San Antonio, Texas
I was born and raised in San Antonio, and love living here. I graduated from the University of the Incarnate Word last year, and I’m currently getting my teaching certificate in high school history. I’m looking forward to finishing my degree and hopefully landing a teaching job in 2025. I like to say that I lead a “grandma-core” lifestyle, so I do a lot of knitting and baking.
Living in San Antonio, though, the one thing that irks me is how bad our public transit system is. Compared to all the other major cities in Texas, San Antonio pays the least when it comes to public transit. The way transportation works in San Antonio is that you must own a car. If you don’t, then you’re out of luck. Times where I haven’t had access to a car or haven’t been able to get a hold of friends that have cars, I’m basically stuck in place.
Also, the biking and walking infrastructure in our city is abysmal. I don’t ride a bike because the roads are designed for cars only. Many times, bike lanes just end abruptly. It’s similar to walking. If you need to walk, the chances are you are walking on the side of the road. There aren’t adequate crosswalks either. So, if you need to cross the road, it’s a dangerous game of chicken with cars that are driving over 50 miles per hour. I live next to a major road. The speed limit on that road is 45, but no one actually goes 45. Walking just isn’t possible or safe for me.
I’ve used the bus a few times. But the way the bus system works, you hope it’s not summer when you need to take it. The bus never comes on time, so you are waiting in 100-degree heat at concrete, unshaded bus stops.
There are four major transit hubs in San Antonio, but the overall urban design for them is terrible. The way they are set up is that you must drive to the transit hub to be able to use the bus. It’s bizarre to me that we need to use cars to effectively use public transportation in San Antonio.
Honestly, every person I talk to that is my age, we want a metro and more public transportation. San Antonio seems stuck in ‘let’s build another lane’ thinking when dealing with our population growth. San Antonio’s growth isn’t going to slow down anytime soon, and given the road construction never stops, the traffic is always going to get worse. We know that building new lanes doesn’t alleviate traffic, at all.
I did a project in college on what it would look like if San Antonio built a metro line. The one wild statistic I came across is that it would lower the murder rate. That is due to the increasing incidents of road rage, as San Antonio has one of the highest incidences of road rage in the nation. If we had more public transit here, we’d also have fewer car accidents and our air quality would improve. On the positive side, my project found that focusing more on public transit would increase available green space, bring in more retail and businesses, and protect our city’s biodiversity.
Bottomline, we need to improve our bus system. We need more frequency and more routes. I would love it if our city had electric buses. We need to ensure that our system can handle the extreme weather in San Antonio and is more accessible for seniors and people living with mobility issues. Public transit investments are vital if we want to make San Antonio the city it could be.
Thanks for listening to my story.