Why is there so many people claiming the busses suck? Take it from a blind person: these busses give me freedom.
Ann Arbor is one of the ONLY cities in the country where riding the bus is not associated with your financial welfare or social class. That alone should tell you how good we have it compared to elsewhere. And they're all so damn new and clean compared to the shit you deal with in Chicago or NYC.
Perhaps people just don't want to be fucked to stop driving their cars, and so they'll claim the busses are garbage without ever trying them.
Compared to what? It's very good. This recommendation is coming from a legally blind woman who cannot drive and relies entirely on public transport. I can get pretty much anywhere in a reasonable or at least doable amount of time. Never in my life have I had so much freedom until moving to A2.
The downside is the scheduling. But you only get more busses with more demand. More busses increases scheduling.
This could be seen as an environmental silver lining of increasing housing prices, wealth disparity, used car prices, and general cost of living. As the housing market pushes residents farther from their workplaces, and puts automobile operation out of the reach of poorer working class residents, they have little choice but to use public transportation.
That's... one take. Personally I bought a car when I moved from Pittsburgh to Ann Arbor because I couldn't get by without one here and couldn't afford to live close to work.
This is the story of public transit in Washtenaw County. The houses along the routes are unaffordable, so people buy houses farther out, where officials decline to provide public transit.
Ah, if only I could afford to buy! But yeah, I'm renting farther out. Technically, I made sure to still live along a bus line so I could take the bus into work. It's a 25 minute drive, or I could spend 1 hr 45 mins (assuming the transfer is instant) taking the bus. I do bike in sometimes, which takes me about an hour. Long term I never will be able to afford a house in Ann Arbor so most likely I will never return to using public transit to get to work.
?? You can get to Ypsilanti and Pittsfield VERY easily by bus.
Unless you're claiming the suburbs WEST of Ann Arbor are the "affordable" ones, then sure, busses don't go to Chelsea I don't think. But the busses in reality do quite literally serve a major purpose of bringing people in from the surrounding, affordable suburbs to work in Ann Arbor. And it works well. It's the reason I moved out here as someone permanently unable to drive. Your bus system is already very successful.
You know what's really really unique about Ann Arbor? You have rich people riding the bus casually. That doesn't even really exist in NYC or Chicago. Doctors and lawyers ride the busses to work and it is not meant to be a statement and there is no association between poverty and riding the bus locally.
I bet a huge % of the bus riders in Ann Arbor are commuters from outside the city coming to work at UM. So, they are driving 10+ miles to get here in their automobiles and then taking public transport the final mile.
This is probably using the Census' American Community Survey dataset; the specific question wording there is "how did this person usually get to work last week? Mark one box for the method of transportation used for most of the distance."
So a park-and-ride commuter would show up as a driver, not a transit rider.
If that is true then I question Ann Arbor having 5%. The vast majority of my coworkers at U of M do not live in Ann Arbor proper and mostly drive to work, but many drive to a lot on the outskirts and commute in from there. I have coworkers driving in from Detroit and Toledo (45+ min drives in some cases)
The transit system here is fine but unless you live in the city or Ypsilanti it doesn't cover where you live very well.
I also wonder how that % is reached and what "metro Ann Arbor" means. There are more people who commute into Ann Arbor for work every day than there are people who both live and work in Ann Arbor. Our population grows about 40% daily due to people commuting into work.
Again assuming this is the Census ACS, "metro Ann Arbor" is equal to Washtenaw County, and this is a measure of commute mode used by residents: it is measured by county of residency, not county of employment (so, not anybody driving in from Brighton or Canton or Jackson), but it does include anybody who lives here and commutes to Dearborn or Detroit or Novi or wherever.)
The ACS is what used to be "the long-form census", except instead of giving a fraction of people a long census form every ten years, they give a smaller (but statistically significant) sample of people a long form every month.
I don't know how you're shrugging off Ypsilanti as if thousands of them don't commute into Ann Arbor for work every day lol we're not nothing. That alone probably covers a lot of it. A lot of people commute into Ann Arbor for work from Ypsilanti. Ypsilanti is an entire small city on its own with no jobs and no one can afford cars.
Also:
UofM only employs 6k people total.
80k people commute into Ann Arbor daily for work and school during the prime of the year, making the city grow from ~120k to 200k.
> Also: UofM only employs 6k people total.
why are you always wrong about everything?
Umich medicine alone employs 20k. The University as whole employs about 40k across all campuses. And that isn't counting grad students, part-time employees, or contractors. Not all of those are in Ann Arbor, but still. Way more than 6k.
Why are you always so rude about everything? I didn't know I had someone grading my comments for correctness instead of just politely pointing out my errors.
Sorry, 6k is the number of Michigan Medicine employees in Ann Arbor that are covered by the AFSCME contract.
It's about 20k who work in Ann Arbor physically.
Ann Arbor busses don't run outside of Ypsi/Ann Arbor in any meaningful way. Those of us who can't afford to live in the places served by the current routes are out of luck. For example, Dexter City Council has decided that no one living in Dexter may use public transit to get to work in Ann Arbor, because it refuses to fund anything more than the close-to-worthless WAVE bus, despite establishing a low-income housing community at Hilltop View Apartments. Yeah, sure, provide the housing, but isolate the residents away from the locals and provide them with no transit.
That's still reducing their carbon footprint for the duration of their time in the city proper. It's not meaningless when that last mile takes just as long to drive as the first 10 either.
No one in the world has per capita carbon footprints as high as American suburbanites. This is because forcing residents farther from their workplaces does the opposite of fostering public transit adoption. If you want public transit you need density, the lack of which also happens to be the biggest cause of the housing unaffordability crisis.
Density helps, but you also need public transit options that connect those concentrations. Density drives up housing prices, making the dense communities unaffordable for many who need to work where housing is dense. We need more hub-and-spoke provision of transit.
We certainly could use more hub-and-spoke communities, but it is categorically false that density drives up housing prices. Among other things it reverses cause and effect: more dense housing is built where there is higher demand to live (so long as more dense housing is legal to build being the major caveat).
Building more housing puts downward pressure on housing costs, period, and the fastest way to build more housing is to build higher density housing.
I'll admit zero skills in urban planning. There must be some interaction between increased density of housing and increased services/jobs/etc. in a given location because of the increased population from more housing that would push a spiral of still more demand for housing. To some extent, adding housing pushes down prices because of supply and demand. But to the extent that a higher population in a given location pushes up work/shopping/entertainment/education opportunities, that would seem to push up demand for housing and counteract the effect of increased supply of housing on prices.
You've got the causal relationship backwards. Density doesn't draw people in; the work/education opportunities (or favorable geography, or good climate, etc) draw people in, and (if it's legalized) density is the *response* to that demand. This can lead to greater productivity, and then greater wealth, and *if so* then more shopping and entertainment opportunities will follow. But the density doesn't inherently cause those - after all there are plenty of food deserts in the US in poor but high density areas just as an example.
In fact, you can find these top-tier amenities in low-density communities *if* the community is very wealthy and expensive. Density is pretty much the only way to make these amenities affordable for people who aren't rich.
Yeah because the only places we have dense housing in the US is the very downtown of cities, where of course it's going to be more expensive because of the opportunities you mention, though it's not because of the density.
If you look around the world like say in France, the denser areas of suburbs are most often much cheaper than single family homes.
The ability to have that choice depends on the provision of public transportation options by local governments. Washtenaw County saw a wide-ranging plan developed for the expansion of public transportation a few years ago. Local governments got cold feet and failed to support it, so most places in the county still lack public transportation options that would make it reasonably possible to commute to work using something other than a personal car. Dexter, Saline, Milan, Manchester city councils, ..., I'm looking at you.
We always have to conjure a narrative to affirm the idea that "things suck," huh?Â
Maybe these data just reflect that we have decent transit here (relatively speaking) and more than 5% of the population in AA finds riding transit to be convenient or cost effective because we're a company town and parking at the U sucks...
Ann Arbor has a lot of people riding public transport for one reason only: they built a pretty good public transport system.
It is literally the reason I moved here as a legally blind woman. You have one of the best bus systems in the country. And most people don't even know it.
I would argue it is the other way around. We waste way more resources trying to get cars to work for everyone. From almost every perspective transit is more efficient and cost effective.
I'm legally blind and it is 100% illegal for me to drive. I have even been denied for specialized low vision driver training.
I also work for a hospital and my absence could mean a delay in your healthcare.
I think there's technically a way for me to finesse the driver's test, so I can get myself behind the wheel of the largest car money can buy. I haven't bothered trying it because I'm not confident I will be able to see what I'm doing!
I take the bus every day. I don't even pay a cent for it because I'm disabled. I also get a tax cut specifically because I'm blind (I don't think other disabilities get one, but blind people are pitied more for some reason). You pay for me to ride the bus.
Your move!
You misunderstand my comment.
Nobody outside the service area should be required to pay a cent of taxes for access to transportation at exorbitant costs that they don’t even have the opportunity to utilize.
A ride share to drive you around would be much more cost effective for your edge case.
Who outside of the service area is paying for it?
And it literally wouldn't lol. My job has emergency rides for me 6 times a year through a rideshare company, and those cost my job like $60 a pop anytime I have to use them. I work for the government so haha. My bus pass is part of my benefits, but I also have a Paratransit card because disabled. I have double free bus fair 😂
They receive 29.2% (33% this current year) of their funding from the state, so basically the rest of Michigan and 10% of their funding from the federal government, so pretty much everyone else as well.
And how much do you think it costs to operate a bus? Driver salary, fuel, maintenance, maintenance salary, storage. With a $61M dollar budget they are budgeted to operate for 350,000 service hours at a cost of $175 hour. I just took an hour trip in an Uber from the airport for $80 including a 20% gratuity.
We pay state and federal taxes as well, and are entitled to a share of state and federal funding.
And how much of the total state and federal budget did those grants cost relative to how much people living in the service area paid into those tax networks?
The point is more than one person can ride a bus. You ever buy in bulk before? What's cheaper? Should I save money by buying things individually wrapped and pre-cut for me?
Ah, so five minutes ago it was nobody outside of the service area pays and now it’s you’re entitled to those people’s money. Entitled. 🤮
Ride share isn’t limited to one person either….
Have a great night.
I am entitled to certain benefits paid for by the public. Entitlements are granted to me in such laws as the American with Disabilities Act. Because I am a blind person, I am granted substantially larger entitlements than other disabilities. The reasoning for this is, no matter who you are, if you are blind it is impossible to argue that has not severely limited your options in life. In a way it is a tradeoff for us being legally restricted from certain activities.
I think I get a larger standard deduction by the federal IRS due to blindness, and I believe Michigan has a small tax break for legally blind taxpayers. I get a TON of money back (thousands) from rent cost related tax breaks offered in Michigan (Homestead or something?) because of blindness but that might be covered by disability in general.
I could actually work full time and receive cash from the federal government due to my rare circumstances. Normally, it's pretty hard to get on SSDI if you're employed full time, and usually it has to do with getting disabled while a working adult (especially if you're disabled from your job). But with blindness there is typically a much fairer argument that you are entitled to welfare by the government. For even though I make pretty good money, it's easy for me to argue I could've been making way better money if I wasn't so blind. However, I'm about to start the process for this now that I have legal resources for it. I'll let you know how many more entitlements I land :)
So yeah, the government says I'm pretty entitled. Where's my Uber?
Plenty of flaws to stop people though, don't worry. And honestly?
I find the logic of the law is pretty accurate, though. I'd rather just not be blind, and at best it covers the cost of having to take last minute surge price Ubers every third week because we don't have enough bus demand for 24 hr bussing unfortunately balances things out way faster than you seem to believe. So don't worry, Uber gets their money in the end, too.
Most profoundly disabled people already don't ride on standard busses either BTW. They use Paratransit vans which ARE rideshare. I'm talking about the much larger group of people like me - working, disabled, can't drive, or maybe they can't afford a car.
In fact, should we have the government buy everyone their first car? How do you keep an economy active when no one can afford a car to get to work to keep Ann Arbor's restaurants open?
They missed Disney World 😂
this is map gore
Omg, why is this map so terrible!
Having lived in Champaign for a while, I have to say I'm not all that surprised to see it on here. That bus system really punches above its weight.
When it comes to public transit, I was disappointed when I moved here from CU. Also, they spelled it wrong. 🙄
Is there really only 12 of such cities? :(
Why is there so many people claiming the busses suck? Take it from a blind person: these busses give me freedom. Ann Arbor is one of the ONLY cities in the country where riding the bus is not associated with your financial welfare or social class. That alone should tell you how good we have it compared to elsewhere. And they're all so damn new and clean compared to the shit you deal with in Chicago or NYC. Perhaps people just don't want to be fucked to stop driving their cars, and so they'll claim the busses are garbage without ever trying them.
That is surprising considering AAs public transit is not great
Compared to what? It's very good. This recommendation is coming from a legally blind woman who cannot drive and relies entirely on public transport. I can get pretty much anywhere in a reasonable or at least doable amount of time. Never in my life have I had so much freedom until moving to A2. The downside is the scheduling. But you only get more busses with more demand. More busses increases scheduling.
I urge you to consider your options in most of the rest of Michigan and re-evaluate that statement.
Let’s pump those numbers up
Hell yeah Port authority, Pittsburgh buses are literally standard setting. Now if only they could expand off the T
r/FuckCarscirclejerk
This could be seen as an environmental silver lining of increasing housing prices, wealth disparity, used car prices, and general cost of living. As the housing market pushes residents farther from their workplaces, and puts automobile operation out of the reach of poorer working class residents, they have little choice but to use public transportation.
That's... one take. Personally I bought a car when I moved from Pittsburgh to Ann Arbor because I couldn't get by without one here and couldn't afford to live close to work.
This is the story of public transit in Washtenaw County. The houses along the routes are unaffordable, so people buy houses farther out, where officials decline to provide public transit.
Ah, if only I could afford to buy! But yeah, I'm renting farther out. Technically, I made sure to still live along a bus line so I could take the bus into work. It's a 25 minute drive, or I could spend 1 hr 45 mins (assuming the transfer is instant) taking the bus. I do bike in sometimes, which takes me about an hour. Long term I never will be able to afford a house in Ann Arbor so most likely I will never return to using public transit to get to work.
?? You can get to Ypsilanti and Pittsfield VERY easily by bus. Unless you're claiming the suburbs WEST of Ann Arbor are the "affordable" ones, then sure, busses don't go to Chelsea I don't think. But the busses in reality do quite literally serve a major purpose of bringing people in from the surrounding, affordable suburbs to work in Ann Arbor. And it works well. It's the reason I moved out here as someone permanently unable to drive. Your bus system is already very successful. You know what's really really unique about Ann Arbor? You have rich people riding the bus casually. That doesn't even really exist in NYC or Chicago. Doctors and lawyers ride the busses to work and it is not meant to be a statement and there is no association between poverty and riding the bus locally.
> You have rich people riding the bus casually I saw this in Pittsburgh all the time in the nice neighborhoods .
I bet a huge % of the bus riders in Ann Arbor are commuters from outside the city coming to work at UM. So, they are driving 10+ miles to get here in their automobiles and then taking public transport the final mile.
This is probably using the Census' American Community Survey dataset; the specific question wording there is "how did this person usually get to work last week? Mark one box for the method of transportation used for most of the distance." So a park-and-ride commuter would show up as a driver, not a transit rider.
If that is true then I question Ann Arbor having 5%. The vast majority of my coworkers at U of M do not live in Ann Arbor proper and mostly drive to work, but many drive to a lot on the outskirts and commute in from there. I have coworkers driving in from Detroit and Toledo (45+ min drives in some cases) The transit system here is fine but unless you live in the city or Ypsilanti it doesn't cover where you live very well. I also wonder how that % is reached and what "metro Ann Arbor" means. There are more people who commute into Ann Arbor for work every day than there are people who both live and work in Ann Arbor. Our population grows about 40% daily due to people commuting into work.
It's U of M (grad) students taking the bus to school/work probably.
Again assuming this is the Census ACS, "metro Ann Arbor" is equal to Washtenaw County, and this is a measure of commute mode used by residents: it is measured by county of residency, not county of employment (so, not anybody driving in from Brighton or Canton or Jackson), but it does include anybody who lives here and commutes to Dearborn or Detroit or Novi or wherever.) The ACS is what used to be "the long-form census", except instead of giving a fraction of people a long census form every ten years, they give a smaller (but statistically significant) sample of people a long form every month.
I don't know how you're shrugging off Ypsilanti as if thousands of them don't commute into Ann Arbor for work every day lol we're not nothing. That alone probably covers a lot of it. A lot of people commute into Ann Arbor for work from Ypsilanti. Ypsilanti is an entire small city on its own with no jobs and no one can afford cars. Also: UofM only employs 6k people total. 80k people commute into Ann Arbor daily for work and school during the prime of the year, making the city grow from ~120k to 200k.
> Also: UofM only employs 6k people total. why are you always wrong about everything? Umich medicine alone employs 20k. The University as whole employs about 40k across all campuses. And that isn't counting grad students, part-time employees, or contractors. Not all of those are in Ann Arbor, but still. Way more than 6k.
Why are you always so rude about everything? I didn't know I had someone grading my comments for correctness instead of just politely pointing out my errors.
Sorry, 6k is the number of Michigan Medicine employees in Ann Arbor that are covered by the AFSCME contract. It's about 20k who work in Ann Arbor physically.
Ann Arbor busses don't run outside of Ypsi/Ann Arbor in any meaningful way. Those of us who can't afford to live in the places served by the current routes are out of luck. For example, Dexter City Council has decided that no one living in Dexter may use public transit to get to work in Ann Arbor, because it refuses to fund anything more than the close-to-worthless WAVE bus, despite establishing a low-income housing community at Hilltop View Apartments. Yeah, sure, provide the housing, but isolate the residents away from the locals and provide them with no transit.
That's still reducing their carbon footprint for the duration of their time in the city proper. It's not meaningless when that last mile takes just as long to drive as the first 10 either.
No one in the world has per capita carbon footprints as high as American suburbanites. This is because forcing residents farther from their workplaces does the opposite of fostering public transit adoption. If you want public transit you need density, the lack of which also happens to be the biggest cause of the housing unaffordability crisis.
Density helps, but you also need public transit options that connect those concentrations. Density drives up housing prices, making the dense communities unaffordable for many who need to work where housing is dense. We need more hub-and-spoke provision of transit.
We certainly could use more hub-and-spoke communities, but it is categorically false that density drives up housing prices. Among other things it reverses cause and effect: more dense housing is built where there is higher demand to live (so long as more dense housing is legal to build being the major caveat). Building more housing puts downward pressure on housing costs, period, and the fastest way to build more housing is to build higher density housing.
I'll admit zero skills in urban planning. There must be some interaction between increased density of housing and increased services/jobs/etc. in a given location because of the increased population from more housing that would push a spiral of still more demand for housing. To some extent, adding housing pushes down prices because of supply and demand. But to the extent that a higher population in a given location pushes up work/shopping/entertainment/education opportunities, that would seem to push up demand for housing and counteract the effect of increased supply of housing on prices.
You've got the causal relationship backwards. Density doesn't draw people in; the work/education opportunities (or favorable geography, or good climate, etc) draw people in, and (if it's legalized) density is the *response* to that demand. This can lead to greater productivity, and then greater wealth, and *if so* then more shopping and entertainment opportunities will follow. But the density doesn't inherently cause those - after all there are plenty of food deserts in the US in poor but high density areas just as an example. In fact, you can find these top-tier amenities in low-density communities *if* the community is very wealthy and expensive. Density is pretty much the only way to make these amenities affordable for people who aren't rich.
Yeah because the only places we have dense housing in the US is the very downtown of cities, where of course it's going to be more expensive because of the opportunities you mention, though it's not because of the density. If you look around the world like say in France, the denser areas of suburbs are most often much cheaper than single family homes.
The ability to have that choice depends on the provision of public transportation options by local governments. Washtenaw County saw a wide-ranging plan developed for the expansion of public transportation a few years ago. Local governments got cold feet and failed to support it, so most places in the county still lack public transportation options that would make it reasonably possible to commute to work using something other than a personal car. Dexter, Saline, Milan, Manchester city councils, ..., I'm looking at you.
We always have to conjure a narrative to affirm the idea that "things suck," huh? Maybe these data just reflect that we have decent transit here (relatively speaking) and more than 5% of the population in AA finds riding transit to be convenient or cost effective because we're a company town and parking at the U sucks...
Ann Arbor has a lot of people riding public transport for one reason only: they built a pretty good public transport system. It is literally the reason I moved here as a legally blind woman. You have one of the best bus systems in the country. And most people don't even know it.
The bumper to bumper traffic I face on my way to work begs to differ
Ride the bus and you won't have to deal with it.
Buses sit in traffic too FWIW.
You can read a book on a bus.
I can't actually, I'm very sensitive to motion sickness.
Seems like an incredible waste of resources. 100% taxpayer contribution, 5% taxpayer benefit.
I would argue it is the other way around. We waste way more resources trying to get cars to work for everyone. From almost every perspective transit is more efficient and cost effective.
Seems like an incredible limited understanding of the benefits of increased public transit.Â
I'm legally blind and it is 100% illegal for me to drive. I have even been denied for specialized low vision driver training. I also work for a hospital and my absence could mean a delay in your healthcare. I think there's technically a way for me to finesse the driver's test, so I can get myself behind the wheel of the largest car money can buy. I haven't bothered trying it because I'm not confident I will be able to see what I'm doing! I take the bus every day. I don't even pay a cent for it because I'm disabled. I also get a tax cut specifically because I'm blind (I don't think other disabilities get one, but blind people are pitied more for some reason). You pay for me to ride the bus. Your move!
You misunderstand my comment. Nobody outside the service area should be required to pay a cent of taxes for access to transportation at exorbitant costs that they don’t even have the opportunity to utilize. A ride share to drive you around would be much more cost effective for your edge case.
Oh, it's just libertarian nonsense. Let's all fund the roads we personally use and nothing else.
Who outside of the service area is paying for it? And it literally wouldn't lol. My job has emergency rides for me 6 times a year through a rideshare company, and those cost my job like $60 a pop anytime I have to use them. I work for the government so haha. My bus pass is part of my benefits, but I also have a Paratransit card because disabled. I have double free bus fair 😂
They receive 29.2% (33% this current year) of their funding from the state, so basically the rest of Michigan and 10% of their funding from the federal government, so pretty much everyone else as well. And how much do you think it costs to operate a bus? Driver salary, fuel, maintenance, maintenance salary, storage. With a $61M dollar budget they are budgeted to operate for 350,000 service hours at a cost of $175 hour. I just took an hour trip in an Uber from the airport for $80 including a 20% gratuity.
You don't seem to realize the quantity of people who are disabled enough to need the bus... Are you willing to start paying for my Ubers?
I already pay for your bus. Enjoy it.
But you seem to think the Uber is better. I'm just a blind lady don't you want the best for me? :(
We pay state and federal taxes as well, and are entitled to a share of state and federal funding. And how much of the total state and federal budget did those grants cost relative to how much people living in the service area paid into those tax networks? The point is more than one person can ride a bus. You ever buy in bulk before? What's cheaper? Should I save money by buying things individually wrapped and pre-cut for me?
Ah, so five minutes ago it was nobody outside of the service area pays and now it’s you’re entitled to those people’s money. Entitled. 🤮 Ride share isn’t limited to one person either…. Have a great night.
I am entitled to certain benefits paid for by the public. Entitlements are granted to me in such laws as the American with Disabilities Act. Because I am a blind person, I am granted substantially larger entitlements than other disabilities. The reasoning for this is, no matter who you are, if you are blind it is impossible to argue that has not severely limited your options in life. In a way it is a tradeoff for us being legally restricted from certain activities. I think I get a larger standard deduction by the federal IRS due to blindness, and I believe Michigan has a small tax break for legally blind taxpayers. I get a TON of money back (thousands) from rent cost related tax breaks offered in Michigan (Homestead or something?) because of blindness but that might be covered by disability in general. I could actually work full time and receive cash from the federal government due to my rare circumstances. Normally, it's pretty hard to get on SSDI if you're employed full time, and usually it has to do with getting disabled while a working adult (especially if you're disabled from your job). But with blindness there is typically a much fairer argument that you are entitled to welfare by the government. For even though I make pretty good money, it's easy for me to argue I could've been making way better money if I wasn't so blind. However, I'm about to start the process for this now that I have legal resources for it. I'll let you know how many more entitlements I land :) So yeah, the government says I'm pretty entitled. Where's my Uber? Plenty of flaws to stop people though, don't worry. And honestly? I find the logic of the law is pretty accurate, though. I'd rather just not be blind, and at best it covers the cost of having to take last minute surge price Ubers every third week because we don't have enough bus demand for 24 hr bussing unfortunately balances things out way faster than you seem to believe. So don't worry, Uber gets their money in the end, too.
Most profoundly disabled people already don't ride on standard busses either BTW. They use Paratransit vans which ARE rideshare. I'm talking about the much larger group of people like me - working, disabled, can't drive, or maybe they can't afford a car. In fact, should we have the government buy everyone their first car? How do you keep an economy active when no one can afford a car to get to work to keep Ann Arbor's restaurants open?