#maybe we shouldnt actively screw over the most vulnerable people in society

[clutterbrain]

I love that comic for biking, but I just want to point out one difference between urban cycling and bus riding.

When biking infrastructure is bad, the only people who bike are exceptionally athletic and/or brave. But for people who use bad bus systems, it's not that they're more capable of making the bus work than other people - it's that they have no other options.

When I lived in San Antonio, I realized it would be faster to just spend 40 minutes walking home than it would be to get a 1 hour delayed bus. So I walked, and I never took the bus again after that. It was hot and time-consuming and there weren't always sidewalks, but I could walk in that little dirt path by the road and make it work.

You know who was still left at that bus stop when I gave up? People who can't just decide to walk. If you pay attention, you'll see who's actually waiting at the bus stops: elderly people, people with visible mobility aids, blind people. The actual population that uses America's shittiest public transit is NOT super intense eco-activists or people who just really love the bus and choose to put up with it, it's people who literally have no other option. They cannot drive a car, they can't just walk, they can't even travel by electric scooter or wheelchair because we *don't build or maintain the fucking sidewalks.*

What is left for them but to wait out that 2 hour delay?

People who only take transit may be expecting it but that doesn't mean it doesn't fuck them over. How can you keep a job or make an appointment if it's impossible to predict whether you'll be 2 hours late or not? Disabled people have shit to do too!!!!

Better buses. Every 15 minutes. And fix the fucking sidewalks!!!!

If you are thinking about it on paper, the bus running every half hour doesn't sound so bad, until you're waiting at the stop and you miss a bus or it's delayed. Then you're waiting a very, very long time. To people who never take transit, that's probably fine. Why do you care. To people who only take transit, they're expecting it, it's baked in their lives. But the important part, what really impacts our cities, is what happens to people for whom transit is an option.

The spiral goes like this. You go to take the bus instead of driving, thinking "I'm going to o have a couple drinks" or "I don't want to worry about parking where I'm going." So you take bus. First bus is right on time. But then you transfer from your neighborhood line to the line that takes you where you actually want to go. And your bus is delayed. And it only comes every 30 minutes. And then you're waiting, 40 minutes later, wondering where your bus is, knowing you could have driven there in 20 minutes.

Why would you ever chose to take a bus again? The bus made you waste precious time on your day off just sitting there. So next time you drive. Ridership goes down. When the transit authority asks for more money for more buses and more drivers, people point to the ridership numbers and say "why should we pay for this instead of paying for our schools/police/baseball stadium/parks/police again (let's be real that's who's taking all the money)?" If we want to increase ridership we need to actually design and fund functional transit networks. If we want people to actually ride the bus we need to make it a better option than driving, which means reliable service, which you don't get with a bus every 30 minutes.

Every 15 minutes, everywhere, all of the time.