Transit and Day Care

A point during a presentation by Sally Thomas, an elected official from Albemarle County (where Charlottesville is) and board member of the Virginia Transit Association, made me think that Transportation Management Districts (TMDs) should also offer some coordinated day care services. (Her presentation was about transit services being more customer-centric, and she mentioned how the local social services agency conducted a survey of its clients, and some of the questions they asked concerned why people didn't take transit.)

I remembered an article I had read many years ago in the Kansas City Star, about the creation of a transit center by the Kansas City transit authority with day care offered at the center by a third party (at the center at 39th Street and Troost Avenue).

Kansas City Childcare Center, 39th and Troost Metro Center, Kansas City, Missouri. Image from the NCNW report.

And when I participated in a Project for Public Spaces training (the How to Turn A Place Around-place game workshop) at the Eastern Market Metro Plaza, one of the people we surveyed (she was waiting for the bus), mentioned the need for child care.

It turns out that the Federal Transit Administration (FTA), does allow "joint development projects" to include spending up to $2 million of federal funds on creating day care centers as part of transit projects. The National Coalition of Negro Women (NCNW) has a publication on how to go about doing this, and some case studies, in Developing Childcare Services at Transit Stations.

I know that WMATA isn't in the business of creating day care centers, but it occurs to me that not just TMDs could be thinking about this, that when we think of transit as opening up job opportunities, as stations get redeveloped, especially those in particularly impoverished areas, could include day care centers.

This could be a strategy to accompany the creation of a streetcar line in Anacostia.

And certainly a Purple Line station in a place like Langley Park could include such a service, given the demographics of the Takoma Crossroads/Langley Park area.

Probably the Silver Spring Transit Center should have included day care facilities, just like it should have included a bicycle station.