A couple months ago I shared my experience taking the train to work. It wasn’t a bad trip, it just cost more and made life more inconvenient than driving.

Cat Warren politely mentions JLF in her op-ed detailing her friend’s travails taking the bus from Clayton to Raleigh. Cat never mentions how full the bus is that her friend and fellow NC State women’s studies professor Deborah Hooker rides for free with “people who appear poorer than she.” They pay $2 per person because they don’t work for the state.

Hooker usually takes 25 minutes to drive to work, but needs 20 minutes just to get to her unofficial park & ride facility and get on a bus for a 35-minute trip before transferring to another bus for what should be another 10-minute ride after another wait: “Standard commuting time with a little luck and no traffic tie-ups? About an hour and 20 minutes — more than three times longer than a car trip.”

Warren then compares this experience with her TTA bus ride from Durham (pop. 209,009) to Raleigh that is “always full” and takes a half hour and concludes…not that the number of bus commuters from Clayton (pop. 12,943) to Raleigh is too small to warrant direct service, but that “public transportation in the Triangle, circa 2008” is “uneven, underfunded, [and] cobbled-together.”