Public Transit Or Hitchin’ A Ride?

I’ve never understood the American allergy to public transit. While common and largely taken for granted everywhere else in the developed world good public transit is largely voided from the American landscape. The industrial evolutionary historical explanation of course is a result of a weird quirk in American industry.

We hit our first peak in industrial expansion at the same time we developed the automobile, in fact, largely because we developed the automobile, and because the automobile was literally the engine that drove that industrial economy, as well as its symbol, we as Americans have never considered any other way to get around. During the same time period European and Asian countries were either too poor to consider individual car ownership, or simply to crowded to consider it as the only form of transportation. We had large, wipe open spaces and offering individual transit instead of having to organize and continue support for our public transit systems was much easier, so rail was largely dropped and cars made king.

Car ownership, and the freedom to go where we want, when we please, by ourselves, is one of the most potent symbols of American wealth. I get it.

Our pride maybe, but as they say, pride cometh before the fall.

The reality is that the average American family would be spending $8,000 dollars less a year by having the primary breadwinners take public transit for their regular commute, just out of energy saving; not including the cost of upkeep on an automobile. $8,000 dollars is nothing to smirk at in a slumping economy, and while middle class families may be able to afford that as the price of owning a car, the reality is that the distances most poor have to travel for work without alternatives forces car ownership on those who can’t afford it.

In this country we have roughly 36 million Americans living in a state of poverty, and as a percentage of the population have never driven the poverty rate lower than 10%

As the poverty guidelines currently sit around $10,400 for an individual and $35,600 for a family of 8 (no joke), these people are not realistically owning cars. These are the people I see biking every morning into work on shabby old bicycles braving the narrow and curvy roads of the Appalachian foothills part of Alabama; round here there are alot of them.

But those barely living above the poverty line too, are deeply affected. Those making roughly $18,500 to $34,738 for a single earner make up the next bracket, and they can scarcely afford $8,000 a year either, though many of them do, and they account for 22 million American households.

To illustrate what I’m talking about, here’s a breakdown of car ownership by quintile (or American households broken into 5 equal groups based on general income, each quintile representing 22 million American households.)

You can see that the first and second quintile have serious issues maintaining car ownership; something which no doubt effects their ability to increase their income. Together, they represent 44 million households out of a total of 113 million family homes. These people make less than 34,000 a year. Car ownership is obviously less of a big deal amongst the more middle class third quintile and beyond, but the sheer numbers of homes unable to or struggling to own a car (roughly 1/3) is staggering.

I’d like to say that as an environmentalist, I obviously have my own good reasons for stressing public transit, but solely as an economic issue, and quality of life, not diversifying our transit opportunities is strangling us as a nation. The problem will only get worse as fuel prices (or car prices in the case of more expensive alternative fuel cars) continue to increase.

-Marc-