JATRAN Will Live, but I Want it to Thrive

I was relieved (and surprised) that our City Council chose not to make any cuts to the city's bus system this year. Yes, JATRAN can be a mess, but the solution isn't to slash budgets and routes, rather it's actually to invest in public transportation. Not just money, but invest creativity into the bus system, from how they look to how they run and where they take people. Make JATRAN smart, efficient and creative, and you will find smart and creative people choosing buses over cars.

I don't drive. I say that proudly, but my reasons for eschewing cars in favor of feet, bikes and mass transit has to wait for another blog post.

For now, I only want to say that I was relieved (and surprised) that our City Council chose not to make any cuts to the city's bus system this year. Yes, JATRAN can be a mess, but the solution isn't to slash budgets and routes, rather it's actually to invest in public transportation. Not just money, but invest creativity into the bus system, from how they look to how they run and where they take people. Make JATRAN smart, efficient and creative, and you will find smart and creative people choosing buses over cars.

I've lived in cities with good--and not so good--bus systems. The best was in Boulder, Colorado where rejecting cars is a point of pride, and mass transit is a celebration. Boulder paints its buses bright colors and gives the routes names such as Hop, Skip, Dash and Stampede. In Jackson, our buses are painted bank lobby green and follow routes named 1 through 14.

More importantly, the people who actually ride the buses helped design the system. Not wonky urban planners, but mothers, minimum wage workers and students who rely on buses to take us to jobs, schools and appointments. And because the buses take people where they need to go, take them there quickly and on time, people choose to ride the buses not because they have to, but because they want to. They're cheaper than cars, pollute less and are a celebration of economic and environmental independence.

The great, radical difference between Boulder's system and our system, though, is Boulder's use of creativity. Everything I've listed above happened because creative people produce Boulder's bus system, making it a kind of work of art, a system that not only works, it thrives and has a hell of a lot of fun doing it.

Jackson government simply must develop that same enthusiastic creativity for public transportation or it must hand the reigns over to people who are perhaps younger and more willing to take chances with innovation. If not, JATRAN will continue to fail. But if so, I believe JATRAN will become one of the best reasons to live in Jackson.

Word to the wise. Jackson Progressives, are you listening?