Here's a letter to the editor by a Ted Vincent from the April 10th
Berkeley Daily Planet:

"In the April 3 edition, Steve Geller earnestly proposes methods
  to improve bus service and attract riders, but even if all available lines ran
every 45 seconds the bus would not suffice considering the travel
needed to negotiate today's world of specialization.

A Berkeley mother takes her kid to child care in Albany, goes to the
chiropractor in Alameda, the psychiatrist in Emeryville, and the
doctor in Oakland, except if she needs brain surgery and has Kaiser,
then she must go to Palo Alto for that service. Her older children
may walk to school, but odds are their teachers had to drive to
arrive before the bell. The woman's father has Alzheimer's meaning
travel out to the rest home.

Shopping can be hard for the mother to do by bus. To save money she
gets groceries from the supermarket, and be it Berkeley Bowl or
Safeway, hauling a week's worth of food by bus is a chore. Too bad
there are few mom and pop stores where one could grab a few things
on the way from the bus."

This [edited] letter triggers serious thought about what transit and
commuting are all about. So, we need to look at the big picture.
There's a terrific article on commuting in the new The New Yorker
(4.16.07). You can find it on the web. The title is: There and Back
Again. It's by Nick Paumgarten who talks about the "soul" of the
commuter. I won't reprint it here, but I do want to take some
information and quotations out of it to discuss the whole commutation
issue; that is, about people who go to and from work daily by either
car or public transportation (or both).

"Roughly one out of every six American workers commutes more than
forty-five minutes, each way." "The number of commuters who travel
ninety minutes or more each way -- known as "extreme commuters" --
has reached 3.5 million, almost double the number in 1990."
"Americans. . .average fifty-one minutes a day to and from work."
"In Japan, land of the bullet train, workers spend almost ninety
minutes a day."

All of which is to say that commuting, either by car or other modes
of daily travel constitutes a significant --and the least fulfilling
-- portion of everyone's daily life. Interestingly, the term
"commute" originally meant, "to change to another less severe," as in
-- to commute one's prison sentence. In the 19th century, passengers
who traveled daily on the same railroad received reduced, or commuted
fares. Hence, they became "commuters." We might ask today how we can
make the commute -- our transit experience -- less severe.

Here's more interesting information. Across the country, ". . .the
automobile took over from the train long ago. Nine out of ten people
travel to work by car, and, of those, 88 percent drive alone."
Those most fearful of global warming warn us to anticipate the most
dramatic changes to our lives. That would mean, among other things,
reducing by a significant number the 90% of those who commute by car.
Especially in California, that's not going to happen without a
fundamental transformation of our urban mass transit system.

It is ironic that some of the ground swell of energy devoted to the
environment and reduction of greenhouse gasses could be shifted into
an arena where, by improving public mass transit, the goals of the
environmental movement have a far greater chance of being achieved.
Which is to say, getting people out of their cars because they have a
better and more convenient way to travel. Everyone needs to ask
themselves, what would it take to get me out of my car and take
public transit?

So, it would seem that at the start of the 21st century, we ought to
stop putting band-aids on a failing collection of transit operators.
Furthermore, it is time for all municipalities, on the Peninsula and
all around the Bay Area to begin to pool their intellectual and
financial resources to create a viable urban mass transit system.
Difficult? Yes. Impossible? No. What is going on now is tinkering
around the edges, tweaking budgets, fares and schedules, sprucing up
the rolling hardware. Not only not good enough, but the focus is all
wrong. The bulk of the State funding will continue to be directed
toward highway improvement because there is no one coherent mass
transit system in which to invest. What we need to create is the
rapid urban mass transit version of Caltrans.

If only. . . if only those who so passionately push for a stunningly
expensive high speed train to scoot up and down California were to
direct their energies into the creation of a single Bay Area rapid
transit network, a distributed regional transit system that would
benefit most of us, and if we could envision what that was like --
user-friendly, convenient, comprehensive and greater Bay Area-wide,
there would be enormous support. That would encourage smart-growth
transit-oriented development as well as the lower cost planned
communities in the Central Valley that so many seek. But, that
requires political will, imagination and the ability to think really
big. And, oh yes, the willingness to do something significant for
all the citizens of the greater Bay Area.

Martin

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Martin Engel
1621 Stone Pine Lane
Menlo Park, CA 94025
650:323-1670
martinengel@earthlink.net
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