Transit Alliance of Middle Tennessee – Bellevue, TN
I grew up in Pegram which is southwest of Nashville and has a population of about 2,000 people. Growing up on a dirt road in a town that had no public transit really galvanized me in terms of thinking about mobility. I learned early on that if you didn’t have the capacity to get from one place to the next, you’re stuck.
Even though I grew up in the country, I like living near a big city like Nashville. When I was younger, there wasn’t much to do back then in Nashville. I have loved seeing the growth over the years. It’s now a bright place full of activity and people. Walking down Broadway you hear different languages. The energy is second to none. I’m really hoping to see how we can continue improving livability and affordability by figuring out the mobility piece through achieving dedicated funding for transit and investing in updated infrastructure, transit services, and access.
My very first personal interaction with public transit didn’t begin until I was in my twenties. I was in Washington, DC and got to use the subway. At first, I found it confusing, but once I figured it out, I immediately realized what good transit service means for society. I truly believe that our individual freedoms are linked to mobility and that no one should be held back because they are dealing with a lack of access to viable public transit.
Right now, I live in the suburbs outside of Nashville. I take transit every chance I can, but the service is very infrequent. Sometimes, I’ll take a bus downtown to a concert, but the question that always lingers in my mind is whether I’ll be able to catch the bus back home. If I miss the last bus, I’m faced with a $40 or $50 rideshare cost to get back home.
Trust is paramount for our public transit system. What I’ve come to learn is that when you have fast, frequent service, people will use it. Once the service becomes unreliable and less frequent, people lose trust in the system and look to other sources to get around which almost always means relying on car travel. Trust can only be built when the system is on time and reliable. Over the past couple of decades, we’ve greatly underfunded our bus system, and mistrust has only grown among many.
Not funding public transit can severely impact the lives of our families, friends, and neighbors. When you don’t have access to public transit, you really are a hostage to your circumstance. If you can’t drive, have a disability, or can’t afford to buy a car, you are reliant on your family and friends to get anywhere and everywhere. If they aren’t available, you don’t get to go to work, the grocery store, or a doctor’s appointment. If you don’t have reliable public transit access, a normal day can seem like an endless logistical nightmare. If you can’t get to work on time or if your child can’t get to school, lack of access to good public transit exponentially compounds daily stress for our families.
If we committed to funding our public transit system, we could initiate a light rail service and support a bus rapid transit system that was supplemented with cross-town routes and connectors. Our goal would be to make all the routes frequent and reliable. We would also supplement this with a large network of accessible sidewalks and protected bike lanes and greenways. Having this type of investment would be life changing for thousands of families.
If I was sitting in front of my Member of Congress today, I would ask them how easy it would be to get to an appointment if they didn’t have access to their car keys. I think this would be a good way for our elected officials to think about our transportation network. We need to get Congress to fund transit operations for the thousands of people that wake up every day to the real threat that, without access to public transit, getting to the grocery store, church, or health care appointments can be a logistical nightmare, a very long and stressful ordeal, or an unattainable dream. Investing in public transit is how we connect people to people, people to places, and people to opportunity which supports shared economic and social vitality and provides for environmental sustainability.