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We see RIPTA buses every day, but how many of us have ridden on one? A curious car lover takes his first journey on public transit and discovers it’s a long, strange trip.
By Chris Museler
by Ronald Cowie
(page 1 of 4)
Last spring I told a friend in New York City that I was planning something I had never done in my eleven years of living in Rhode Island: I was going to travel from one end of the state to the other solely on public transportation and then write about the experience.“Pretty cool, huh?” I said.
There was dead silence. Then he started to laugh.
“That’s not a story,” he said. “We ride public transportation every day, everywhere.”
He wasn’t the only one with that reaction.
When I quizzed Rhode Island Public Transit Authority’s planning guru, Tim McCormick, about my brilliant idea, his response was,
“Are you nuts?”
Okay, maybe I am, a little. After all, who voluntarily pries himself out of his own private, comfy ride to be at the mercy of unknown public transit schedules, meandering bus routes and possibly, uh, colorful fellow passengers sitting a little too close?
But when McCormick told me about so-called choice riders, the small but growing segment of the population that has a car but chooses to take the bus, and how they are the key to the growth of public transit in Rhode Island—and with it cleaner air, fewer cars, less congestion, all those green causes I say I support—I started to be a believer again. It was time to explore this hide-in-plain-sight subculture.
Rhode Island is no New York or D.C., with interconnected railway and bus systems spread out on sprawling yet well-managed grids. And you may never be able to take a subway or the T to every little town and shopping center in the state. Today, however, it seems we’re closer than ever to an era of modern, intermodal public transportation, thanks to a legislature that is slowly realizing what RIPTA planners have been telling them for years: The system works and is overburdened because of it.
“In the 1980s, ridership had dropped to 13 million a year,” says Mark Therrien of RIPTA’s transit development and planning department “We’re at 24 million. It’s hard to sell out a sinking ship. Now we’re like a submarine coming up from the depths.”
According to McCormick, however, no matter how much money you throw at public transportation, the potential of mass transit here will only be realized if taking the bus makes sense to people and if the state gets behind funding RIPTA. There is a simple equation that illustrates the human decision to ride public transit vs driving a car. Bus = less money and more travel time. Car = more money and less travel time.
In planning my trip, McCormick and I plotted a 164-mile tangle of bus routes that would carry me from Westerly in the far southwest corner of the state, up through Providence and Woonsocket, ending up as far away as you could get from the start, Little Compton. McCormick cautioned that by the end, “Your car will be in Westerly, your mind will be jelly and god knows how you will get home.”
What I discovered, after shelling out a meager $11 and nearly twelve hours of bouncing around on thinly padded seats on a hot summer day, surprised, depressed and inspired me. Rhode Island public transportation and its impact on our traffic and air pollution problems is very much at a crossroads.
