Trains vs. Buses vs. Autos

 

 

"Our traffic in this state is like a horror story. Only instead of a story, it is real life that many of us have to deal with each and every day..."

I think I might have told this story before. Shortly before I retired (for good), I did a tour at Ecolab in St. Paul. After being through the wringer some very tough accounts at IBM, the job I had at Ecolab was a breeze. Good company, great job, horrible commute. Many days from the time I left my garage, parked in a municipal ramp in downtown St. Paul, and then plugged my laptop in at work, was two hours. If there was bad weather or an accident, it took longer.

There was an express bus I could take into downtown St. Paul, but I had to drive 25 minutes to get to the express stop. Plus, the express schedule was very limited. The last bus left St. Paul at 5:00. If you missed it, you ended up taking a "milk run" bus with many stops and transfers. In short, to get from my house to downtown St. Paul, there is no train, and limited bus service. That left taking my car and sitting in hours of butt ugly traffic.

My son-in-law lives in Elk River and works in Minnetonka. On a good day, his commute is an hour. On a bad day, much worse. There are zero options other than taking his car. And traffic sucks. What did our planners, our representatives, come up during the last session? Na-da. Keep on sucking out citizens. If you don't live on a bus line (or the Northstar line), work downtown Minneapolis with a 8 to 5 job, you are out of luck for mass transit.

So where do we go from here? What can we do? Prohibit companies from moving from the city and into the burbs? Probably not. Basically we are in the soup for years. Even if our elected officials realized how much we need ROADS in this state, it would still take years to garner funding, permits, environmental studies and so on to see any improvements in our transit.

Some interim solutions which have been bantered about:

• More telecommuting - Many jobs are set up for working mobile. You don't have to sit in a cubical downtown to do your job. You can do it from anywhere, including your home.
• More flex time - The simply dumbest thing we do as a working public is have EVERYONE start at the same time and then have EVERYONE leave at the same time. Can you spell "traffic gridlock"? Offer the opportunity to have people start as early as 6am and as late as 9am. It would help traffic as well as give employees more free time at home.
• More flex days - What ever happened to the concept of 4 days at 10 hours a day? Taking cars off the road one day a week would certainly help. Many companies loved the 10 hours a day, but want 5 days to boot.

In absence of any forward thinking by employers, and with the lack of viable transportation options by our state government, we remain stuck. Stuck in gridlock hell. How long will this continue? I fear my children will go through their entire careers stuck in traffic. Thousands of hours, and millions of gasoline wasted. Day after day, week after week and year after year.