Driving decisions

Transit fans don't all dislike cars but a lot of them do. I've never understood why -- cars are tools, no different than hammers or levers or any other mechanical means a human being can use to simplify the work that must be done. And cars are very efficient tools, because you can take them to get most places you'd like to go.

Writing for MinnPost, Marlys Harris remembers the discontents of her commuting days in the Northeast:

So when I landed a job in “The City” — Manhattan to you folks — I was jubilant. No more exhausting driving. No more $4 per gallon gas. No more worries about traffic, flat tires and accidents. On the train, I could eat, sleep, read, put on mascara, text and even (ugh!) work, without endangering other people.

But did I use the train?

Well, yes and no. MetroNorth had its own drawbacks. A monthly ticket cost $309, about $7.50 per trip, since most people work only 20 days a month. Plus, you have to have a permit to park in the train station lot. For that there was a three-year waiting list. I had to put my car in one of the few non-permit spaces located about a half mile from the station (usually in a snow bank) at a cost of $5 a day.

Though the seats on the train were ergonomic disasters, the trip was quiet and reasonably efficient. Then the task became boxing the crowds at Grand Central Terminal, shlepping up three flights of stairs from the sub-sub basement track and hiking a mile to my office — or taking a bus ($2.75). The entire journey door-to-door took two hours and had to be repeated at the end of the day — a trip that was much more stressful because missing the 6:25 express meant waiting an hour and not getting home until nearly 9.

Many was the morning when I arrived at the train station, thought about the ordeal I was about to face, said to myself “the hell with it” (or something worse), zipped onto I-95 and drove to Manhattan.

Public transportation in the Twin Cities works better than that, but most people use cars to get from point A to point B. I don't know too many people who don't have a car in this area, because it's awfully difficult to do things if you don't have one.

When Mrs. D and I were younger, we lived in Oak Park, Illinois, a first-ring Chicago suburb that is best known for being the longtime home of Frank Lloyd Wright. Oak Park had excellent CTA train service, as both the Lake Street Line (the Green Line) and the Congress/Douglas Line (Blue Line) went through town. Our apartment was about three blocks away from the Austin station on the Blue Line, which could get you to the Loop (downtown Chicago) in about 20 minutes and to O'Hare in about an hour. We did not have a car when we lived in Chicago and we were able to get by without one for the most part, because the trains were constant and generally reliable.

The only time when not having a car was problematic was when we needed to get groceries. The nearest grocery store was about a mile away, so we would walk there, buy our groceries, then call a cab to take us back to our apartment. The wait for a cab would vary wildly; sometimes we'd have one in two minutes; other times we'd have to wait a half hour or longer in the parking lot of the store, which was problematic on a hot summer day. Once or twice the wait got too long, and we'd have to "borrow" the shopping cart and take the groceries home that way, returning the cart later on. The grocery store wasn't particularly fond of that, and the local police would have been less fond of it still, but we were lucky enough not to get caught doing it and I suspect the statute of limitations has run on our offenses. And we did return the carts, which most people didn't do.

For the most part, though, it was easy to rely on public transportation in Chicago. If you wanted to go to a baseball game, you could get to Wrigley or Comiskey on the train without much trouble. If you wanted to go out on the town, the train could get you to the hot spots without much trouble. And if you wanted to get out of town, it was easy to get a rental car at O'Hare and just take the train home when you were done with it.

If we were to go back to Chicago to live now, we couldn't really operate that way any more. When you're a young married couple with disposable income, no kids, and plenty of time, you can make those sorts of choices. Most people don't have that life. And that's a future post.