After a month off from blogging, it’s hard to decide where to begin. So first a comment on my bus and train travel.
To visit friends in a few different places, I took a bus from Boston to Cincinnati, then the next week to East Lansing, Michigan. A few days later I took a train from East Lansing to Lincoln, Nebraska and then eventually another one back to Boston. The bus part especially made me feel very old, very white, and very middle class.
The U.S. public transportation system is poor in general, and my first extended bus-train trip in at least a decade reminds me how bad it is to get from one city to the next. The majority of bus passengers along most of my route were African Americans and, leaving Boston, students. At 56, I often seemed to be the oldest person on the bus. On the trains, though, old people were everywhere; when we boarded in Chicago on the way home, the announcement telling passengers over 62 to board first drew what looked like almost half the people in the waiting area.
Bus schedules are better than train. I would have done more of the trip by train instead of bus — being able to walk around during the trip is worth the few extra dollars — but the routes were too circuitous. There’s only one train a day in each direction through Nebraska, reaching Lincoln at 12:30 am westbound and 4:30 am eastbound. Four of the five trains I took (with connections) left and/or arrived late, a couple of times more than three hours late.
Food was a problem in almost all the many bus stations I spent time in. Sometimes there wasn’t any except for a few vending machines, and when there was a coffee shop of sorts it wasn’t catering to people who care much about what they eat. That might not be so bad on a short haul, but for long-distance it’s a drag.
Trying to sleep was also a drag, though both the bus and train were better than trying to sleep on a plane. Train seats especially are more comfortable than airplane seats, with a lot more legroom. (I’ve never been in a sleeper car, which cost a lot, so I don’t know what they’re like.)
Despite my food and sleep complaints, I had a good time. Here at home I rarely spend a day just sitting and reading, but on this trip that’s pretty much what I did. Talked to a few people on and off. Watched the scenery go by — not as exciting as on the trips I took long ago through mountains and desert, but interesting enough.
In both Michigan and Nebraska, the train stations had pamphlets asking passengers to fight cuts in train subsidies. From what I read it looks like schedules are destined to get even worse, and both bus and train travel is likely to become even more inconvenient (Greyhound has also been cutting routes). The further decline of Midwest towns and small cities may be the result — not being able to take a bus wherever you want may not bother people who can afford to fly, but even if the poor can afford a plane ticket they still often need a bus to get to the nearest city with an airport.
In a society that really cared about such things, public transportation would be a lot better.