Not Driving and Riding the Bus with My Aunt

My Aunt is the biggest user of mass transit I know. For most of my childhood, she worked in downtown Denver. We lived in the northern suburbs, and she would drive her 1988 Hyundai Excel to the park and ride and take the bus into the city. Even when she briefly worked out of Denver, she usually tried to commute by bus.

I think that’s how my passion for mass transit started. When I was 18, I really just wanted to move to New York, ride the subway and never own a car. In sweet irony, I’ve spent much of my life driving and traveling. I didn’t intend for it to be that way. When I was 18, I wanted to be an interior designer and take the subway in New York. My theory went like this, “why should I go to all that work of navigating traffic when a nice man in a train could do it for me?”

I think it was also the influence of television. Children’s programs like Sesame Street that always seemed to be set in New York featured things we didn’t have in provincial Denver: taxi cabs, subway trains, and a variety of buses.

When DIA opened in 1995, there was a public preview before the airport opened, and you could anywhere in the public areas of the building (pre-9-11 travel!) and the underground train that took you from the Terminal to the concourses seemed so fast and magical to me. It was much more modern than the old Stapleton airport, which involved a great deal of walking. The airport was so poorly planned, airplanes were obliged to cross I-70 over several bridges.

When I was a little kid, my Mom would drop me off at her job at National Jewish hospital in Denver and I would wait a patient for a couple of hours for her to finish working, and then we would ride the bus all the way to her house in Denver’s northern suburbs. I think she was the only person I knew who actually used mass transit to commute to work.

Somehow, to me at 6 or 7 years old, riding a big bus on RTD seemed glamorous and exciting. The walk from her office at the corner of Colfax and Colorado Boulevard to the bus stop involved crossing this major intersection and then going over to the bus stop. Even today, having worked in the area myself, that intersection still seems dangerous and daunting!

As major cities go, Denver didn’t have a proper mass transit system until a few years ago. Denver had several bus lines and some big park-and-ride stops. My Aunt used one such park-and-ride stop for her commute to avoid having to park downtown.

As I grew older, my desire to not drive increased, but was thwarted by the realities of where I lived. My Mom was desperate for me to get my license, so she could get off taxi duty to all my various events. As a musician, I was teaching, had a rehearsal somewhere almost every day of the week, and had private lessons to boot. I learned to drive with a great deal of practice and possibly shortening my Dad’s life by many years, and got my license right when I was eligible at 16.

However, me, mass transit, and my Aunt weren’t quite done yet. Denver has a large walking mall on what used to be 16th street. When I worked at the state capital she was back working downtown not far from the seat of state government for the Centennial state and I would take the free 16th St. mall shuttle up to her block at Curtis, and we would have lunch in her office, and then I would return to mine. Somehow, I felt very grown up. I’d have to wear a suit (jackets were required on the Senate floor) and so I’d be like any other business person. Once, I ended up having a great chat with Mike Coffman, who was Secretary of State at the time and would later run for Congress. He had a habit of jaywalking across Colfax Ave (which is also US 40 and 6 lanes at the State Capitol) and I asked him why he did that. He had recently done a tour in Iraq and said that it was no worse than anything he had seen in Iraq.

I was older when I started to see other mass transit systems. As a middle schooler and teen, I had the chance to visit our nation’s capital on three separate occasions. The first time I went to Washington, D.C. I was so impressed by the metro system. It sounded so fancy: metro! It was exciting to see congressional staffers and Pentagon people all riding on the metro. The first time I went was shortly after 9-11, and the scaffolding on that side of the Pentagon facing the Capitol Beltway was still in place. It seemed so nice to skip all that traffic and be whisked on the yellow line into Virginia.

When I was a young man, I dreamed of moving to New York City and never owning a car. Unlike most teens who were eager to drive, my parents had to sort of cajole me into learning how to drive. I begrudgingly learned how to drive, but I did not find it terribly pleasant. There were so many rules and things to think about and anxiety to have about everything that happens while driving! It seemed to me that it would be far easier to get on a train where a pleasant person at the front deals with all of that while I quietly sit in the back until I reach my stop. I did not end up moving to New York, instead I lived in several places where having a car was compunctory. This did not stop me from using mass transit occasionally as opportunities permitted.

In 2013, I was working with numerous businesses along Colfax Ave in Denver, and I would take the infamous number 15 bus to get to all my clients. I would park my car in the parking lot for a dollar tree and then walk/bus my way around town. It was faster and involved fewer parking tickets. The 15 is well known because you will see anything on the 15 bus in Denver. From houseless individuals, to people down on their luck, to those with severe mental illness, you’ll see it all on the number 15 bus in Denver. Smells from human waste often attack the nostrils and with legalized marijuana now, the only thing to cover it up is the smell of ganja. I think that is one of the cool things about mass transit: you meet interesting people. Sadly, that can also be one of the downfalls of mass transit. Some interesting people you will meet are not so safe. That is probably the one thing that turns most middle-class people off mass transit: the people. Let’s face it, American’s like their privacy.

Mass transit in other countries is quite different. The London Tube and Paris Metro are clean. The Japanese are notoriously fastidious with the whole system, both in its cleanliness and in its punctuality. Some American cities can do alright in this aspect, but New York has been plagued by delays and the MTA has become somewhat unreliable as a result. Even the vaunted DC metro is struggling. America has a long way to go when it comes to proper transit. This also means that we are a long way from mass adoption of mass transit. For transit to really work for Americans, it needs to be reliable and a better option than driving. So far, except for cities like San Francisco, New York (region), Boston, Atlanta, and Philadelphia, transit isn’t practical for other Americans.

RTD in Denver has changed a lot since I took it with my Aunt as a child. RTD has added more bus service and train service throughout the metro area. The buses still run slow in the suburbs and the last I heard, the train to the airport was still unreliable. Denver did a smart move and made their old train station a transit center. It was set up to be glamorous, I left on Amtrak from it in 2014; however, it has since become a magnet for the local homeless population, leaving transit users to navigate unfavorable conditions. Since Union Station is the only place to change train lines, many people opt to sit on I-25 instead.

I still have a passion for transit. I would love to have convenient transit to get me around town. Seattle has alright transit for commuting, but not really for getting around town. Seattle also has transit police to help mitigate some problems on the transit system. The bus system is well-developed, and I’ve used it a few times, but I’d rather take an Uber or drive than try to use transit most of the time.

I am frustrated by the new urbanism and the people who are promoting transit. They are so anti-car and against driving. There are still use cases for driving. We’re still going to use cars and autos for some people. A bicycle is not a solution for everyone or every use case.

As I get ready to move to the East Coast, I’m excited to take advantage of the transit systems available that will make it easier to leave my car at home. I like transit, it’s a great idea. I like it and want to use it more, and I suppose it all started with those special bus rides with my Aunt as a child.