Why mass transit won't work

As one of the fortunate Americans who lives in a city with mass rail transit, I can zip around the District of Columbia with relative ease, so long as I never detour more than a mile from any metro stop, assuming that metro stop is in a safe location with sidewalks and lighting.

For the most part, the metro suits my needs as the city has built around supporting commuters like myself. As an old city with many historic buildings, there's less room for parking, and the roads ... lord, the roads.

But an interesting article in the Economist has recently shed light on how mass transit will just never win over the pleasure of one's own transport, bad traffic or not. The article looked at trees.

The anatomy of trees has always been pitched as an effective means for distributing nutrients, from roots to trunks to main arteries to increasingly smaller ones as the mass of the tree gets thinner and the demand for nutrients is less. In mass transit parlance, this would be a central train station with a spoke of rail lines running out from it, providing increasingly less service as the population decreases.

But research has shown that one aspect of the tree is distinctly different in its structure. Long thought to be a replication of its larger self, leaves, it turns out, aren't structured along that pattern at all. Instead, they have a series of interconnecting routes so that when one portion of the leaf is damaged, nutrients can still travel freely. This is the same as a driver finding a traffic jam and detouring through a side street to avoid the wait.

Mass transit has few options like this. While rail and bus remain predominant, there is no continuous flow through them. Getting those nutrients--that's us--to the right place is often a difficult task because the infrastructure doesn't exist to get us there. Trains take you to a stop where you wait for a bus and when the bus stops you walk the rest of the way. Cumbersome as it is, that is the only alternative.

Cars, or personal means of travel, offer a multitude of routes to arrive at the same location. They are structured like the leaf, less dependent on large arteries and more adaptable to changing situations. Mass transit, by definition, cannot be so agile on account of its, well, mass.

With gas on the rise, and car manufacturers in the red something has to be done. A recent look at Google's route finder told me it would take 22 minutes to travel into the District's Adams Morgan area by car (getting there has often taken 45 minutes in heavy traffic). Mass transit, it said, would take 2 hours and 5 minutes (if I used only buses, which is all that most American cities offer). Walking the 8 miles it happily informed me, would only take fifteen minutes more.

It's not that mass transit is entirely ineffective. But the system does need an overhaul--more rails, more redundancy and more reliability. Why do I mention this? Because I just spent the better part of four hours traveling less than twenty miles by foot, then bus, then rail with a hobo that smelled like sour cheese. Surely there is a better way. For my sake.