Public transportation and short-sightedness

Item.

Getting around the Twin Cities by bus would get much harder under a proposal presented Monday that would eliminate 28 weekday routes and reduce service on 78 others.

In all, the Metro Transit cuts would affect nearly three-fourths of all 153 routes that criss-cross the Twin Cities and suburbs. . . .

The proposal also includes a 25-cent across-the-board bus and light-rail fare increase.

The proposed changes will "affect real people in a very real way," Metropolitan Council Chairman Peter Bell said at a meeting Monday.

The fare increase and the service cuts are expected to reduce bus ridership by more than 4 million a year, according to Metro Transit. . .

Of the proposed reductions, 50 percent would be made on local routes in Minneapolis and St. Paul; 31 percent of the cuts would be made on suburban local routes and 19 percent on express routes.

My wife and I drive into downtown Minneapolis together everyday, but she leaves and takes the car at 3:30 each day to get home in time to meet the school bus. I then take a bus home on an express route; the first stop is mine, 12 miles from downtown. My bus service won't be impacted by the proposed changes, so this proposal represents no skin off my nose.

That said, these proposed cuts are stupid.

The people who rely on the bus within the urban areas as their only means of transportation will be, to varying degrees, forced to shoulder a disproportionate impact of these cuts. But it doesn't stop there. When I am faced with the huge inconvenience of not being able to take an express bus, and instead have to take a bus that makes several stops along the way (meaning it takes me 15 more minutes to get home), I can't help but notice that a substantial percentage of the people on the bus are commuting from the city to their minimum wage-plus jobs in the suburbs. (They are the same people I saw walking along the freeway to get to those jobs during the last bus strike.) If we want a dearth of prospective employees for low paying jobs in the suburbs, a good strategy is to make it harder for urban residents to get here by public transportation.

Public transportation is a public good from which everyone reaps direct or indirect benefits and it should be expanded, not contracted. Among other things, it leads to reduced pollution, reduced congestion, economic development, and increased opportunities for people to be self-sufficient. These proposed cuts should be rejected.