Personal car ownership gets a lot of bad rep these days. People looking for a solution to climate change tout public transportation as one way to reduce humanity’s damage to the world. In some parts of the country, this might even make sense. Manhattan’s infamous congestion, caused by the island’s natural limits, makes car travel far slower than taking the subway. And New York City’s iconic subway system does its job.
But in Lancaster County, we have the Red Rose Transit Authority. I’ve used them to get around since moving to Lancaster City in 2018. As a low-income commuting student, the bus is the only transit method besides walking that I can afford. And when it works, it’s a passable way of commuting.
The problem is that when it doesn’t work, it upends my day-to-day life in catastrophic ways, and the failures over the past couple years have become much more frequent. So despite all the environmental dooming and glooming about cars, RRTA has managed to firmly place me in the “cars are better“ camp despite my otherwise liberal beliefs. So how has RRTA led me to this?
Over the past year, RRTA’s service reliability has badly eroded. While the authority has made efforts recently to fix traffic issues on some routes leading to late buses, I am still having significant issues. I’m going to give two examples, one from this month and one from earlier in the year that is too egregious not to bring up.
A systemic issue RRTA has largely comes down to not just buses running late, but early. On Sept. 25, I was trying to go to the university campus from Lancaster for dinner. I tried to wait for the 6:30 p.m. bus, only for said bus to end up being about 15 to 20 minutes late. This meant that I did not make it in time to campus for the Upper Deck, and had to go to Chick-Fil-A instead.
But something far worse happened when I tried to catch the last bus leaving the university hours later. A bus that was supposed to leave at 10:03 p.m. instead began the trip an indeterminate amount of time earlier. This left me fully stranded on campus, instead relying on the kindness of a fellow Snapper editor to get me home. This happened with no warning, and no recourse from the bus company as the driver had already returned to base.
To sum this up, in one evening, I had been screwed over in two opposite ways by the bus.
And this pales in comparison to by far the worst transgression RRTA has made, not only against me but against their entire rider base. Last winter in January, a severe snowstorm hit the Lancaster area. I was working at the Target on Lincoln Highway East and had been watching RRTA’s website all day, fully expecting service to be impacted by the storm.
What I hadn’t expected was RRTA shutting down all buses with immediate effect. I had no time to rush out the store’s front door to catch the rapidly-departing bus to go home. I was, again, stranded. This time with no one else able to drive me home. It was one of the most terrifying moments I’d lived through in years.
I consider that the exact moment I stopped treating buses as a viable transit method. By relying on buses for transportation, you are placing your mobility into the hands of a third party, one who may not always make decisions for your benefit.
On that evening in January, RRTA had not only left me stranded at work, but likely their entire rider-base was left stranded all across the county in the middle of a snowstorm. I can’t imagine the amount of harm inflicted on people by that decision. And yes, while the safety of their drivers is important, RRTA had a responsibility to safely get their riders home in that storm by giving them sufficient warning of a service interruption.
So there you have it. In a world where environmentalists swear by their chinny-chin-chins that cars are terrible and public transit is better, I have simply been burned by RRTA too many times to possibly agree. This isn’t just an RRTA problem. It’s the product of an American society that considers public transit to be a punishment for people who can’t afford a car. But until something drastic changes to fix RRTA’s problems, I think that driving is the best way of getting around Lancaster County.
