Michael Andersen
unread,Jan 3, 2010, 12:53:34 AM1/3/10Sign in to reply to author
Sign in to forward
You do not have permission to delete messages in this group
Sign in to report message
Either email addresses are anonymous for this group or you need the view member email addresses permission to view the original message
to trans...@googlegroups.com
I don't want to distract from Steve's awesome who-we-are email, but I had a tiny balloon of a thought yesterday about transit policy and this list seems like the best place to float it.
When I was looking through the Census data for the numbers I cited the other day, I re-encountered a number I'd seen before: 70 percent of Portland's car-free population lives in a one-person household. That compares to 37 percent of Portland's general population.
There are lots of factors keeping families tied to cars: bigger grocery trips, the high cost of space in dense neighborhoods, disagreements between partners, etc.
But that stuff aside, I bet there's a margin a couple hundred households thick who would be car-free if not for the fact that riding the bus doesn't scale. Unlike car drivers, whose insurance, maintenance, parking, depreciation and long-distance travel costs are more or less fixed, transit costs are all variable: double your family, double your bill.
So why doesn't TriMet offer a family rate, like a cell-phone company does? Maybe you'd have to pay in advance and get a set of passes mailed to your house or whatever. That seems doable, doesn't it?
Do other transit agencies offer this? I haven't noticed it, but I wasn't really looking.
Michael