Correspondence - Kyle Sweeney - Laserfiche WebLink

Home

From: Kyle Sweeney To: CityClerkMbx Subject: [External] Public Transit -For the city council Date: Wednesday, March 9, 2022 11:15:13 AM Dear Councilmembers, As the current fuel price increase has illustrated, reliance on personal cars should not be the default option for transportation in our city. Good transit should not be limited to those who can afford it. The current experiment with making transit cheaper is a great step. Quarters are much easier to get ahold of than our bus passes and makes transit much more affordable and increases accessibility in the city. We need to focus on making our city more friendly to non- car transit methods. We can do this with a combination of bus policies, zoning, traffic design, and street infrastructure. Buses are one of the most efficient transit options available but unfortunately our bus system has a number of limitations that often make them a choice of last resort. Buses become very limited when they don't pass a given stop at least once every 15 minutes and some of ours only pass stops once every 40 minutes to an hour. This makes them very impractical to use, especially if a rider has to use multiple buses. Imagine if your car could only turn on in a narrow window once per hour. You could only leave your house at certain times and every stop you made doing errands would have to be at least an hour before you could start the next. Another major limitation of our buses is that they often get caught in traffic. People use the mode of transit that is most convenient and fastest. Cars always win convenience, but when alternatives are faster people switch to them, which in turn reduces traffic. Because our buses move at the same speed of traffic, make frequent stops, and often have a wait, they end up as a transit of last resort. By having bus only lanes, and bus only streets we can speed up buses and reduce traffic as well. When a bus ride becomes a viable alternative to sitting in traffic and paying for gas people will use it. Buses of course aren't the only alternative transit, walking and biking would also be viable options if we made our city friendly to these modes of transit. The more friendly we are to these, the less traffic we will see. Related to this is slowing traffic will also lead to more usage of buses, walking, and biking. Slowing traffic is also a good way to make these transit methods safer while encouraging their use. Right now we have very few safe bike lanes, they are often right next to traffic with no barrier to protect riders and our intersections prioritize cars over these other methods. This makes biking a very dangerous option which discourages use. Finally our city isn't designed for short trips well suited for buses, bikes, and walking. We have large suburbs and residential areas without local shops that would be well suited for this form of transit. By diversifying our zoning to allow small local stores in our communities we encourage shorter trips that are more viable by foot and bike, while increasing economic opportunities. We have spent a lot of time focusing on big box stores which undermine the smaller businesses around them and make our city more car dependent. The more viable we make non -car transit the better our traffic will be, which means safer and more pleasant traffic. The better our transit is the more friendly our city is to outsiders and residents alike. The fewer cars we have on the road the less pollution we have, both chemical