For much of my life, taking public transit has been A Choice. I think New York City is the only place I’ve lived where taking public transit was typical. Even in cities like Pittsburgh or Boulder ― which have decent public transit ― people seem to default to driving themselves places. Because even when the transit is ‘decent’ it is still often slower than driving.

That’s certainly true where I live now.

Taking public transit to museums in Denver takes twice as long as driving, but I do it anyway. Partially so that my kid gets used to taking public transit and thinks of it as normal. (This is definitely A Choice.) But besides that, I prefer it ― it’s not something I have to suffer through for my kid’s benefit.1

There are all the usual reasons transit aficionados like myself will cite for why public transit is better than driving: I don’t have to find or pay for parking; I don’t have to navigate all of the traffic with reckless drivers in over-sized pickup trucks and SUVs. But on a recent trip to the Denver Museum of Nature and Science I noticed something else: when we’re on public transit, I can actually pay attention to him, and that’s way more enjoyable for both of us. We can talk, or look at things out the window, or play silly games. In the car, half the time I’m too busy driving to pay him much attention, and that can sometimes make him grumpy, which is no fun for anyone.

He and I have a great time on the bus and the light rail. I’ll take an hour on the bus with my kid over 30 minutes in the car with him any day.

Something else I’ve noticed is that riding transit gives me more opportunities to talk to him about the variety of human experience. When we’re in the car, we don’t really see any of our fellow travelers; we typically end up talking about the other vehicles we see on the road. But on transit, we see a much greater variety of people, which gives us an opportunity to talk about things like disability because we see more of the disabled community on the bus than we do elsewhere in our lives. (Sadly, we live in a fairly homogeneous community.) I’d much rather talk to him about people than cars.

On our most recent trip, for example, he asked me why the bus lowers down when it stops. It lowered for us when we got on, and it did again later in our trip for someone using a cane. So we got to talk about how for some people making a big step up onto the bus is harder, so the bus ‘kneels’ down to make it easier for them. Sometimes it’s because they’re young, like him, and not fully grown; sometimes it’s because they have something big and unwieldy, like me pushing his stroller; sometimes it’s because they have either a permanent or temporary disability that makes it hard for them to step up. I love getting to talk to him about these kinds of things. Hopefully it’s helping him to think about the experiences of other people that are unfamiliar to him, but also relate those experiences to his own. Hopefully, I’m helping him develop a sense of empathy.

It’s not hard to find transit advocates going into great detail about the practical benefits of public transit (Streetsblog, The War on Cars, Not Just Bikes (YouTube) just to name a few). And if we all could wave a magic wand, we’d probably live in a world where it didn’t take twice as long to get from my house to the museum by transit as it does to drive ― which would be nice. But even when transit is twice as ‘inefficient’ as driving, it can still actually be better than driving.

To finish the moment, to find the journey’s end in every step of the road, to live the greatest number of good hours, is wisdom.

Ralph Waldo Emerson A couple of hours on the bus talking to my kid are good hours.

Footnotes

Except waiting at the godforsaken bus stop next to the highway at the nearest Park’n’Ride. That pretty much sucks. ↩︎