Antiplanner drops this piece of news:
For more than a month, transit agencies have been telling people not to ride transit unless they are “essential workers.” Now those same agencies are outraged that the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) is giving people the same advice as they go back to work.
In an advisory page for employers of office workers, CDC urges employers to “Offer employees incentives to use forms of transportation that minimize close contact with others, such as offering reimbursement for parking for commuting to work alone or single-occupancy rides.”
“We’ve never had a situation where everyone in authority told the public to avoid public transit,” observes my friend Jarrett Walker. “We’re basically training the entire public to view public transit as dangerous. That’s going to take awhile to come back from.”
Or maybe transit will never come back. We can only hope.
After what seems like a lifetime of trying to get people out of their cars— or at least getting more people int one car—we are now being told that for our health and safety we must drive alone. Freedom –or at least freedom of movement–takes strange twists. Who would think we would ever see this day?