people who lose their driving privileges or simply can’t afford a car are almost wholly unable to find work outside of their immediate areas. A comprehensive transit system, including interurban transport, whether bus or train, would allow people to go to where the jobs are, instead of being stuck in dead-end jobs and on government assistance. The US had a system like this, but we dismantled it as the age of the automobile got its start. But now, as oil prices are on the rise and unlikely to come back down, we need to start preparing for the end of that age. Automobiles would never have come to dominate as much as they have if the government hadn’t made a decision to invest heavily in the infrastructure they require – well paved roads, major highways connecting urban centers. We need to make the same kind of investment in other forms of transit.