News & Articles

Every so often, the newspapers publish a letter or opinion strongly against transit.  The current favorite target is the Green Line between Minneapolis and St. Paul.  At least the critics are writing about the costs and not about “government taking our cars away.”
I would like to turn the last phrase around and say that “government took our street cars, buses, and trains away.”  “Government” did this by building bigger and faster freeways and reducing transit service.  Why take a bus that runs every hour or half-hour when you can arrive at your destination in your car in fifteen minutes?
I grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, and got around by foot, bicycle, street cars, and buses.  I rarely bothered with a schedule because service was rather frequent.  By the time I got to graduate school, most service had deteriorated to the point that I could walk to school faster than I could take two buses.  In bad weather, I drove.
Those who complain about “government taking our cars away” should look at it as “making room for me.”  If more people took the public transit, there would be more room for those who choose to drive.
Think about how a bus makes more space for drivers.  Suppose a forty-foot bus has an average load of twenty-five passengers.  Suppose a fifteen-foot car has an average load of two passengers.  Assuming that all vehicles are traveling at 55 mph with a safe stopping distance between them, a bus would need fewer than fifteen feet per passenger but a car would need sixty-eight feet per passenger.  See, government can be efficient!
I use the load of twenty-five passengers above because that was my usual load driving a bus between Maple Grove and downtown Minneapolis.  If buses are carrying forty passengers instead, which some do, then the comparison drops to nine feet of highway per passenger.  I’ll let you do the comparison for four passengers per car.  However, my first figure is generous in that so many cars have a single occupant.  Using that figure shows us that a single occupant uses almost ten times as much highway space per passenger as a bus carrying twenty-five passengers.
Think about the parking space needed. A forty-foot bus will need about 360 square feet of parking space at the terminal.  They would all be jammed together.  A fifteen-foot car would need over 200 square feet of parking space in a lot or garage.  That is around 100 square feet of parking space per passenger.  On the other hand, if a bus made three runs, it would only need fewer than five square feet of parking space per passenger.
It’s a bit of a slog to find CO2 emissions and fuel efficiency figures, but from Wikipedia I found that a 2008 Toyota Prius has a rating of 46 mpg and 55-passenger buses in Santa Barbara have a rating of 6.0 mpg.  Using the previous figures of two passengers in a car and twenty-five in a bus, we get 92 mpg/passenger for a Prius (worse if we use some other vehicles) and 150 mpg/passenger for a bus.  If the bus has forty passengers, we get 240 mpg/passenger.
In areas where traffic comes to a standstill and buses drive on the shoulder, the buses would definitely be doing better on emissions.
Every time I drive to the Cities, I marvel at all the land gobbled up by that huge interchange of 35E and 694.  How much tax revenue is lost for that land?  I took an easier sample.  Using Hennepin County’s Property Interactive Map, I selected a few residences on Second Avenue South that were south of Lake Street.  Houses on Second Avenue there overlook I-35W Gulch.  The real estate taxes there are about $2,500 per year.  There are about 31 blocks from Lake St. to the city limit at 62nd Street.  I-35W is one block wide.  The city, county, and school district taxes lost for that section of freeway are over $1.8 million.  For this little article, I am not going to make the effort to calculate the taxes lost for all the freeways that scar the Twin Cities.
Sadly, the freeway is probably used more by people who don’t even live in Hennepin County, but in counties to the south.
It wasn’t “government that took our buses away,” but land speculators and corporations.  In the 19th and early 20th centuries, railroads and land speculators encouraged people to move to the suburbs to get away from “those people” in the city.  Then the car manufacturers lobbied for more roads for their vehicles.  Roads were a subsidy for cars, but to pay for the roads, governments couldn’t afford street cars and buses.
Ironically, now many affluent people are moving back to the cities and pushing “those people” out.  First it was land speculators attracting people out from the cities, and now it is building speculators attracting people back to the cities.  Psst, hey buddy—I have this nice New York City condo for you, only $25 million.

Mel doesn’t cycle anymore, but he still walks, drives, or takes a bus, depending.