Twenty-two years isn’t very old. Parts of the downtown library are close to fifty years old and they’re making it last.

re: the question of education, I think there’s a bit of a chicken and an egg thing going on here. First, I doubt many people will pay attention until there’s actually a question on the ballot. Second, a lot of the service that may be most valuable to rural parts of the county aren’t very visible. Things like A-Ride and Door-through-Door service could be very important, but they don’t have the visibility that fixed bus routes do. So, it will be hard to do good education and feedback until there is a plan and something to vote on.

I’m not saying there shouldn’t be efforts to do education and get feedback. Personally, I would like the consultants to come up with a few different scenarios that the AATA could get feedback on from people in all parts of the county prior to finalizing a plan.

A county-wide millage needs very strong support from Ann Arbor voters to pass. The strongest contingent of that support should be current AATA users. What current Ann Arbor city transit users want is better service (that is, more buses on heavily used routes at peak times, and more evening and weekend service.) If the permanent transit millage is not used at least in part to improve transit service within Ann Arbor, potential strong supporters of a new millage will be converted into equally strong opponents. Any decrease in service to Ann Arbor city users will generate a campaign to “Save Our Buses”.

I think the designers of any successful county-wide transit program are likely to take this into account. If they don’t, the proposed millage will not pass.

I’m thinking that it might give us all a way to vote with our rides that could provide some useful information, as well as more tightly connect us with our investment. I’ve ridden the bus in the past but don’t much anymore. I can imagine that those who don’t ride The Ride would find it difficult to support enthusiastically. Any thoughts on the potential value of something like this? (I’m less interested in thoughts on the practicalities of implementing something–let’s not constrain our thinking from the outset.)

I believe more people would ride public transportation if it were more efficient: more frequent service, service to more areas, more rapid service. But in order to make it more efficient, we have to lay down a lot of money to start, to create more routes, or express routes, or a dedicated bus rapid transit lane, for example. That’s why it is necessary to educate voters on these issues, and to help them visualize the possibilities. And that’s why it is better to have millages on a longer-term basis.

It’s not that I think people are too stupid to figure out what’s best for them, but there have been a lot of cultural forces going against public transit, and few people of any education level know much about the possibilities of public transit. Really, it’s just something you have to experience to “get”.

Having lived in Portland, Oregon, I know how a good public transit system functions. However, it is not perfect, and has it’s downsides, just as driving does, on a personal comfort basis. You have to deal with being in close proximity with people from all walks of life, which is something most people in America have very little experience with. We are also very protective of our personal space, which I think is partly borne of our experience as car-drivers. The ways we get around shape who we are, and habits are difficult to break.

But if we care about global warming, pollution, and the economic and cultural vitality of our cities, we need to change the way we view public transit. It is the future, and we need to make it what we want it to be, because it is inevitable that we as a society are going to shift toward it.

In [3] I didn’t mean to suggest that transportation millages are easy to pass. I meant only to suggest that there are some communities, like Flint and Bay City, where it appears that the transit authorities now go into their regular millage votes with some confidence that it will pass.

And in those communities where a transportation millage passes, I think it’s likely due to the fact that the voters have a clear understanding of the transit they’re being offered, and there’s a good match between the offer and what they want (either for themselves or for others), delivered at a price that’s reasonable.