Even if you don’t leave the house every day, and even if you don’t have a television, as a resident of the tri-county area in western Washington, you will be hit with multiple advertisements to promoting mass transit.
All you have to do is turn on a radio and not change channels during commercials. AM or FM, it doesn’t matter. Local stations get a kind of PSA credit (and money, so its a win-win) for running these commercials.
“You can read a book, catch up on some sleep or just relax and let someone else do the driving while cruising in the carpool lane” is the basic line of these ads. Of course, it is all hooey. The buses have to deal with the same traffic snarls as everyone else. The bus routes are rather poorly planned and poorly timed so that they are almost always running late. And when they’re not late, they’re running very early, to make up for problems that will happen later in the day.
All in all, riding the bus is an incredible pain in the ass, even for those not going into Seattle. And if you live in an outlying suburb, fuggetabowdit. If you miss the one bus in your area, you might as well get back in your car and drive in, because if there is a second bus, it’s gonna be by in an hour or so and you’ll be late to work.
And yet, on a daily, even hourly basis, we’re urged to ride mass transit.
Diane Naber of Kingston, WA decided to try and reduce her so-called “carbon footprint”, by not only taking mass transit, but working for the Snohomish County transit provider, Community Transit. Here is her tale from a Letter to the Editor of the Seattle Times.
I decided to go back to the workplace, but only if I could reduce my carbon footprint. I found a job listing at Community Transit, applied for it and was asked into an interview. Sounds great so far!
Since I would be interviewing with a transit bus company, I thought, Cool — I can walk aboard the Kingston-Edmonds ferry, and catch a Community Transit bus to the interview at their headquarters. Boy, was I mistaken.
Where it takes only one and a quarter hours to get from the Edmonds ferry to downtown Bellevue on the bus, it takes two hours to go to Paine Field in Everett (about half the mileage as to Bellevue). Not only did it take more than two hours to go there, there were also eight transfers.
So much for looking to reduce my carbon footprint; I would actually spend more time and gas commuting to Community Transit than to downtown Bellevue. It was also suggested by an employee of Community Transit that I drive, since there were so many bus transfers.
What is wrong here?
Yep, sounds like government to me.