I gave up my driver’s license two months ago after I had a seizure on my way home from the grocery store. Since then I’ve been using my old license just for identification until getting settled in my new apartment. I moved at the beginning of the month and today I was finally able to head to the DMV to replace the no longer valid license with a new state ID card.

The exercise of getting a state ID was a good reminder of what I have to be thankful for and a great look at how class and ability impact our lives. My seizure in August meant leaving the small town where I was living to return to Madison. Madison has public transportation. It is, at least in theory, an accessible community in which to live.

My trip to the DMV today was via the bus. Taking a cab could have been an option, but it cost more than I cared to spend for a trip to just get a new ID. It began by needing to schedule my day according to when the best route options were available. Then waiting at the stop to ride the half hour on what would have been a ten minute car trip. Along the trip I read the information about how the busses are being cleaned during COVID and the rules riders need to follow and pondered how much each ride increased my risk of disease.

Thanks to being given the wrong form and a mildly confused elderly man in the line front of me, my visit to the DMV took a bit longer than expected. That meant walking out the door just as the ideal bus to take home pulled away. So, I walked about a half mile to catch another bus. My trip that would have taken probably about an hour or maybe less if I were driving took about three hours on the bus.

I don’t ride the bus often, but when I do it is clear who the busses serve. The vast majority of people I see are BIPOC, low income, homeless, students, and people with mental health issues. If my experience today is typical and it takes three times as long to complete a task via bus or even just twice as long as it does for someone using a car, I wonder how we can expect people to get ahead? How does someone win when a bus that is a few minutes late makes you late for your transfer or your job? How do you hold control in your own life when you are living by the bus schedule and others set their own times?

The busses are a place where social and environmental justice come together. There are many who care about climate change and clean water and clean air and all those things. Many who know that public transportation is environmentally more sound than private cars, but yet they don’t ride. Why not? I suspect a few things, first there is that issue of timeliness, being able to get to the places they want to go, and get tasks done and secondly there is the issue of the other riders of the bus– those who are BIPC, low income, homeless, and those with mental health issues. Could it be possible if bus service were improved and these individuals were able to begin to bridge the gap, able to access the services they need, get to work, school, and able to run their errands in a more timely way that the busses would become a more welcoming service for all while also making life just a bit better for those who need it? Sometimes we just need to draw the connections. Make it possible for folks to do the work they need to do and life gets better for us all.

Just some ponderings from today’s and a couple of other recent trips on Madison’s busses. What do others think?