I was walking and talking with a planner at the city, Marco Velotta. He said that day he parked his car at the Park & Ride facility by the airport then hopped on the bus to work, in the heart of “old downtown.” In the morning, that’s a 20 minute commute for a 5 mile commute – that could take 15 minutes in a car. Going back in the afternoon, takes about an hour and a half.

This is the unfortunate wall for many denizens to take public transit – it takes too damn long and it’s too damn hot to wait under the hot sun for a bus that you pray will take you to where you want to go.

It’s a huge sacrifice of time and energy. Not only is it impossible to buy tickets at the majority of bus stops, but there are no schedules printed on the signs. Some stops don’t even have a shelter to at least soften the blow of 115 degrees of raw sun. And the frequency of buses could mean waiting 5 minutes or 50.

I drive to work. There isn’t a bus stop near me. I don’t even know that buses come by here. And by the time they’ve built the Park & Ride on Durango (5 minutes from my house), I will be cruising the metro in DC.

So I will gladly give whomever takes the bus to work everyday a hearty handshake- whether it’s because they have no other way of getting around or because it’s a conscious decision. They deserve it, really. They’re the ones saving this dust bowl of a city tons of carbon monoxide emissions, not me.

Related posts:

1. Las Vegas Transit Projects
2. UNLV Transit Hub Study, Part 2 of 2
3. Interview with Mayor Oscar Goodman: Connecting Las Vegas to Downtown Culture
4. LEEDing Sustainability: Union Park in Las Vegas
5. Reading the LV Sun’s Comments: Cannibals, Mass Transit and Economics