I was at a meeting this week about public transportation in my town—what we have of it—and during one of our many tangents into how we could actually get viable transit throughout the valley, at least among the three main cities, I happened to mention that my car had broken down over the weekend, and that I had jury duty later in the week.
I love that you think about buses this way. Me too - and also ferries, the buses of the waterways here in Scotland.
Every time I'm travelling on either, I had an opportunity to strike up conversation with strangers and do a bit of people-watching, both of which are good for my soul in ways I don't quite know how to verbalise. No buses? None of that path-crossing serendipity, or the reminders that we don't live in feudal pockets of lonely isolation, we're part of communities (and if we don't feel like part of those communities, well, why not make more of an effort, starting with an awkward hello?)
So on top of the eroding of access to places, there's also the loss of access to people. Which is...not a good thing for us in the long run. See: pandemic. (And I wonder if *that* will put even more pressure on buses. I feel very lucky to be in a country where buses and ferries are so entrenched as ways to get around that there's currently no question of limiting their use just because COVID-19 isn't yet under control.)
Thanks for the link to my piece on Jo Kibble's wonderful, absurd adventure. That idea for a personal challenge was everything I love about the British amateur adventurer spirit of "let's go do this somewhat everyday thing to wild excess and document the whole thing in a gently self-mocking way". So much fun, and truly inspiring, because, well, any idiot could do it, because look, one just did! I am proud it's so deeply baked into British culture in a lot of the right places.
One of the things that surprised me in Macfarlane's "The Old Ways" was sea routes between islands. I'd never thought of them that way before (having been born and raised in a very landlocked mountainous region) but of course it makes sense!
There was a former city planner of Toronto or somewhere who had a podcast for a while about transit and walkability and urban planning, and I remember this one episode where she described waiting at a bus stop and there was a woman there in a burqa. As they were waiting, the woman in the burqa put a hand to the small of her back and leaned backward a bit, and the host person talked about how that little motion made her feel so connected to the woman, whom she never even made eye contact with, because she knew how that felt, when your back ached and you put your hand on it and leaned back a bit to ease it. There was so much of humanity in her just noticing it, and she talked about how public transportation and especially buses make those moments of commonality possible.
"Any idiot could it because look, one just did!" LOL! And yet with self-deprecation every step of the way.
Dec 22, 2021·edited Dec 22, 2021Liked by Antonia Malchik
That is beautiful. Yes, those tiny moments of relatable intimacy - especially when the journey's been long enough that we all let our guards down and stop "performing", putting on a guardedly selfconscious act because we know (or assume) others can see it. But after a while you just think "meh, whatever" and relax - and those are the best moments to connect properly. The right level of boredom, perhaps...
Re. sea routes, I had my thinking about this changed at university, where we studied the archaeology of the Mediterranean. One of our texts was Fernand Braudel's "The Mediterranean And The Mediterranean World" and a more recent book riffing off of it called "The Corrupting Sea". Each (multi-volume) work is 800-1,000 pages, absolute beasts of things when you were carrying them in your backpack to & from lectures. For this reason some folk didn't do the reading, and I can't condemn them for it. This is one instance where ebooks have a distinct advantage - except, it would be another half-decade before they arrived...
Anyway. The main thrust of Braudel's work is that to ancient seagoing civilizations, what really connected countries and city-states (at least, the parts along the shoreline) wasn't the land but the sea. The sea was the main "road network" making travel, trade and the exchange of cultural ideas happen much faster, and the sea had something of a unity of climate, meaning it wasn't hard to feel a sense of kinship from port to port. Therefore it was possible, maybe even more fruitful, to see everyone at the coast as "inhabitants of a sea" rather than connected to the land behind them.
(This also has parallels elsewhere: David Gange makes similar points in his book "The Frayed Atlantic Edge" - https://www.waterstones.com/book/the-frayed-atlantic-edge/david-gange/9780008225148 - that the sea meant that towns and cities on the west UK & Irish coast often had more connection to mainland Europe than to London and the bigger UK cities in the east...
So many ways to re-see the sea. I'm fascinated by all of them. :)
That makes so much sense! I suspect that societies that are closer to the sea have a more accessible instinct about "sea roads," whereas in the land I am from and live in I get obsessed with, for example, rivers--where they come from and where they lead to. And ridgelines and valleys.
I wish I'd studied something like archaeology as an undergrad, though it wasn't much of an option. It's always seemed such a fascinating subject, though, especially as you get away from the pop culture assumptions -- entrancing as they are, like with science, it's really the deeper you get into it that shows you how fascinating it is!
But it makes me think -- no wonder you are viewing the internet through pathways and maps! You have that perspective on land and water already.
I've never ridden a bus as an adult ... except maybe in Chicago a couple times, now that I think about it. I see people using the bus in Missoula but I've never used it, though I would happily do so if it came out to where I live and it doesn't. It is frustrating. I would love to be able to reduce how much I drive but given how massive vehicles (and the texting drivers behind the wheel) have made my narrow country road I have to take for at least a dozen miles at a time a death trap, I don't think I'll be that person for a while yet.
I was really struck thinking about so many of the things you discuss here, Nia, when I was in Tucson recently. Talk about a city that seems to be moving farther and farther away from any kind of walkability. Most of the main thoroughfares have been widened so many times and are so packed with speeding cars that crossing them at all for many people probably takes two lights and some dangerous waiting at the midpoint. It's disappointing how little progress has been made culturally related to this.
It's so crazy, Chris. Portland is having this big fight now because it's all so "we're pro-climate and moving in the right direction" while at the same time its transportation department has decided to widen the highways that split the city up and make it difficult to connect across town. And from what I've read they don't even need to widen it; they just have access to money. Which is often the case. It's an easy place to spend money and it's easy to talk yourself into thinking that it's something people will want because they often *do* want it. But it's so destructive. I couldn't believe it when I saw what Montana DOT wanted to do here in Whitefish. Yes, we have a traffic problem but widening the highway would utterly destroy the town and would make crossing those roads impossible. It's crazy.
There was someone from Missoula at our transit meeting on Monday. Or someone who's worked on their transit system. The buses don't go out to where my mom lives, either, which is really frustrating as the sidewalks only go partway out there so there's no real safe way to get to her neighborhood without a car. And Missoula's buses don't run on Sundays! Why???
I used to provide strategic oversight for a youth government funded public forum that offered a space for young people to discuss everyday social issues that affect them. Through the 4 years I spent with them, I identified a sense of weariness and disillusionment when staff were made to explain the actual utility (positive externalities) of the public service they were offering - there was a major disconnect between doing the job and doing it meaningfully. This sentiment did eventually cascade into the quality of service that was delivered.
I suspect a public good or service is only worth its value when there is a sense of solidarity behind its operation, where everyone is motivated and convinced that it will make an enduing change to local communities. Unfortunately most public initiatives (where I live) do not have long lifespans and the quick turnaround (often attached to the presiding electoral cycle) does little to motivate those working on it.
I'm reminded of Thornton Wilder's words:
“Leadership is for those who love the public good and are endowed and trained to administer it.”
We need passionate leaders who believe in the virtues of the public enterprise rather than just paying it lip service.
This is incredibly insightful -- and useful for my own thinking going forward, thank you! This, particularly, is spot on: "a sense of weariness and disillusionment when staff were made to explain the actual utility (positive externalities) of the public service they were offering." It's so true. The never-ending requirement to explain why public goods are ... good is just exhausting. The sense of solidarity I think helps take some of that weight off? I mean, the transit people in the meeting were wonderful and should be allowed to just do their jobs without having to justify the service's utility all the time.
Love that Wilder quote. I hadn't seen that before!
I have tried and failed many times to decipher the occult tables that are the City of Billings MET Transit schedule. I am not at all certain that if I find a bus stop near my house and get on the bus, I will ever get back to my house. They paid for a service that tracks the busses on a GPS so you can see where they are, but nothing showing where they are going, or, more crucially, how to connect various bus routes to get across town to a destination. I'm sure this has nothing to do with only 10% of the MET Transit's revenue comes from bus fares, that the few times I see a bus in the wild it is carrying no more than four passengers at a time, or that I have never heard of any of my friends or associates taking the bus. As one who grew up walking and biking all over my little home town, and didn't get a driver's license until I was 20 years old, because there was a decent transit system that could take me between my home and the state university where I spent my freshman year, I am disturbed by how difficult it is to navigate this town. But, at least we have those new, dump-methane powered busses. More grant money pouring in to buy more carts when we don't have any horses.
In many cities, the bus routes can be planned out through Google maps. I took a moment recently to see what it would take to get Billings "on the map", and found that, for Google, it appears to be merely an issue of putting the route data in a particular text format and submitting it to their transit program. They have a radio button to select what kind of user is submitting the data, and among the various professional transit officials, one selection humbly indicates "end user". I haven't had a chance to follow through, yet, but I am hopeful that this opens the door for normal transit activists to submit data that would simplify access to the system.
"I am not at all certain that if I find a bus stop near my house and get on the bus, I will ever get back to my house."<-- I realize this response isn't meant to be humor but I just read the review of that Michelin restaurant in Italy and then this and then laughed a lot because it sounded so similar! (If you haven't yet run into the review, it's worth it for a moment of levity: https://medium.com/@everywhereist/bros-lecce-we-eat-at-the-worst-michelin-starred-restaurant-ever-3466c98cdbdf)
My spouse grew up in Nottingham in England and his parents never owned a car or learned to drive. I taught him to drive when he was 30 and we were moving to a rural area where we'd be dependent on cars. It is fascinating to me to hear people's experiences of growing up and being able to get places without a car being a necessity. It's such a great way to live!
I've experiment with going to Missoula via bus (my mom lives in Missoula, so going there from Whitefish is something we do often). There's an affordable public bus run by the CSKT from here to Missoula, so I did that (it takes about 4 hours rather than 2 1/2 hours in your own car), and then connected to Missoula's public bus system. Which is fairly decent at least for what I needed but then I discovered that I'd have to walk to the bus station to catch the CSKT bus home because Missoula buses don't run on Sundays! Why??? People do things on Sundays, a lot of things. Shops are even open. When I lived in Vienna in Austria nothing but coffee shops and restaurants were open on Sundays but public transportation still ran on regular schedules. It's so weird how little end users' needs are truly considered when designing transit.
I hope your input can make a difference. Billings deserves good transit! As well as accurate and updated information about things like *where the bus goes.* (This is a commonly missing piece of information, and it's really bizarre.)
All of this. I've been listening to a lot of Building Local Power (podcast), and the whole corporate ownership of energy, especially for places that used to have public utilities, is such a huge problem. And it touches every public good in so many ways -- market erosion, as you can say.
You really nailed it here: "it really highlighted how systemic support is critical to being able to change systems, and how people experiencing systemic injustice cannot rely on systemic support." It's this massive frustrating feedback loop. And it takes *so much work* to change. Like, this year I started a 3-year term on the city's bike/pedestrian advisory committee and got involved with a really difficult trail issue right at the outset. My first question was whether they'd talked with someone with disabilities about it, or any of the groups that work with people with disabilities, and it hadn't occurred to anyone. These are good people who really care! But it had never occurred to anyone that how we build and connect our bike/ped trail system really needs continual input from people with disabilities and people who use the system for transportation, not just people who like to ride bikes for exercise.
Anyway. Sorry, tangent there. Sometimes I wonder if people focus so much on national politics because focusing locally makes it clear how much hard work it is to change things.
Well said.
🚌
I love that you think about buses this way. Me too - and also ferries, the buses of the waterways here in Scotland.
Every time I'm travelling on either, I had an opportunity to strike up conversation with strangers and do a bit of people-watching, both of which are good for my soul in ways I don't quite know how to verbalise. No buses? None of that path-crossing serendipity, or the reminders that we don't live in feudal pockets of lonely isolation, we're part of communities (and if we don't feel like part of those communities, well, why not make more of an effort, starting with an awkward hello?)
So on top of the eroding of access to places, there's also the loss of access to people. Which is...not a good thing for us in the long run. See: pandemic. (And I wonder if *that* will put even more pressure on buses. I feel very lucky to be in a country where buses and ferries are so entrenched as ways to get around that there's currently no question of limiting their use just because COVID-19 isn't yet under control.)
Thanks for the link to my piece on Jo Kibble's wonderful, absurd adventure. That idea for a personal challenge was everything I love about the British amateur adventurer spirit of "let's go do this somewhat everyday thing to wild excess and document the whole thing in a gently self-mocking way". So much fun, and truly inspiring, because, well, any idiot could do it, because look, one just did! I am proud it's so deeply baked into British culture in a lot of the right places.
One of the things that surprised me in Macfarlane's "The Old Ways" was sea routes between islands. I'd never thought of them that way before (having been born and raised in a very landlocked mountainous region) but of course it makes sense!
There was a former city planner of Toronto or somewhere who had a podcast for a while about transit and walkability and urban planning, and I remember this one episode where she described waiting at a bus stop and there was a woman there in a burqa. As they were waiting, the woman in the burqa put a hand to the small of her back and leaned backward a bit, and the host person talked about how that little motion made her feel so connected to the woman, whom she never even made eye contact with, because she knew how that felt, when your back ached and you put your hand on it and leaned back a bit to ease it. There was so much of humanity in her just noticing it, and she talked about how public transportation and especially buses make those moments of commonality possible.
"Any idiot could it because look, one just did!" LOL! And yet with self-deprecation every step of the way.
That is beautiful. Yes, those tiny moments of relatable intimacy - especially when the journey's been long enough that we all let our guards down and stop "performing", putting on a guardedly selfconscious act because we know (or assume) others can see it. But after a while you just think "meh, whatever" and relax - and those are the best moments to connect properly. The right level of boredom, perhaps...
Re. sea routes, I had my thinking about this changed at university, where we studied the archaeology of the Mediterranean. One of our texts was Fernand Braudel's "The Mediterranean And The Mediterranean World" and a more recent book riffing off of it called "The Corrupting Sea". Each (multi-volume) work is 800-1,000 pages, absolute beasts of things when you were carrying them in your backpack to & from lectures. For this reason some folk didn't do the reading, and I can't condemn them for it. This is one instance where ebooks have a distinct advantage - except, it would be another half-decade before they arrived...
Anyway. The main thrust of Braudel's work is that to ancient seagoing civilizations, what really connected countries and city-states (at least, the parts along the shoreline) wasn't the land but the sea. The sea was the main "road network" making travel, trade and the exchange of cultural ideas happen much faster, and the sea had something of a unity of climate, meaning it wasn't hard to feel a sense of kinship from port to port. Therefore it was possible, maybe even more fruitful, to see everyone at the coast as "inhabitants of a sea" rather than connected to the land behind them.
(This also has parallels elsewhere: David Gange makes similar points in his book "The Frayed Atlantic Edge" - https://www.waterstones.com/book/the-frayed-atlantic-edge/david-gange/9780008225148 - that the sea meant that towns and cities on the west UK & Irish coast often had more connection to mainland Europe than to London and the bigger UK cities in the east...
So many ways to re-see the sea. I'm fascinated by all of them. :)
That makes so much sense! I suspect that societies that are closer to the sea have a more accessible instinct about "sea roads," whereas in the land I am from and live in I get obsessed with, for example, rivers--where they come from and where they lead to. And ridgelines and valleys.
I wish I'd studied something like archaeology as an undergrad, though it wasn't much of an option. It's always seemed such a fascinating subject, though, especially as you get away from the pop culture assumptions -- entrancing as they are, like with science, it's really the deeper you get into it that shows you how fascinating it is!
But it makes me think -- no wonder you are viewing the internet through pathways and maps! You have that perspective on land and water already.
I've never ridden a bus as an adult ... except maybe in Chicago a couple times, now that I think about it. I see people using the bus in Missoula but I've never used it, though I would happily do so if it came out to where I live and it doesn't. It is frustrating. I would love to be able to reduce how much I drive but given how massive vehicles (and the texting drivers behind the wheel) have made my narrow country road I have to take for at least a dozen miles at a time a death trap, I don't think I'll be that person for a while yet.
I was really struck thinking about so many of the things you discuss here, Nia, when I was in Tucson recently. Talk about a city that seems to be moving farther and farther away from any kind of walkability. Most of the main thoroughfares have been widened so many times and are so packed with speeding cars that crossing them at all for many people probably takes two lights and some dangerous waiting at the midpoint. It's disappointing how little progress has been made culturally related to this.
It's so crazy, Chris. Portland is having this big fight now because it's all so "we're pro-climate and moving in the right direction" while at the same time its transportation department has decided to widen the highways that split the city up and make it difficult to connect across town. And from what I've read they don't even need to widen it; they just have access to money. Which is often the case. It's an easy place to spend money and it's easy to talk yourself into thinking that it's something people will want because they often *do* want it. But it's so destructive. I couldn't believe it when I saw what Montana DOT wanted to do here in Whitefish. Yes, we have a traffic problem but widening the highway would utterly destroy the town and would make crossing those roads impossible. It's crazy.
There was someone from Missoula at our transit meeting on Monday. Or someone who's worked on their transit system. The buses don't go out to where my mom lives, either, which is really frustrating as the sidewalks only go partway out there so there's no real safe way to get to her neighborhood without a car. And Missoula's buses don't run on Sundays! Why???
This was a brilliant read thank you!
I used to provide strategic oversight for a youth government funded public forum that offered a space for young people to discuss everyday social issues that affect them. Through the 4 years I spent with them, I identified a sense of weariness and disillusionment when staff were made to explain the actual utility (positive externalities) of the public service they were offering - there was a major disconnect between doing the job and doing it meaningfully. This sentiment did eventually cascade into the quality of service that was delivered.
I suspect a public good or service is only worth its value when there is a sense of solidarity behind its operation, where everyone is motivated and convinced that it will make an enduing change to local communities. Unfortunately most public initiatives (where I live) do not have long lifespans and the quick turnaround (often attached to the presiding electoral cycle) does little to motivate those working on it.
I'm reminded of Thornton Wilder's words:
“Leadership is for those who love the public good and are endowed and trained to administer it.”
We need passionate leaders who believe in the virtues of the public enterprise rather than just paying it lip service.
This is incredibly insightful -- and useful for my own thinking going forward, thank you! This, particularly, is spot on: "a sense of weariness and disillusionment when staff were made to explain the actual utility (positive externalities) of the public service they were offering." It's so true. The never-ending requirement to explain why public goods are ... good is just exhausting. The sense of solidarity I think helps take some of that weight off? I mean, the transit people in the meeting were wonderful and should be allowed to just do their jobs without having to justify the service's utility all the time.
Love that Wilder quote. I hadn't seen that before!
Spot on, Nia; thank you!
I have tried and failed many times to decipher the occult tables that are the City of Billings MET Transit schedule. I am not at all certain that if I find a bus stop near my house and get on the bus, I will ever get back to my house. They paid for a service that tracks the busses on a GPS so you can see where they are, but nothing showing where they are going, or, more crucially, how to connect various bus routes to get across town to a destination. I'm sure this has nothing to do with only 10% of the MET Transit's revenue comes from bus fares, that the few times I see a bus in the wild it is carrying no more than four passengers at a time, or that I have never heard of any of my friends or associates taking the bus. As one who grew up walking and biking all over my little home town, and didn't get a driver's license until I was 20 years old, because there was a decent transit system that could take me between my home and the state university where I spent my freshman year, I am disturbed by how difficult it is to navigate this town. But, at least we have those new, dump-methane powered busses. More grant money pouring in to buy more carts when we don't have any horses.
In many cities, the bus routes can be planned out through Google maps. I took a moment recently to see what it would take to get Billings "on the map", and found that, for Google, it appears to be merely an issue of putting the route data in a particular text format and submitting it to their transit program. They have a radio button to select what kind of user is submitting the data, and among the various professional transit officials, one selection humbly indicates "end user". I haven't had a chance to follow through, yet, but I am hopeful that this opens the door for normal transit activists to submit data that would simplify access to the system.
"I am not at all certain that if I find a bus stop near my house and get on the bus, I will ever get back to my house."<-- I realize this response isn't meant to be humor but I just read the review of that Michelin restaurant in Italy and then this and then laughed a lot because it sounded so similar! (If you haven't yet run into the review, it's worth it for a moment of levity: https://medium.com/@everywhereist/bros-lecce-we-eat-at-the-worst-michelin-starred-restaurant-ever-3466c98cdbdf)
My spouse grew up in Nottingham in England and his parents never owned a car or learned to drive. I taught him to drive when he was 30 and we were moving to a rural area where we'd be dependent on cars. It is fascinating to me to hear people's experiences of growing up and being able to get places without a car being a necessity. It's such a great way to live!
I've experiment with going to Missoula via bus (my mom lives in Missoula, so going there from Whitefish is something we do often). There's an affordable public bus run by the CSKT from here to Missoula, so I did that (it takes about 4 hours rather than 2 1/2 hours in your own car), and then connected to Missoula's public bus system. Which is fairly decent at least for what I needed but then I discovered that I'd have to walk to the bus station to catch the CSKT bus home because Missoula buses don't run on Sundays! Why??? People do things on Sundays, a lot of things. Shops are even open. When I lived in Vienna in Austria nothing but coffee shops and restaurants were open on Sundays but public transportation still ran on regular schedules. It's so weird how little end users' needs are truly considered when designing transit.
I hope your input can make a difference. Billings deserves good transit! As well as accurate and updated information about things like *where the bus goes.* (This is a commonly missing piece of information, and it's really bizarre.)
All of this. I've been listening to a lot of Building Local Power (podcast), and the whole corporate ownership of energy, especially for places that used to have public utilities, is such a huge problem. And it touches every public good in so many ways -- market erosion, as you can say.
You really nailed it here: "it really highlighted how systemic support is critical to being able to change systems, and how people experiencing systemic injustice cannot rely on systemic support." It's this massive frustrating feedback loop. And it takes *so much work* to change. Like, this year I started a 3-year term on the city's bike/pedestrian advisory committee and got involved with a really difficult trail issue right at the outset. My first question was whether they'd talked with someone with disabilities about it, or any of the groups that work with people with disabilities, and it hadn't occurred to anyone. These are good people who really care! But it had never occurred to anyone that how we build and connect our bike/ped trail system really needs continual input from people with disabilities and people who use the system for transportation, not just people who like to ride bikes for exercise.
Anyway. Sorry, tangent there. Sometimes I wonder if people focus so much on national politics because focusing locally makes it clear how much hard work it is to change things.