Transit Miami

Mariel Garza of the Los Angeles Daily News recently conducted her own personal Transit Challenge, where she depended solely on the Public Transportation in Los Angeles for a Month straight, Impressive. All in all, her experience flat out sucked (from her perspective.) Her daily commute (50 Miles) aboard public buses took around 3.5 hours a day (this is what Sprawl will do to Miami eventually, especially if we keep expanding the UDB to build lame, poor-planned suburban developments.) She neglected to talk about how much money she saved from not having to fill her gas tank, but, harped about the $75/Month bus pass she purchased.

However, to ride the L.A. DOT’s commuter express past a few miles say, to or from the San Fernando Valley you must purchase an extra stamp for $17 a pop. A bus pass for $75 a month hardly seems like a big incentive.

The LA system seems to be as well planned as the independent, extremely non-interconnected, tri county transit authorities. I wonder if their monthly passes are as difficult as ours to attain, where you have to travel to strip shopping centers to purchase one. All in all, Garza, learned about the problems of Public Transportation in her neighborhood, but provided little insight as to what could be done to improve it or make it efficient enough to improve her commute. Maybe “tricking” out the buses on Pimp My Ride, would entice a few of the more materialistic LA riders. LA’s problem is similar to Miami’s in the sense that it’s extremely difficult to coerce anyone to abandon their vehicular dependency, to a certain extent at least. Inching along independently in thousands of cars along the highways is some how more efficient to everyone than working to seek an alternative.

But the most important thing I learned from my bus experiment is that it is both humbling and humiliating to be dependent on the bus. When you drive, you are in control of your destination and thus, in a way, your destiny. When you ride the bus, you give up control to the bus driver, to the other passengers and to chance itself

My car certainly isn’t taking me to destiny, I’m headed to work. Humiliation should never be a feeling evoked by using public transportation and thus here lies one of our fundamental issues in openly adopting transportation use. I guess it just isn’t “cool” anymore to ride the bus to work, or it must that we are so concerned with how others will perceive us if we did so…