81,000 Households in Metro St. Louis Don't Have a Car

• BTW where is the photo of that bus from? Not her; FOSHO!

• Did you think the 55,000 daily metro riders all just prefer the bus and the train to the Rolls sitting in there garage?

• Here is a novel idea: ride a bike.  $500 and you can have a nice new hybrid.  I live three miles from work in the City.  It takes me 15 minutes to drive it, 20 minutes to cycle it, and at 30+ minutes to ride the bus.  Unless it is raining or icy out, why would I want to ride the bus?  There are other non-car, non-Metro transportation options for people who don't have cars.

• Well said, especially your comments about weekend transportation. The only weekend job that is easily accessible is working at  the stadium during ballgames.

• Yes, city residents have access to public transportation, but the lack of public transportation in surrounding counties means we often have long bus rides and long walks at our destination to get to a job or doctor.

• Because of the decision to route every transfer through MetroLink, it takes about an hour and a half not just to get to any possible job, from MetroBus, but anywhere at all: walk 5 to 10 minutes to a bus stop, arrive at the stop the recommended 10 minutes early, ride the bus for 15 minutes (probably going opposite direction that you want to go), wait 20 minutes for a train, ride the train for 10 minutes, wait 20 to 30 minutes for the bus that takes you the rest of the way, ride that bus for 15 minutes, walk 5 to 10 minutes to where you're going. And that's under optimum circumstances. Try it on Saturday, and the connection times nearly double, because they run half as many buses and trains. Try it on Sunday, and it gets even worse if it can be done at all: in addition to the Saturday slowdown, some buses don't even run at all. Too bad that an awful lot of the area's jobs that pay too little to afford a car also involve working weekends. They also not infrequently involve working third shift, when St. Louis has no mass transit options at all, period. St. Louis is what happens when a city's mass transit service is run, managed, and mostly even operated by people who don't ride mass transit.

• I've been considering ditching the car as well, but truth be told, I've tried Metro out enough times to know that my life would be like that of a Hobbit never leaving his particular corner of the Shire. If I ever wanted to go anywhere special besides work (like the bank, for instance), it would be an odyssey of at least an hour each way. We need to look at CTA and the system in DC as good examples of how we can improve. 20 minutes (on a good route on a good day) between stops is ridiculous.

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