Solving the suburban transit shortage shouldn’t be so hard

The first point to make is that no one forced us to live here. We bought this house of our own free will, and it seemed to make sense — a reasonable commute, close to family, all the boxes checked. It has been a perfectly fine house.

But it's also true that what makes sense before you have kids, or when you have young kids, often makes less sense as those kids get older. What seems unclear is whether there are any good places for kids who are old enough to have their own lives but too young to get around on their own. Connecticut doesn't really do that kind of thing.

It's a real problem.

My kids are preteens. They don't have “playdates” anymore — when they see their friends, they don't necessarily want their parents hovering. They have the normal amount of extracurricular activities — swim practice, piano lessons, stuff like that, but they also prioritize time with their friends outside of school. And they are, like kids their age everywhere, increasingly chafing under their inability to get around on their own.

We don't have a whole lot to offer. We dutifully drive them where they need to go, and accommodate their requests for pickups and drop-offs when arrangements can be made. But they have nothing resembling freedom of movement. Like most kids, they are entirely on our schedules.

They are lucky to have parents with relative flexibility, but are increasingly aware of how limited they are. And they wonder, not unreasonably: Why does everyone live like this?

It's not an issue of maturity. Kids are able to handle logistics, given the opportunity, and that includes transportation. It's simply about availability.

There are bicycles, which come in handy. But when children are forced to share the road with cars, especially on busy roads, there is a significant safety concern. A statewide system of bike lanes on every major roadway would probably play well with the preteen set, but unfortunately they don't vote, and their parents for some reason have other priorities.

Maybe we need to frame it in terms of gas prices, which we know reliably draw a response from voters. There's no trip cheaper than the one you don't take, and if your kids are selfsufficient, that's a lot less time and money spent driving around town.

But it's more basic than that. There's nothing natural about car-dependent suburbs. They've been around so long that people assume this is just how the world looks, but there's no reason it has to. There's a long history of people getting around without needing a car for all their basic needs, and you wouldn't need to live in the equivalent of Midtown Manhattan to have that opportunity. We could decide to build a future that isn't dependent on cars to do everything.

Because it's not just children. For people who are too old to drive safely — a number that is only growing as the nation ages — auto-dependent suburbs turn a home into a prison. There's no place to go, and there's no one to ferry you around, and so your world is confined to the four walls around you. It can be a stultifying experience.

Then there's everyone else. Driving is fine right up until you encounter other people doing the same thing, and then you have traffic, and few experiences are more likely to drive up your blood pressure. Doing less driving would help everyone's mental health.

We could have communities where people who can't drive or don't want to could see each other with regularity. This could be accomplished by dramatically reworking the shape of our towns and the layout of our neighborhoods, but none of that seems likely. We have to work with what we have.

People need places to go, but once that's established, it's just a matter of getting them around, but maybe that's not so hard, either. Towns already run buses down nearly every street multiple times a day, but they're not open to the general public because they're big and yellow.

Is it that far-fetched that the system already in place to run school buses around towns could be expanded for general use? It would solve a lot of problems, and even create some jobs along the way. It could be a lifeline for people who are otherwise stranded, including a few who live under my roof.

Of course, no one would ride it, at least at first. A few pictures of empty buses would probably be enough to doom the endeavor. But, given time, people might get used to having another way to get around.

There is a lot to gain by simply providing people a ride. That was the thought behind the Ubers of the world, but those cheap rides appear to be ending, now that the venture capital is running out and the idea of turning a profit has been revealed as a fantasy. Getting around collectively should be something we put our collective brains toward figuring out.

Maybe when gas hits $6 a gallon we'll consider some ideas.

File photo A school bus arrives at a Middletown school earlier this year.