This is why we have to educate people about how to use transit.

Flickr photographer Techne has a blog, The Latest Obsession, which among other things reports this conversation:

Coming home from Tryst just now, I hear this on my building’s front stairs:

very young woman: “I never knew about the bus until I came here….it’s awesome…I just like, get on it, and it takes me to my work!”
very young man: “wow, do you have to pay anything?”
v.y.w.: “yeah, like a dollar.”

Who ARE these people?

Be nice, Techne. When I lived in Detroit's suburbs, I never rode the bus either. And when I lived in Detroit, I was a child and I walked or rode my bike. This was before parents were obsessed with driving their children everywhere. And we lived within walking distance of school, not like kids today.

Rode my bike to Birmingham when I was high school-aged, and then it was all about the car.
Cruising Woodward. Detroit News photo. From "Let's get ready to rumble: Cruising in the Motor City," in the Detroit News (which has an excellent e-section of articles about the history of the region). Thus far, this is the best such section of any U.S. newspaper that I've run across.

The Detroit suburbs sponsor a Woodward Avenue Dream Cruise every August. The Car Connection website has some great photos from the 2003 edition.

It wasn't until going to college in Ann Arbor when I started using the bus a very little bit. (The school also has a bus system, but I only lived one year in a place where it was convenient to take.)

Then DC, and even then I started using buses probably because a co-worker of my girlfriend was a native Washingtonian with extensive bus familiarity. Sure, I started taking the subway as soon as I moved here (and before when visiting).

But the bus?

I don't think I would have been as apt to try out the system if it wasn't for my girlfriend's colleague. And since where I lived, the bus was the most time efficient way to get downtown to work, I started using the bus. (And I am big on cost-effective efficiency and not big on "airs".)

One more reason that we must be thinking about "Making Transit Sexy."
From the Arlington County Commuter Page.

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Apparently techne writes about the bus a fair amount, also see this post "Thoughts from a Metro “customer”

Index Keywords: transit