What is the meaning of transit?

What is transit? Certainly it is mass transit, public transit, public transport... but what does it stand for and what do you think of when you hear the term? What sort of feelings do you find yourself having?

Here is a tag cloud of the "Public Transport" page on Wikipedia:

(Made using Tag Crowd with the following words omitted: archived, edit, http, org)

While there are some great words (like "access"), there are certainly some that we don't associate with public transport ("car" or "private"). There is no real answer to what transit stands for in your mind, but arguably we can all agree of what we want it to stand for and what it should strive to be.

It should be fast, efficient, easy, convenient, safe, and reliable. I refrain from using the word "cheap" because it can have a negative connotation; instead, I also think it should be "not costly."

This is a tall order, especially because of our hefty amounts of infrastructure in the private automobile. However, it's what is necessary for public transport to succeed and thrive. If we want it to be a part of our lives, it must be at least most of these things. Almost always, it seems as though transit gives up on being fast - but how many more of these qualities would we give up before we no longer consider riding it at all?

My local transit agency, TriMet, is building a new bus rapid transit (BRT) system. Like most government, they are soliciting input from the public in terms of what is expected of them. The following is a real question asked in the survey:

If a transit agency is giving up on creating a service that is both faster or more reliable than regular buses before the project is even started, how much hope do we have that it will be easy to use? That it will be safe? Can we honestly assume it will be efficient? I immediately asked these questions and the following ones to myself:

Will service be efficient if it is faster, but not on schedule?

Will service be efficient if it is on schedule, but not faster?

I stopped taking the survey at this point because I assumed they weren't serious about delivering quality service. Unfortunately, this is nearly always what BRT in the United States is: lanes where you don't need them, and mixed traffic where you do (more on the topic of watered-down BRT, or "BRT Lite", in a later post). The end product is a BRT system that does little in the way of providing multiple well-developed options for transportation.

That's really what I want: multiple well-developed options. That's what freedom of choice is. A fancy bus sitting in traffic is the same as a regular bus sitting in traffic.