How to Win Over Transit Skeptics

Enter: The Better Work Bus.

Since COVID-19 supercharged the move toward remote work, an increasing number of people have started to count time commuting to the office toward their day’s working hours.

Perhaps you’ve noticed this: your boss or co-worker pushes a meeting or takes it on their cell because they’re going to be driving to the office or co-working space.

There’s about a thousand directions a conversation about this could go:

• Build mixed-use communities where people don’t have to commute far (or by car) to work

• Should commuting time count toward your 8-hour work day?

• Should people be required to go to the office?

But where I want to go is posing the following question: How do we lean into a trend that probably isn’t going anywhere any time soon, and make the most of it as we seek to build better cities?

My proposal: Start designing public bus interiors like small coworking spaces.

In school, I was never a big fan of sitting in a classroom. But as an adult, I can’t tell you how much I love going in to my coworking space a few days week. And it’s basically adult studyhall.

It’s amazing how much more desirable a classroom becomes when it has leather chairs, a coffee bar, and successful individuals nearby to network with. As Farhad Majoo wrote in a 2015 New York Times piece, “A company’s snack bar often stands as a rough proxy for the scope of its ambitions.” And the aesthetic improvements really do make you feel more ambitious - it turns out the built environment matters at work as much as it does on main street.

Could such features spur more interest in transit as well?

Before you say it, let’s get this out of the way: I’m not proposing Dwight Schrute’s Work Bus.

As is usually good advice, I’m proposing using Dwight’s solution as a model of what to avoid as we envision what this can look like.

For fun, here’s some images I was able to create using Bing Image Creator of what such a bus could look like:

America has a perception problem that is particular to busses. Most consider them to be vehicles for the lower class (despite bus routes consistently failing to reach neighborhoods that need them most), dirty, and dangerous.

But what would happen if bus interiors began to look like the places that most would consider to be safe, clean, and classy? What if, rather than half-focusing on typing an email and half-focusing on slowly inching through traffic, commuters could comfortably set their laptop up and connect to reliable WiFi while knocking out 20-60 minutes of actual work while on their way to and from the office?

Some will point to the failures of private companies like Leap to do exactly what I’m describing. But as Majoo’s piece highlights, much of Leap’s failures came specifically from the logistical challenges of being a private transit company: lack of a valid city or state license, high price points that target a specific demographic, perception of being a vessel of gentrification, and creating a tense relationship with local government by relying on public bus stops.

What happens when a local or regional government decides to step up its game and bring higher-quality transit to everyone, rather than build a separate solution for those looking to escape the general public? What happens when profitability is not the driving force of decision-making? Space is created to build a transit system that is both accessible to those who most need it and high enough quality to entice those who otherwise wouldn’t consider it.

As former Bogota mayor Gustavo Petro once said, “A developed country is not a place where the poor have cars. It's where the rich use public transportation.”