Kids on Transit

I’ve covered this topic before but feel compelled to revisit and reassert the point. Cities are great places to raise kids of all ages! And access to and use of mass transit is a big part of that. Let me count the ways, based on my own experience growing up in the suburbs and then being a parent in University City:

 1.      Freedom – There were many years I was old enough to want to go out with friends but not old enough to drive. During that formative phase of childhood, city kids can go anywhere and do anything.

 2.      Thrift – Buying, insuring, and maintaining one car for each person 16 and over is a lot more expensive than…zero. Public school kids ride for free from 7 to 7 on weekdays. And Asher can ride for free when he’s with me. 

3.      Safety – Far all the hand-wringing about it being dangerous to ride the subway, it’s pretty clear to me that driving is the far higher-risk activity we regularly engage in. And, accompanying your parent to stations and trains, and then navigating them on your own, is a good way to learn how to carry yourself in the world so as to protect yourself. 

4.      Environment – Not sure how we all know that driving is way worse for the planet than the bus or subway, and then make major life choices that make it impossible to get anywhere without a car. And then have the nerve to make it seem like leafy suburbs are more “green” than “dirty” cities. That’s not what I want my kids to think. 

5.      Diversity – Driving literally cocoons us with our own. Riding mass transit connects us to, well, “the masses.” Where else will you find a guy in a suit sitting next to a guy in rags? As with the environment, somehow we justify massive differences between what we say is important for our kids vs. the settings we actually put our kids in. 

6.      Convenience/Predictability – Admittedly this is a mixed bag. There are trips that are way easier to do by car as opposed to being beholden to a train schedule. And there are times when mass transit lets us down in terms of a broken-down train or a bus caught in a detour. But I submit that there are many other times when the opposite is true, namely the very times when everyone is trying to do the same thing, like get to school/work or coming/going from an event, and it is terribly inefficient to drive through traffic and then have to figure out where to park your car. 

Alas, for many of us, our ability or inability to take mass transit is preset, in that we either have easy access to it or not. But, I suspect there are many parents out there who have easy access to it and yet choose not to capitalize on it. And I suspect there are many parents out there who are at the point of making decisions about where to live, who either do not account for or actively consider it a negative to have transit access. I’m here to tell you it’s a very good thing for the kids and the parents when you can forgo your car and get around on mass transit.