Ironically, for the first time in my adult, working life (except for during a run of lousy temp jobs back in the early nineties), I’m using Metro Transit to get to and from work – or I was, before I started biking.\u00a0 It’s…OK.\u00a0 It takes twice as long as driving, even in the congested urban core between Minneapolis and Saint Paul.\u00a0 But, since my company pays half the cost of my “all you can ride” card, it costs about 1\/3 as much to take the bus as it would to drive and park for a month.\u00a0 I know a deal when I see one.\u00a0 And sitting on the bus isn’t that bad, when I remember something to listen to (I get motion sick if I try to read too much, damn the luck) or find a cool game to play on my cell phone, and the late-thirtysomething childless couple that sits across from me doesn’t drive me absolutely over the edge talking about their endless remodeling job.\u00a0<\/p>\n
No, the bus is just fine – and since my tax dollars are already paying for it, whether I like it or not, why not use it?<\/p>\n
The thing I find most galling about transit advocates isn’t the zeal with which they approach the subject, with their blog posts about bus routes from Inver Grove to Minneaoplis and smug “car-free” sloganeering.\u00a0 No, it’s the zeal with which they expect the rest of us<\/em>\u00a0 to order our lives around those big white buses and that one yellow train.<\/p>\n Tracy from Anti-Strib apparently feels the same.\u00a0 He reponds to a commenter who sniffed about his choice to live (in the city) far from his clients (usually in the ‘burbs):<\/p>\n the decision where to work is often made by things like downsizing, layoffs and new opportunities. It also takes two incomes today and most of us don’t work at the same company as our spouse. In today’s economy, it’s not possible to know where you will be working 5, 10 and 20 years from today. People know this and pick a home in an area that they like, usually with good schools. They can’t always live near where they work and often don’t want to if they could.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n One of my rationales for settling in the Midway was that it was pretty central; I could get to where the work was, <\/em>without having to try to guess where it was going to move.\u00a0 \u00a0<\/p>\n Then there are people like me that consult. Should I move every time I get a new client? How about the people that have to leave work and visit clients? The idea that you can live near work and don’t need a car is a pure myth for many people including salesmen, consultants, tradesmen and most parents (Trying getting to school to get a sick kid on LRT<\/span>!)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Great points, all of them.\u00a0 I’ve been a consultant for most of the last 14 years.\u00a0 I’ve changed jobs as many as 3-4 times a year – I’ve even worked simultaneously for companies that were miles apart (in one case, Farmington and Minneapolis.\u00a0 Try busing that<\/em> spread!).\u00a0 There was no way to make transit work under any circumstances.<\/p>\n Only government employees have the luxury of working in the same building for 30 or 40 years. The rest of us know that we will be changing jobs at least 3 or 4 times. We make rational housing choices based on many things, not just the location of the employer du<\/span> jour<\/span>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Which is hard to explain, since so many lefties work in long-term, unionized jobs where the main imperative is to never <\/em>change.<\/p>\n It’s hard to explain.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Ironically, for the first time in my adult, working life (except for during a run of lousy temp jobs back in the early nineties), I’m using Metro Transit to get to and from work – or I was, before I started biking.\u00a0 It’s…OK.\u00a0 It takes twice as long as driving, even in the congested urban […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-991","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-minnesota-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/991","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=991"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/991\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=991"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=991"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=991"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}