Not to mention all of the stops! On the rare occasions that I’ve taken that line, it seemed to take twice as long as the Morristown line to cover less distance.
Of course, it could be worse. Try getting from Atlantic City to New York. Not only is there no direct northern line, necessitating a trip into Philadelphia first (!), there isn’t even a NJ Transit bus running in that direction. It’s tour buses or nothing.
I’m sure that there are major metropolitan and suburban areas with worse public transportation, but it’s hard to picture how.
Well, for me…the city of Seattle is trying to get us to get rid of cars and drive less. To that end, they now don’t require that new housing comes with sufficient parking (and there’s a ton of new housing in the area) and even before the new housing went in, there was virtually no street parking during the day. So, every morning, I need to put my car somewhere. It’s both cheaper and more convenient to take it to work with me than it is to leave it at home.
I’m a long walk, medium bike, short bus ride away from work. On the days where I do manage to find a parking space near my home, I don’t drive in. But I’m only allowed to stay in those spaces for three days, and then I have to find somewhere new to put the car. At least twice/week, I really do need a car, so I can’t get rid of it. And doing the zipcar thing is way more expensive than just keeping one of my own. So I drive to work, way more than anyone (me, the city, the environment, the other drivers) really wants me to.
Either “buses” or “busses” is acceptable, according to my dictionary friends. I prefer “buses” to distinguish the word from a synonym for kisses.
When I worked downtown, I took MARTA every day. Now I live in Vinings and work up in Alpharetta; 24 miles, and no public transportation that would get me within ten miles of it.
When I inexplicably moved here 20 years ago, I saw a map of the MARTA system and thought, “Well, I’m sure they’ll be building it up.” Not so much. And yes, part of it is racism; there are people in Cobb Co. and Gwinnett Co. who think that dusky burglars are going to take the train and bus up into their clean white neighborhood, steal their stuff, and head back to East Point on the bus, with bags of stolen swag at their side.
Heh - and I live in Alpharetta and work in Vinings. I’ll wave to you on my way home today.
But I suspect Baldwin and I are examples of the problems with public transit here. To the extent that transit exists - it’s either exclusively for going in and out of downtown (MARTA) - or primarily local (CCT, for example). So if you are trying to get from one suburb to another, then mass transit really is not much of an option.
And my commute isn’t even a bad one by Atlanta standards. I avoid the worst tie-ups by going out of town in the morning, and toward town in the afternoon (sorry, Kiber; I’d hate to be on southbound 400 some mornings). And when I first came here, I commuted 40 miles each way, which isn’t unusual.
Heck, if there were a safe bike path to work I’d ride it; probably be in fantastic shape by year’s end. But I’m not riding a bike in Atlanta traffic, and on the highway it’s not an option.
It’s not so much the “drive only mentality”, which is only a symptom. The real issue is what’s behind that, which is our collective* stubbornness in clinging to suburban style development both in housing and in business sites. Presumably rooted in our early history, it seems that for too many of us the aspiration to our own house and yard is not negotiable. The anti-urbanist current in the culture, notably expounded by Thomas Jefferson still drives our cultural values, and affects not only where we live, but, increasingly, where we work as sprawling new business parks spring up in the ring cities like mushrooms after the rain.
The result of these trends is that, IMO, public transit can’t be more than part of the solution. We have to overcome the resistance to telecommuting for the jobs in which that is practical, and recognize the fact that this resistance comes not only from employers, some of whom are surprisingly receptive to the idea, but from workers themselves.
It’s more than the “drive only mentality” that’s the problem, it’s also the “I need to drive there and back five days a week come hell or high water” mentality. Instead of wailing and gnashing our teeth asking how we will get from Point A to Point B and back, we should ask whether we can stay at Point A and still get the job done, while taking time out for a refreshing walk to Point C, which is a nice little cafe around the corner from Point A, for lunch.
How long until it becomes too painful to keep funding the mass transit?
But if you stay on your A at point A, you aren’t working. You’re slacking off in your pajamas all day. It doesn’t matter what you get done: If you aren’t seen to be working and you can’t be controlled while you work, you aren’t working.
That is certainly the perception, but a surprising degree of computer based control is possible. For one thing, presence and shift compliance can certainly controlled, and much more easily now that used to be the case. Quantity and quality of work should speak for itself.
In the old days, when only a few programmers and similar workers had the opportunity to “dial in” to the office, there was nothing but the phone and emails. You could miss phone calls and you might not see an email right away. But now there is online chat, which allows not only real-time collaboration between two or more colleagues, but also allows a supervisor to contact a worker in the place where the worker is expected to be. If it’s a time when the worker is normally supposed to be there, working, then it’s up to the worker to explain why he wasn’t there, or why he didn’t respond in a timely manner. As when working onsite, there are any number of valid reasons, like other meetings and so on.
About the only thing that can’t be monitored is the dress code.
What you’re talking about (which I completely agree with) would take a paradigm shift that companies just don’t seem willing to make yet. Hell, they won’t even embrace part-time workers who work on hourly wages, and are having a really hard time making room for women having and raising children. Maybe when all the Boomers retire and there are 10 jobs for each worker, they might start loosening up some of the hidebound traditions of jobs (“Our workers work from 8 to 4:30, Monday to Friday; they get a salary; they are expected to be at their desk, dressed appropriately; they get two coffee breaks and a half hour lunch.”)
You’d be surprised. I was researching this topic for a school project earlier this year, and there is more management receptiveness to this than one would think, at least in IT. I think this is going to become more prevalent as offshore outsourcing increasingly proves to be not quite the golden egg-laying goose it was originally thought to be.
I would be surprised. Yeah, here’s hoping management will start to get the idea of what workers actually need and want, instead of just trying to shove what the corporation wants down our throats and telling us that they’re good to work for because of it (team building, anyone?).
Yeah, here’s hoping management will start to get the idea of what workers actually need and want, instead of just trying to shove what the corporation wants down our throats and telling us that they’re good to work for because of it (team building, anyone?).