This afternoon I had to take the Ozaukee County Express bus up to Grafton. On the way I had a couple interesting conversations with people about transit and the bus in general, just thing to get them to think about why things are the way they are with car infrastructure. These also were while the bus was running over 30 minutes late due to traffic and congestion during the ongoing interstate widening project #onemorelanebro
Continued …
For a while I’ve been attempting to trigger conversations just to get people to think about why things are the way they are and general #strongtowns stuff.
My first conversation was with a woman also waiting at the stop and we were discussing about the bus being late and the traffic it was going through to get here and I brought up about how we have existing underutilized rail lines that could be used instead but aren’t. She responded how we can’t because it’s a freight line (???) and…
… how trains are limiting in freedom (again not making sense considering we’re waiting to take a bus). But I digressed, my focus was to just try to get someone to think about these issues. This was eventually followed by an incredibly noisy bus ride thanks to rough roads.
Following up was when I was very kindly given a ride by a coworker to my destination wherein the topic of the construction and how difficult it’s become to use the bus service I just got off of. This led to a conversation…
… about government involvement in things like how in his opinion everything should be privatized; I don’t agree but I totally understand where that comes from. I tried countering this about roads but they felt that was the one exception. I think I got through to him though when I mentioned all the lobbying and subsidizing got us to where we are with all our road infrastructure and how the manufacturers actively worked against rail and transit to artificially incentivize car popularity.
…
… In the end, please have conversations about these things with others, especially those who are directly affected by these problems but don’t see them as problems, which is often all if not most people.
Note: all of the above was written late at night before going to bed so parts could’ve been written better, but I digress.
Have conversations with people, get them to think about this stuff, challenge their beliefs!
Ryan Breaker