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Middle class people don't ride the bus but ride trains because the bus isn't competitive with a car while trains are.
Buses are comparatively cramped, erratic in motion, lack stations isolated from streets, and are seen as slow. Sorry but comfort on public transit matters.
Buses are comparatively cramped, erratic in motion, lack stations isolated from streets, and are seen as slow. Sorry but comfort on public transit matters.
People presume low income people ride the bus as some kind of commitment to transit when they really just do so because the cost-burden of owning a car is too high. The only place bus riding is universal are places where car ownership is difficult like very dense cities.
If you treat public transit quality like some veeeeeery basic welfare service required, accompanied with aesthetically unpleasing vehicles and acronyms, and its punctuality like something run by the DMV, its only predictable the folks to use it are people who dont have a choice.
I already did a thread about this but SF makes transit ridership competitive in the parts of the city that are dense. More importantly, the high cost of car ownership via meters and *very proactive* parking enforcement downtown makes cars too expensive https://twitter.com/thegreenfrog611/status/1340707778906624000?s=20
Politicians HATE this but its the truth: making driving and parking difficult is half the strategy to making public transit universally used. You give away curbs, right of ways, and storage for free! Often on streets not originally built for cars.
To be frank, low income folks dont even necessarily "ride the bus". Vast majority of working class people drive. Yes most bus riders are low income but there's just not that many riders. As soon as someone can afford a car in most of the US, it's just too competitive over transit
Common false argument: "Middle income people dont ride the bus because they're scared of poor people."
Nah. For example: NYC transit is heavily used among all incomes. Not only is this perception false but then buses wouldnt be running empty in most middle and upper income areas
Nah. For example: NYC transit is heavily used among all incomes. Not only is this perception false but then buses wouldnt be running empty in most middle and upper income areas
Transit ridership and service has declined so substantially after the rise of the automobile and fossil fuel industry that many Americans dont even recognize buses as a legitimate form of transit anymore when many of these cities were built on electric, widely used transit lines.
