Long Trek
Posted by Fred Jandt
Editor, Mass Transit
This week’s BusCon starts off our second season of shows for 2007. From here it’s off to APTA’s Annual Meeting, Rail~Volution and CUTA’s Fall Conference and Trans-Expo in short succession. Whew!
BusCon was a pretty good show. I had never been down to it before, but I was suitably impressed. It has a great location. You can’t beat Navy Pier just as fall begins to set in. The weather is warm, but not too warm, and there is plenty to do when you’re not on the show floor. Do yourself a favor, get a cheeseborger (the double is the best) at the Billy Goat Tavern while you are there.
The show had a good turnout. There was a fair amount of people waiting to get into the show floor before the doors opened — always a good sign. BusCon was definitely the place to check out motorcoaches and cutaways with lots of other component manufacturers there as well.
The one complaint I have with this show, as with pretty much every other show, is that it’s not in my backyard. And really, that argument can be made for work and everything else.
While BusCon’s Chicago site was within driving distance, the MT staff decided to take public transit for a variety of reasons. It’s the height of construction season in the Midwest, which makes any long car trip worthy of a second thought. Also, the location was easy to find within Chicago. You didn’t have to worry about parking. There are a lot of trains heading into and out of town. And we wanted to do our part for the environment and the mass transit industry.
That’s the public transportation reasoning. And it’s all very good reasoning. It all makes sense. And it’s hard to argue that logic. But we all know the majority of people argue against transit each and every day despite all of those good reasons for taking it. Sometimes it seems like we’re banging our heads against a wall talking with them because they just don’t seem to get it.
The car driver reasoning?
From my house to Navy Pier is about 140 miles — according to Google, a drive of 2 hours and 37 minutes. The drive to the closest Metra station is about 60 miles — according to Google, a drive of about 1 hour and 34 minutes. This doesn’t take into account the two-hour train ride into and out of Chicago.
I can hear it now, “See, it takes me less time to get there by driving and I can leave any time. If I take the train, I have to get up that much earlier, and I am stuck with when I can leave at night.”
And you know what, I can understand their point. I can. It makes sense on the surface. And when I was driving down to the train station early Tuesday morning, I admit I was grumbling that I could probably have been there by the time I got to the train station.
But for the fifteen bucks I spent on a Metra ticket, I got a chance to take a nap on the way into Chicago in the morning. It wasn’t a great nap, but better than being stuck in traffic on the Kennedy because of construction.
And not only was I able to easily make my train on the way out of town, I had enough time to stop at Ogilvie Transportation Center, grab some dinner and pick up a book to read on the way back home. It was relaxing. It was easy. And it was a great way to go.
If only we could get people to understand that the extra hour or so they spend using public transit every day has all those added benefits they never considered or just dismissed out of hand.
Thanks for reading the MT Position, updated every Friday.
October 5th, 2007 at 10:27 am
True though we should also be striving to find ways to make mass transit faster so the trip times are comparable.
October 5th, 2007 at 2:15 pm
Amen. I also took the Metra train into Chicago for Bus-Con, and it was great. No stress, no traffic, no parking issues.