Quote:
Originally Posted by arkhitektor
Yeah, I was simply relating what seems to be most people's thoughts on the matter: That busses are only for people who are too poor to afford cars.
Certainly the perception is different in highly urbanized areas, but most people in the western United States live in suburbia. Most also have a negative perception of 'riding the bus'.
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I think what you're getting at is that people who ride the bus typically have, on average, a lower socio-economic standing than people who ride rail. Therefore, since most people prefer (consciously or subconsciously) to not associate themselves with people of a socio-economic standing lower than their own, middle class and upper class folks avoid using the bus and think of most bus-riders as "poor" people. It's an overgeneralization, but I would agree with that. But I don't believe that most people think that people on the bus are too poor to afford a car. That just strikes me as too extreme and not reflective of the attitudes of people in a progressive urban area like Denver (where I've lived for 23 years so it's all I have to go on) where a lot of middle/upper class folks may not take the bus themselves, but they understand that a lot of non-poor people use public transportation for commutting to downtown due to traffic, cost of parking, etc.
I recently learned that 53% of the 115,000 people who work in Downtown Denver get there by some means other than driving a car (bus, light rail, walk, bike, etc.). About a third of the people I work with (planners, engineers, scientists) take the bus to work. At least for the Downtown crowd, there's not much of a stigma to riding the bus to work, particularly when your employer gives you an Ecopass (unlimited access to RTD bus and rail) and parking would cost a minimum of $80-100/month for outlying parking lots.