More on transit

Listening to MPR this morning I found myself growing angry again. There is a push, on the part of a few people on the Republican end of our state government, to gut the public transit system we currently have on the grounds that the ongoing bus strike is not creating much disruption and therefore the bus system must not be all that important. I beg to differ! Perhaps the people whose lives it is disrupting are not politically strong, perhaps they do not have the time or the energy to march on the capitol — although, for those of us who do, there’s a rally in support of the bus drivers happening at 2 pm today on the capitol steps in St. Paul — but there is major disruption all the same. We don’t need LESS public transit, we need MORE! Barb Thoman has a nice piece in the Star Tribune this morning explaining why. I wish more Minnesotans had had the chance to live within reach of good public transit — as our kids and I have — so that we could all understand, from a gut level, how incredibly useful it is.