I have lived in Southern California for over 30 years and everyone here claims to want mass transportation but very few choose, including myself, to use mass transportation. My reason, as I suspect most other people’s reason, is, despite the effort, it is neither convenient or timely. Or this is my impression of mass transportation.

Every time I have experimented with mass transport I have had the same problem — it is easier and quicker to have taken a car. Now, things change and I experiment so little, I could be wrong. Mass transport could be better, easier and quicker but that just isn’t my perception and, as an old boss told me once, perception is reality. The truth is irrelevant if people think the service is bad and a lot of people think the service is bad.

I have visited cities were mass transportation is both good and more timely. For instance, New York and San Francisco have mass transportation that any rational person would choose over a car. So I can be convinced to change my mind but nothing has happened to convince me I am wrong.

Here is my reality. My partner and I were going to a football game. On game days, the city encourages people to take the trolley as there is limited parking and heavy traffic near the stadium. A perfect time to experiment with mass transport. The trip to the stadium was uneventful but the trip home was much more problematic. Some time after departing the stadium, the carriage I was riding in filled with smoke. The passengers were forced to walk back to the station were an already large number of people were standing waiting for the next train which wasn’t coming because there was a stalled trolley blocking the track. Once the trollies began moving, every car was full. Another person couldn’t be pushed into it even if someone tried. And, believe me, people tried. Eventually we made it home but the conclusion we reached was it would have been far easier, even with limited parking and excess traffic, to have taken the car.

In case you are saying well that is unfair. I shouldn’t judge the system based on one system breakdown. And I didn’t. A few years later I had to abandon a smoke filled trolley car and walk back on the tracks to the next available station. Since I have only used the trolley system a handful of times, this has left a particularly bad impression of the system. I am not going to get where I want. I am going to end up walking on trolley tracks to station that doesn’t have my car and I will have to find some other mode of transportation to get where I want to go.

More problematic is that even a good experience with the trolley, and I have had them, you realize that taking a car would be quicker. My best experience was when a new line opened to La Jolla. This one went smoother. No smoke, no abandoned cars, no walks on the tracks. It took a good 40 minutes. If I drove my car it would have been all of 20 minutes and there was plenty of parking at the shopping center where I was going. I could have done this faster in my car and had a much more pleasant experience to boot as there was a homeless man ripping up a stack of free newspapers and throwing the torn pages on the ground. I probably should stopped him but he was much younger and appeared to be a bit crazy.

This brings me to an even bigger problem. The city parents are trying to make San Diego a mass transportation, bicycle riding city without doing any work to make this palatable to the residents of the city. The number of mid-rise buildings going up in Hillcrest, my neighborhood, is alarming mostly because the already bad traffic is now becoming even worse. Trying to make a left hand turn on the street where I live is nearly impossible at some points in the day. There are too many cars and not enough nice people to let you in. They have taken away parking along the avenues to make bike lanes. Bikes lane that so few people use that when I see someone using a bike in them I am startled and will excitedly point them out to anyone with me at the time.

The plan, as I see it, is the city parents are trying to make car driving so miserable that people will choose to take bad and inconvenient mass transit instead. Now this is a big problem because the citizens may make other choices. Like move to other cities. Or to the suburbs. Or elect a less environmentally conscious city council. The solution, as I see it, is to prove to a doubting public that the city can provide reliable, quick and convenient public transportation. This they are failing to do.