This week's column is about transportation, and naturally it begins with the automobile.
People of my persuasion, who advocate for environmental conservation, sometimes get accused of being anti-automobile. I’m not anti-automobile, but I am a realist about automobiles and the problems they present.
Automobiles are like children: we love our own automobiles, but other people’s automobiles are something we could generally do without. People who say that they love automobiles love best to drive them on roads that are largely empty of other traffic. They do not feel the love in conditions of traffic gridlock; the immediate presence of hundreds of other drivers and cars does not warm their hearts one bit.
I love my own car, and I might love the car I’m driving at any given moment, or the car I might hope to possess someday, or the nice-looking car I do not have to share the road with at any given time. But I don’t love cars. Nobody does. We are all closet haters of other people’s cars.
Clear Vision, New Choices
I believe that the automobile, and the experience of driving, is one of the great minor highlights of American culture and experience. There are certain kinds of experiences that seem extremely American, invigorating and freeing, that would not be the same without a car.
There are few travel experiences more evocative to a person my age, for instance, than to slip into a Chevrolet Corvette of any vintage and start driving west on Route 66. There is no driver who won’t enjoy driving their car on I-94 west of Fargo, or any of the other great, fabled, mostly deserted highways of the American interior – to say nothing of the great coastal routes. The Great American Vacation Road Trip, in fact, is what we need cars for.
But for getting to and from the office or the factory every day, we need something else. We need something that will allow for an ordinary degree of privacy and comfort, at less expense, and at markedly less aggravation, distraction, and negative impact.
We need a system that doesn’t put us in thrall to a three-thousand-pound infant as soon as the ignition key is turned off; that doesn’t require an eight-hour babysitting fee every workday, or to be nursed continually with three-dollar a gallon gasoline.
In two words, we need mass transit; and ultimately we will need to accept the fact, and begin to accustom the future urban population to its use. But before anything else happens, we will need to define the sort of transit system that people will readily use.
The Evolution of Mobility
I begin and end with the idea that a great transit system is worth the money it takes to make it great. If this means taxation, then that’s what it means. A lot of people scoff at the sight of near-empty buses, and gnash their teeth about the cost even as they endure poor systems and services; yet, somehow near-empty expressways are a wonderful thing, and worth every hundred million dollars spent to build them.
People in metro Grand Rapids have already demonstrated that they will pay more in taxes for a good system than they will pay at the bus stop. In two successive millages, in 2000 and 2003, voters supported millage increases for regional bus service, rejecting the notion that our area should limp into the future with substandard service. As a result, an era of declining ridership was reversed.
Transit should be construed primarily as a travel strategy for grownups. Kids may use it, but only if they fold their hands and behave. My stepdaughter tried riding the bus to her classes a few years back, but as soon as she could afford a car, she gave up transit. She said she got weary of strangers aggressively asking her for dates (when she said no, they would ask for money instead).
I don’t mean to disrespect anyone or any age group, but we ought to know we can’t succeed on a large scale with a transit system that young girls are afraid to ride. So, successful transit cannot be strictly a service to the social fringe and the still-being-socialized. A certain standard of manners must prevail. Neither should it be strictly a service to poor people, because the need, from a sustainability standpoint, is to have transit be a service with broad social support and general use.
This is by no means hopeless. Civic leaders in greater Grand Rapids are working seriously on the future of transit in ways that could not have been envisioned ten years ago. The Great Transit, Grand Tomorrows study currently underway soon will issue recommendations for future transit models based on streetcars or, alternatively, rapid transit bus service along major corridor routes.
Former Mayor John Logie, long a champion of light rail for metropolitan Grand Rapids, favors the 21st century streetcar alternative for the immediate future while not ruling out a light rail system years from now, when economic and demographic circumstances permit.
It seems clear that either prototypic streetcar or fast-bus transport will have its foothold in Grand Rapids by 2014. When the new system is built, though limited to a couple of routes, it will undoubtedly be state-of-the-art. And it will signal an evolving transportation system that's about much more than a narrow focus on the automobile.
Photos top to bottom:
Vintage T-Bird on Lake Drive
Rolls Royce in downtown Saugatuck
Hummers along 28th Street
Southbound on US-131
Photographs by Brian Kelly - All Rights Reserved