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Transportation »
Return to full transportation vision
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Share your comments below!
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Affordable (or free) transportation for all. Everyone should be able to move around for their basic living needs, regardless of how much money they have. It is a fundamental right.
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Comments (4)
Free or extremely affordable transit is a must; however, without more frequent service, better routes, and more accessible transit stops it won't matter. For public transportation to catch on it needs to be: frequent, accessible, and cheap.
Between “(or free)” and transportation, add “easily available”. Easily available means adding stops in or on the edges of neighborhoods, so people can walk or ride to them. I’m guessing that would require a greater number of smaller buses and vans, incurring added labor cost. But the upside is more jobs and potential tax revenue to offset that cost. And it doesn’t have to happen all at once—targeting lower-income neighborhoods and using any Federal or State job-creation incentives could support a start.
Too many people use the word "affordable" without defining it (which makes me itchy).
I've worked with many intentional communities who stated "affordability" as one of their group values to define what that actually means to them. I think most people unconsciously think it means "I can afford it" which translates to "I am willing to pay that amount for that thing/service."
I had people anonymously write down actual NUMBERS ("how much are you willing & able to pay for your home in this community") and graphed them so everyone could see the range (usually a bell curve).
The difference was orders of magnitude between rural & urban, Santa Clara Co vs Sonoma Co etc.
So I cannot embrace that word without some sort of definition.
It makes sense to define "affordable" in less subjective terms. Do you have any suggestion for how to define it in the vision-- or otherwise how to improve this part of the vision?
Affordable could be defined as a percentage of income (such as or 3%.) This would mean free for people with no or little income.
Here is some data showing that, on average people in the US spend 13% of household expenditures on transportation, but the percentage is much higher for lower income households (more like 30%)
https://www.itdp.org/2019/05/23/high-cost-transportation-united-states/
Another option would be to simple switch the bolded part of the vision statement to say "Free low-carbon transportation for all." This takes out the fuzzy "affordable" term and also specifies low-carbon... because we don't want everyone to get free Hummers.
I absolutely love this idea! I think it's a goal that we must shoot for as it is totally reachable. I can already imagine having a morning bus route that drops off high schoolers to their respective schools. I also think that adding information onto this website on how the SMART Train can be incorporated into some residents daily transportation routine could be very helpful. The SMART Train is the future!