The Rationing Of Public Transportation

This is kind of a continuation of my December 30th post. As most people know, I'm an urban kind of person. I have no desire to live in the country, or in a small town where you have to be reliant on an automobile to transport you everywhere. I love riding public transportation. I only drive when I have to, and many times that driving is driving to where I can catch public transportation to my final destination. Currently, I live in the inside the Beltway suburbs of Washington, DC.

This is the point of this blog post... Convenience, and how things are made inconvenient in order to force a certain demographic into their cars, despite all the environmental bleating from the Left. Why would these environmental types and the local governments want to force a certain demographic into their private vehicles? Because, doing so generates tax revenue.

I live in Prince George's County, Maryland. Let's look at the demographics of the county: Black professionals, middle class, working class, and poor; White working class, lower middle class, pink class, and a smattering of White professionals, and a small smattering of Asian lower middle class, middle class, and professionals. With exception, many of the people that live in this county work in the suburbs, and don't commute into the city, except for some of  the professionals and a smattering of non-professionals like secretaries and such. Some commute county to county, but the majority commute both to work and live here in PG County.

Many of the residents of PG County have a problem riding public transportation. It's not part of their culture. Dan Reed of Greater Greater Washington wrote an article a while back describing this phenomenon pertaining to the Black middle and upper classes. Many of them grew up in DC and before they started making decent money and moved to the suburbs, they were poor and were reliant on public transportation. Once they arrived, so to speak, they distanced themselves from the trappings of the working poor, and the ghetto poor. That meant driving everywhere, even if there was a bus stop feeding the Metro right across the street from their house. Another demographic that won't use public transportation are the working class whites and lower middle class whites. For them, even though they won't admit it, it's racism. They are not going to ride bus public transportation with those "little brown people," and those N word types. They will ride the Metrorail if they work in DC, but not the buses.

It's sad, but that is the reality of the situation. Hopefully, as this part of Prince George's County becomes more gentrified things will change. Maybe then, Metro and the PG County Council will reach an agreement to increase the bus service serving the Metrorail, as well as bus service as an alternative to the rail system. I hope so.