Confessions and aspirations, for the record.

My nephew, ever eager for an excuse to ride the TRAX. So what's wrong with me?

So the world's getting one more blog. Poor world. But this one I hope will be a bit more useful than some. I hope it will help motivate me to change for the better, and perhaps help few others to change as well.

Flashback: I began my adulthood in 1994 and that same year discovered the remarkable public transit system of Olde England. My traveling companion and I were able to get to any little village and any corner of any city we wanted to visit using buses and trains and reasonable walks. We were not alone: the English were enthusiastic public transit riders, which frequent use and abundant fare collection made possible the robust mass transit schedules and vast web of routes. It was a beautiful thing, those six weeks of bus utopia. I returned to the States with no desire to own a car. But....

This only worked until I graduated from college. I wanted to continue live in the "city" (Provo, Utah--ha!), but my new job was in the 'burbs of sleepy Orem, Utah. There was no way I was getting there and back every day on the very limited bus routes. So I bought my first car. I totaled my first car. Fifteen years and two cars later, I am still driving to work. *Hangs head in shame.* I still live in the city (now Salt Lake City) in the downest part of downtown, and I love the accessibility: being able to get easily on foot most everywhere I need to go, with the occasional help of a Free Fare Zone downtown bus or train. Most everywhere except work....because my current job is also in the 'burbs....of sleepy East Millcreek, Utah.

For ten years I have driven to this job. It's 7.5 miles from my apartment, about 15 minutes, so not a long commute compared to many, and I almost never end up in traffic because it's a reverse commute. But it bothers me that I've spent so many years' worth of 15 minutes polluting the air, wearing and tearing my car, and accomplishing nothing besides not crashing. And yet I continue to drive every day, because the quickest public transit option takes about an hour--almost four times as long. (Because we're not in England anymore.) And at $5 per round trip or $84 per month, it costs far less to drive than to take the bus, even with our current high gas prices.

But the last couple of winters the populated areas of Utah have been terribly smoggy. We have a frequent nasty weather phenomenon called an inversion that is caused when cold air is trapped under warm air, and both are hemmed in by our tall mountains. The air pollution builds in the cold air layer, trapped next to the ground, creating terrible thick soups of smoggy nastiness. These end only when a strong wind or storm blows in and clears the air, so for many winter days we have had the worst air in the country--something resembling Beijing. I rarely get headaches, but I had many this winter. I don't have respiratory problems (yet), but those I know who do were miserable. And it's depressing, not seeing the mountains or the sky for days or weeks on end.

It's ridiculous, particularly for a part of the country that prides itself on its beautiful scenery and outdoor appeal, to have air so bad that people are advised to stay indoors for weeks at a time. Businesses have started reconsidering whether they should jump on the bandwagon and move to beautiful and business-friendly Utah--can they convince their employees to relocate to a place that could easily give their children asthma and that will increase their cancer risk? There has been a public outcry this last winter. I participated in a big clean air rally, and we demanded that the legislature take swift and meaningful action to do all it can to clean up our air. Industrial pollution is one area that government has a lot of control over and needs to look at much more closely. But residential and vehicle pollution are big. And while there's much that government can do to incentivize improved fuel use habits of private citizens, ultimately we each have to decide to change our ways. Change is hard. Utah is part of the West, and the West cherishes big yards, big houses, big open spaces, and the big cars that such big lives were designed around.

Salt Lake City's mayor, Ralph Becker, recently launched a pilot program, the Hive Pass, which drastically reduces the cost of a monthly unlimited all-access transit pass from $84 per month to just $30 per month, for one year. This is a citywide experiment to see if people will actually buy and use them and if it will make a marked difference in the pollution levels in the Salt Lake Valley. I had been clamoring for reduced transit fares in my circle of influence (because the fares were high enough that there was little financial incentive to ride public transit unless you were traveling long distances). My feeling was that individuals were never going to lean away from a car-centric culture toward a public transit culture if there wasn't at least one way in which public transit benefited them personally. (Yes, we all benefit from decreased pollution, but that's so vague and each person's efforts to that end are all but impossible to detect.) So now that Mayor Becker has provided what I wished for in the form of these dirt-cheap transit passes, it is time to show that I am on board. I bought my Hive Pass two weeks ago: $350 for a full year. To break even, I need to make at least six round trips outside the Free Fare Zone each month.

So I want to prove to myself that I'm willing to make some consistent sacrifices of convenience to both decrease my car use and increase my familiarity with the UTA transit routes. And I don't want to substitute my normal frequent walking errands with mass transit (yes, this pass could actually make me lazier!) Rather, I want to be sure that I'm improving the health of both the air and myself with this pass, so I've got to use it to cut out some of my regular car trips. That means using it to make trips to/from work or church or my Sunday evening trip to visit my parents, as those are the places I still drive. There is no way I can get to church on time by public transit because the limited Sunday routes don't run early enough, and even if there were, there are physically challenged others in my congregation who rely on me to drive them to church frequently. And while UTA can easily get me to Sandy on Sundays, traveling the last stretch to my parents' house would require a 40 minute walk or being picked up from the station (and later returned to the station) by my family, because while the TRAX train runs on Sunday, the connecting bus does not. Not ideal. I am willing to be somewhat inconvenienced, but I don't want to inconvenience others if I can help it.

So the work commute will be the big one. My goal is to take public transit to work at least six times a month, and ideally eight times a month. I will have to leave my apartment 50 minutes earlier than usual and will get home 50 minutes later than usual. I'll focus on Tuesdays and Thursdays, because demanding a big new sacrifice of myself on a Monday morning is a recipe for failure, arriving home much later on a Friday evening is a recipe for a damaged social life, and I have a commitment after work on Wednesdays that would make that day somewhat hard.  I will need to reconsider a lot of little things to make this my new habit: Do I wear good walking shoes and carry appropriate work shoes to change into? Or do I just have one pair of work shoes that I wear every day and leave them at work so I don't have to carry them back and forth? Or do I invest in new shoes that could work as both walking and work shoes? I don't want to eat breakfast an hour earlier than usual, so do I carry breakfast with me and eat it between bus transfers (no eating on the buses!) or do I store breakfast food at work and eat once I arrive? Do I pack an after-work snack to keep me from gnawing my own arm off during the longer trip home? What foods can I keep in the work freezer for backup in case I forget to bring my lunch one day (the food purchasing options within walking distance of my work are scarce, so being without a car when I forget to bring a lunch becomes a problem). And there will be other questions to answer through research and trial and error. I'm sure all such puzzles will have elegant solutions, and I think I will enjoy coming up with those solutions and feeling like I'm making even a small difference as I try to make this work commute a natural part of my life. I expect that I will also feel much better physically arriving at work having walked about 15 minutes total to and from buses, and arriving back home having walked about 15 minutes again. Time on the bus can be used for reading or writing, and the walking part of the journey can count as part of my daily exercise.

I will also explore the rest of the transit system--places I don't ordinarily need to go--just because I can now get there and back for no extra cost with my Hive Pass. I'll do this just to become familiar with the various routes, to learn how best to transfer between routes, and I'll investigate what is easily accessible on the Frontrunner commuter train, as well. The hope here will be to give myself and any readers an idea of what is reasonably accessible on the current routes and what interesting new places might be discovered by trying new routes. So this portion of my blog will be more about exploration and adventure and trial and error: for example, with a little advance planning and by leaving a little early, can I get to the restaurant on time to have dinner with friends? Will buses still be running the other direction when dinner is over? UTA's routes are admittedly limited at present. Only as we get a sense of what key places can be reached on current routes and at what times of what days will people start increasing their mass transit use, and only as the system registers increased regular use will UTA be likely to expand service and make regular mass transit use more reasonable for more people.

This blog will probably seem silly to any readers who don't have easy car access and so have had to get everywhere they go on the local buses. But my goal with this blog is to overcome my own attitude about Utah mass transit and my own knowledge hurdles and to communicate with people like me: people who can afford to have a car and drive it a lot, but want to move away from that habit--people who despite good intentions know too little about the finer points of the UTA system and have been reluctant to devote the effort necessary to figure it out and then commit to regularly make the extra effort to choose public transit over car travel. I hope that frequent and regular public transit use becomes my new habit, a way of easing out of the belief that I am always free to plan my life poorly and race from place to place by car in the name of efficiency (but honestly, more often laziness and lack of planning). I'm currently single and childless. If I'm going to change my transportation habits in a meaningful and permanent way, this is a perfect time to do so, while I have few people dependent on me to be at specific places at specific times. A more complicated future life will be easier to mesh with public transit use if I'm already well versed in the system and if the rhythms of my life have been adjusted to accommodate a slightly less frenetic pace. One day I may move to the 'burbs for the sake of scampering children, and have less walking access to what I need, so learning the bus system very well now may serve me even better in some future life as I try to keep my car use minimal.

I don't flatter myself that these minor changes of my habits will make a huge impact on the local air. But I'm hopeful they'll make a huge impact on my attitude and lifestyle and that as I learn to adapt cheerfully and creatively to that new lifestyle, others around me who have been been uncertain about how to make similar changes in their own habits will have a better idea of what to expect and how to do so without unreasonable sacrifices. As more of us pass around encouragement and useful advice, more of us will use the system. And as more of us use the system, the routes will gradually be expanded, and with any luck the next generation in the Salt Lake Valley will have a beautiful and extensive transit system like the one beloved in England, rendering car ownership optional and dramatically improving our air quality.

So here begins my little personal journey--learning to watch the world out the side windows.