Getting Serious About Public Transportation In Nashville?

A recent letter to the editor of the Tennessean was critical of Nashville’s development of public transportation. The reader sarcastically pointed out that the schedules, routes and possibilities of our current MTA system are too limited to be useful to the majority of Nashville folk.

This seems to be another case of the people wanting their cake and eating it too. Nashville Metro Government has done an acceptable job operating a largely underused resource by planning routes and schedules based on demand. If anything, during the 90’s and early 00’s when the fuel psychology of the American consumer was bullish, they kept the empty busses on the road as a service to the thin margins of the Nashville population who needed it.

Let’s remember who is paying for these things.

However, times are changing, and Metro is indeed expanding the budget, routes, and even adding hybrid vehicles to the fleet. Why? Because demand has increased sharply with the doubling of oil prices. As demand continues to rise, I would agree that this is the time to make a case to a bigger push to improve the coverage, range and frequency of public transit, but their certainly needs to be a reasonable calculus that bases expansion on demand, or definite trial limits set based on new routes.

The mistake is to think that by providing a bus at every corner, ever half hour, that somehow everyone in Metro is going to use them. They won’t. People love their cars. Mass transit is popular in major cities for logistical reasons: there are too many people to drive. Nashville has a long way to go before our population will exceed our current road infrastructure.

One area that could use relief is the outer areas of town, or the exurbs: the real estate areas that are being hit the hardest by the real estate crash and the oil crunch. Mass transit makes a lot of sense for the satellite communities who could see significant savings from catching a bus into town for the day.