Blog #13 - Reduced Reliance on Energy, and Conservation Promotion

When I was a little kid, riding on the city bus, ringing the bell, jumping down the stairs at my stop, all of it fascinated me. As a teenager though, the bus was always late, always crowded, always slow, and always smelled. When I got my first car I thought I had kissed public transportation goodbye (I even became a pro at parallel parking), but when gas prices skyrocketed I reconsidered my old friend.

But riding the bus in southwest Florida is horrible (at least in the tri-county area). If commuting by car from Lehigh to Estero takes forty minutes in good traffic, I shudder to think of the "three hour tour" it would become by bus. When I asked at the Fort Myers Redevelopment Agency if plans to rehab the waterfront and downtown included any considerations of public transport, I received a flat, marginally apologetic "no".


I shrugged my shoulders about it all until I moved to southern California and had to live under that oppressive brown sky. All of a sudden I became obsessed with public transportation. Memories of being smooshed against rush-hour commuters in the DC subway became fond recollections. I waxed poetic about the autumn views from the windows of the Amtrak trains that run from Boston to New York. I framed a picture of my four-year-old son staring out the windows of an Orlando city bus.

I don't mean to ramble on and on about planes, trains, and buses, but the fact of the matter is that most people (especially in Florida) are so caught up in their egocentric, isolationist lives that the idea of sharing their morning commute with perfect strangers, or of going shopping on someone else’s schedule, is so appalling that they’re more than willing to put up with the traffic jams, and smog, and highway runoff, and rising gasoline prices, and a host of other environmental ills. Not that riding the bus in Lee county would ameliorate all those problems, but at least it’s a start.

I never thought there would come a day when I longed for public transportation. I guess it's a sign that I'm getting older.