Why No Ride?

Transportation Disparities Face Us All

TRANSPORTATION SECURITY HAS EVERYTHING to do with our quality of life. If we can access safe, affordable public transportation, we function better and we are healthier. If our access to stable and safe transportation is threatened, we are in serious trouble.

Every county has residents experiencing transportation insecurity and some have segments of the population reporting extreme difficulty accessing public transportation to get to vital services. In times of crisis like a pandemic, access to stable public transport becomes even more critical.

In the Center for Transportation@100% we seek to get to real-world solutions. Get ready to be inspired. We will guide you through all the steps needed to put ideas for addressing health care security into action.

Why is public transport such a challenge?

It’s pretty simple: money and the design of cities and towns have made our world car-centric–as in our own cars. For much of the entirety of human history, people have considered a half hour to be an acceptable maximum commute time. This is why a lot of old European cities are packed tightly together. Not because they were somehow more enlightened than the people who built Phoenix, but because they didn’t want to walk more than about a half hour in the course of doing whatever they needed to do. Cities started to sprawl not with the invention of the car, but with the invention of the bicycle. Suddenly, a half hour’s effort could get you a lot farther, and so people lived further from the city center.

Eventually, though, the car came along and supercharged that sprawl dynamic. Suddenly, entire cities and neighborhoods were developing with the idea that no errand, from seeing a movie to buying a stick of gum, would be accomplished without getting into a car.

This created two big problems. The first is that car-centric cities work best when a minimal number of people actually drive, which is why I-405 in Los Angeles looks the way it does at 5 p.m. every weekday. Second, even though cars were cheap enough to cause huge challenges with congestion, they were still pretty expensive. Before, the price of doing your business around town was two legs or maybe a bicycle. These days, it’s a machine that costs many thousands of dollars to buy and maintain.

Fast forward to your reality today: With data from the 100% New Mexico Survey and other sources, you have a good idea about where the need for transport may exist in your county, and that’s why it’s difficult to access for both parents and youth. While global, national and state data on transport are very interesting and instructive, the real data that informs your work are generated by your 100% New Mexico initiative work diving deep into local neighborhoods. That said, you may be surprised by your survey results and learn that a challenge is far bigger or smaller or more localized than you originally thought.

But wait, google says there are answers!

With literally millions of people reading articles on ending transportation disparities and thousands of foundations, governmental and non-governmental organizations focusing for decades on ending innovations in travel and transport in the United States, why is access to affordable public transportation still so prevalent across fifty states? Why do students miss out on experiences because they have no ride to events? Why do parents working full time not have enough money for a safe car, repairs, insurance, and gas? Why do cities that do offer public transport somehow miss designing routes that take folks to vital services? In a pandemic, can we afford to have anyone without a way to get to medical care?

We don’t mean to question our good-hearted leaders in political, academic and philanthropic circles, but there appears to be a complete disconnect between those who claim to have answers and the actual implementation of solutions to ensure 100% of our residents are able to access well-thought out public transport that is safe and helpful.. What are our morals, ethics and values that allow lack of public transportation to exist amid so much abundance?

What kind of society would allow a policy of benign neglect to doom entire zip codes to lack of public transport?  Why should our most vulnerable children and families ever endure anxiety about getting safely to school, job training or work? If we ever needed a public and private sector solution to public transportation insecurity, this is the moment.

Truly, why are we all not asking in loud public forums, “What is the root cause of public transportation insecurity impacting our urban and rural communities in the US?”

Transportation is a survival issue for children and adults. In our 100% New Mexico initiative, we label transportation as one of our survival services. Simply put, problems related to transportation insecurity can generally stand in the way of a good life for kids, students, parents and all those seeking jobs and getting to work.

Our best bet for addressing a host of challenges related to transportation insecurity is ensuring easy access to a quality, comprehensive public transportation at an affordable price or with subsidies for our most vulnerable residents.