About once or twice a year I get the idea in my head that I should commute to work using public transportation. It is, after all, much better for the environment, I tell myself. It is less stressful than wasting my time in endless traffic jams. I can chill, relax, and read a book. It will be wonderful.
At least on paper, my public transportation resolution makes sense. I live in what used to be a trolley suburb. I can take the bus to the train station, and my office is close to the stop on the other end. It should work; this is what commuting to work looks like in other countries! I should take advantage of it.
Well, spoiler alert: it does not work at all. The bus line to the station is far too unreliable to get me to the train on schedule, so I miss the transfer about a third of the time. Taking an earlier bus is impractical, as I would have to leave 40 minutes earlier and waste about that time at the station. Taking a later train also means an hour’s wait. On my way back, the commute is even less feasible, as the train is scheduled to pull into the station three minutes after the connecting bus leaves. After a few days of cursing at delays and feeling both self-righteous and miserable, I give up and go back to my car.
The trouble with cars, besides taking up too much room, requiring too much parking, and being terrible for the environment, is that they are expensive both to purchase and maintain. According to AAA, the average cost of ownership of a car is around $1,024 a month, including insurance, interest, depreciation, upkeep, and fuel. For households without kids, it usually is the second-biggest expense in their budget, housing being the first. Car ownership amounts to more than a third of your income if you are earning minimum wage.
In theory, public transportation—trains and buses—should provide an affordable, reliable alternative for those who cannot afford a car. They allow them to go to work, do groceries, and go places without having to spend a huge share of their income on a quickly depreciating two-ton hunk of metal. What usually happens, however, is that our public transportation is so clumsy, outdated, and poorly run that no one in their right mind would use it by choice. The first major purchase for anyone with a job tends to be a secondhand car, usually paying punitive rates on a subprime loan, because the convenience outweighs the financial cost.
And the costs are massive. The average American household spends roughly 16% of its income on transportation. Households in the lowest quintile (that is, the 20% poorest families) spend close to a third of their income just getting around, because they need to get a car. And as anyone who has gotten an old car on poor credit with a few too many miles from a sketchy salesman can attest, the kind of clunker you end up driving ends up requiring expensive repairs over and over again.
As is often the case, this is a policy choice. Europeans spend just a bit less, on average, than Americans on transportation (around 11%). They usually drive cheaper, smaller cars, but they pay much more for gas. The big difference is that many Europeans do not need a car, because public transportation is more often than not a viable alternative. Low-income European households spend on average just 14% of their income on transportation. In countries with dense, walkable development patterns and good transit, like Spain, that share drops to just 6%.
Decades of car-centric development and underinvestment in public transportation make matching these numbers quite unlikely here in Connecticut. We can, however, take some zero-cost, easy steps right away to at least lower the cost burden of transportation for low-income families.
First, something that does NOT fix the problem: free transit. Low-income households rush to spend thousands of dollars to get crappy cars as soon as they can. What we need to do is improve service by making buses more frequent and reliable and build lots of housing close to transit corridors, not a cheaper fare.
Both of these solutions are essentially free. There are plenty of ways to dramatically improve bus services within the current budget. Upzoning close to train stations and busy bus lines is essentially free – and zoning and transportation are essentially the same problem, so we should address them together as such.
It is often said that the mark of a good transit system is when middle-class commuters choose to use it instead of driving because it is convenient. I believe that we should aim, at least, to have public transportation good enough so people do not need to sink thousands of dollars a month into a car unless they can truly afford it.