Americans Don’t Want Transit

No really, I promise, they don’t. In this video, we see why America sets up transit systems to fail. And the answer is very simple: we don’t want to take transit. We talk a good game about taking transit and you’ll see people bemoan the fact that American cities are built for cars and not transit but the reality is that anyone who can afford a car will buy one. Transit can never keep up with the point-to-point, on-demand service offered by a car. I was recently picking up various packages from my mailbox because I can’t get mail at my apartment (theft issues) and I was thinking how hard it would be to move this stuff with my little cart on transit. Funding is one of the reasons transit struggles but transit also struggles because people don’t want transit bringing “problem” people into their neighborhoods. The reality is that people pay a great deal of money to not have homeless people attacking them in the street (like what I live with in downtown Seattle). Transit is a hard sell when buses are a repository for people our society has forgotten about. If we want transit (that people want and will use) then we have many other problems to solve first.