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Bus Culture

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Matt pursues a rationalist explanation for bus ridership:

My sense is that the main determinants of yuppie bus usage are the determinants of everyone else’s transit choices — it all has to do with the speed and cost of taking the bus versus the speed and cost of getting around some other way. If you internalize more of the costs of driving & parking and implement strategies to make bus service faster and more frequent, more people will take the bus. Obviously, a bus can’t be made to go as fast as a grade-separated heavy rail system, nor can it carry as many people, so it’s better to build heavy rail where you see potential for a lot of demand, but there’s not some law of nature keeping people off the bus.

I don’t know. In Seattle, everyone I knew took the bus; its cheaper, there are dozens of park and rides, and there are (thus far) no alternative mass transit options. When I moved to Lexington, then later to Cincinnati, I discovered that almost no one I know takes the bus. Now, this might be because I moved up a class bracket when I got a real job, but I got the sense that it was something cultural. The descriptions of bus travel given me by the locals here harp on the twitchiness of the whole enterprise, not going quite so far as to characterize it as dangerous, but clearly placing it within the “normal people don’t do that” category.

Last week, I took it upon myself to ride the bus in Cincinnati. I found the experience almost exactly like that of riding the bus in Seattle, with the difference that you would normally see jackets and ties on the bus in Seattle, while the Cincinnati crowd did seem to have a different class make up. But that really suggests a cultural rather than a rationalist difference…

Atrios also weighs in on the general less-awesome-than-trains-ness of buses.

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