The blog bloomed out of a bus line: the 6. I take it down Euclid to get to school at Cleveland State not because I don’t have a car, but because I can’t stand driving and parking a car for such a short commute. Oh, and that whole environment thing. (Okay, the environment does actually play a role in my choice, but it’s not as compelling as my hatred of commuting by car. If only all the world felt as I do, Al Gore would be so happy.)
Ride the 6 towards downtown Cleveland — as none of you has ever done — and it’ll get you thinking about, well, Cleveland. It scoops up the local residents and takes you past some of Cleveland’s most prominent features — University Hospitals, CWRU, Severance Hall, the Cleveland Clinic, Cleveland Play House…and…well, it goes silent there for a while until it rolls into CSU.
Perhaps that two-mile, fifty-five-block silence is why the Euclid Corridor project has so many detractors. What’s on Euclid? they rage. Not me, that’s for sure. Can’t we spend this money on schools, on security, on municipal programs? Besides, there’s already a bus line connecting downtown Cleveland and University Circle. How will reconstructing Euclid and buying new buses change the way the 6 is used? No one rides it, and improving Euclid isn’t going to change that.
In truth, the 6 has a slew of regular riders. It’s at least half-full every time I ride it — except that one time it was just me and an old man, and he debarked at E 55th, and then it was just me…that was eerie. It was the middle of the day, too. If that were the 6’s passenger quota, I’d balk at the Euclid Corridor project too, but the fact remains that it is a heavily utilized route whose buses are consistently packed with passengers despite running every ten minutes or so.
So let’s be honest: the 6’s constituents are probably mostly poor. Those are the people who ride the bus — poor people, people who can’t afford cars. If they had cars, they’d be driving them just like the rest of us do, and the rest of us will keep driving them because convenience outweighs the nebulous tug of the environment, the only reason to ditch your car if driving short commutes doesn’t make your skin crawl.
And because the 6’s constituents are poor and therefore silent, none of the rest of us cares to improve their bus-riding experience. Oh, I know this claim is a bit incendiary, but that’s essentially what’s going on here. Those who don’t ride the bus — who have never ridden the bus — don’t realize that so many do ride the bus and therefore miss the point when it comes a project like the Euclid Corridor. They don’t realize the value in rebuilding the street because they don’t know how ridiculous it is to sit on a bus rumbling over a surface like Euclid’s used to be. They don’t see the high volume of passengers the bus carries or understand how essential the bus is in getting people around their part of the city. Those fifty-five silent blocks see the 6 at its fullest. I don’t know where everyone is going, but they all have a reason to ride the bus.
So before the hecklers spout some more about the Euclid Corridor’s uselessness, I’d like to see them ride the bus for a while, get to know it and its reality. Come sit next to me; I’ll scoot over.
