My first week using public transportation in Philadelphia is winding down. Or is it winding up? Whatever. It is almost over. While I can’t say that I have had a breadth of experience – only two bus routes and two train routes in the city and suburbs – my experience does not lack depth. I have taken these routes at various times of the day and night, and I have used them during peak hours, off-peak hours, and weekends.
A little context may be in order. For the past year I have been spending most of my time on the west coast in the Bay Area and the Wine Country. When I decided to stay here in Philadelphia on a slightly more permanent basis (three weeks a month more or less), I was faced with the decision about “personal vs public transit”. So, I chose public for a variety of reasons, not the least of which being the cost of personal transport.
Saving money was not the only factor in my calculations, though. I have been in any number of conversations with various “fellow progressives” over the last few years about how important it is for all of us to begin changing our behavior in response to the global environmental crisis that is in the forefront of most of our minds these days. Just one problem, however. I did not see any of us (including me) actually changing that behavior, especially when it came to a choice about giving up our cars and relying on public transit to get us there and back again. So, I decided to forgo getting a car, and see what it is really like to join the masses that comprise mass transit.
Before I head off to the tailor shop to be fitted for some saintly robes, I do have a few carbon sins I need to confess. Once I make that confession and firmly resolve to sin no more, I will immediately head back to the Bay Area, get refitted for shoes that will leave a carbon footprint to rival Bigfoot’s, and engage in the wanton excesses that come with living in the land of the sixteen-lane freeway. And a more than passing mention must be made of the one hundred plus trans-continental flights I have taken over the past six years.
Maybe I should just cancel that fitting appointment at the tailor shop and get a hair shirt off the rack.
Ok back on track… So, what have I noticed in this first week with a diminished footprint? Well, let’s deal with the obvious first. It is both the most obvious and least discussed aspect of the public transit conversation – black folk take buses; white folk take trains. I don’t know how this happened. It has no power of law (at least black folks are free to sit anywhere they wish nowadays), but it might as well have the power of law the way it plays itself out. For me, as a middle-class white man, taking the bus means that I will be the only white guy on the bus, and usually the only white person period. Not so for trains, though.
Taking the train is an exercise in middle-class predictability. I know I will be surrounded by others who look like me, act like me, and probably think like me (although I hold tenaciously to the delusion that my thinking is somehow unique). Oh there are any number of persons of color on the train, but the most striking difference is the number of white middle-class passengers that are regulars.
Perhaps the bus routes have something to do with this. Maybe it is the perceived unpredictability of the bus schedules. Maybe this, maybe that. But here’s the thing, so far the buses and trains have pretty much taken me anywhere in the city I wanted to go.
Before I close this first week’s journal entry, I need to mention another form of public transit I use here from time to time – Philly CarShare. This non-profit organization has dozens of “pods” scattered throughout the city with cars (mostly Priuses) parked in designated spaces. I can then reserve a car on the web. There are enough pods nearby that I have never had a problem reserving a car at the time I needed one. The cars have a computerized sensor on the windshield and I have a doohickey fob thingy (sorry to be so technical) that I put on my keychain, which allows me to swipe and drive. The cars cost $7 per hour and that includes gas, insurance, maintenance, everything. For anyone living in Center City, this is an unbelievably sensible way to go – both from an economical and environmental perspective.
Well, that’s it for now. Next entry in a few weeks when I return to Philadelphia.
Stay safe. Be green.
Afterthoughts... after the jump.
Afterthoughts...
One more thing that I noticed during the first week that may be worthy of note…
early last week I went to the Chestnut Hill section of the city to use an internet café. It is a very posh part of town with lots of aromatherapy spas, fine paper and stationary stores, quaint candle shops – you get the idea. When I went to the counter to pay for my coffee, the very pleasant young barista asked me if I needed my parking validated. (There are several parking lots in the business district, and parking is free is for active shoppers.) I said no, and that didn’t drive there.
Then it occurred to me how many subtle, and not so subtle ways the car is subsidized at the expense of the environment. Why is it that I could not show my weekly transit pass to this pleasant young woman at the counter and get a discount on my coffee purchase? In fact why aren’t there any number of establishments in the city doing the same thing. If I have a Public TV membership card, I can get discounts all over town. Why not with a SEPTA (the name of Philadelphia’s transit system) card?
This led me to think about the fact that a generation to two ago the #23 bus route I took to Chestnut Hill was once the 23 trolley line, although my parents would have called it “the 23 Car Line”. The trolley tracks ran from Chestnut Hill in the northwest corner of the city along Germantown Avenue (an old colonial road that ran on a diagonal through the city) and then down into South Philadelphia. In those days trolley lines such as the 23 served not only to move people about, but also to link every socio-economic sector of the city seamlessly. Most of the tracks are gone now; the cars now able to drive down the center of the streets without waiting for passengers to get on and off. All so much more efficient, except that we have lost those small moments of connection, those trifle bits of social capital when we were not so alone, so self-contained.
Race and class need to be more prominent in any conversations about public transit. There is something very wrong with me being the only white guy on the bus... This must change.
Well that really is it for this entry. Maybe in the intervening weeks I’ll research some of the transits systems that we once had in key cities all over the country.
