Document text
My View: Reduce driving — just don't take my car Friday Dec 15, 2017 at 12:01 AM   The city of Medford is trying to find ways to get residents to stop driving their cars to work alone. Good luck with that. It’s part of a proposed Transportation System Plan to guide a growing population through 2038, and one of its objectives is to reduce vehicle travel and reliance on solo driving. It’s a noble and necessary goal — reducing vehicle trips would cut down on pollution, save energy, decrease wear and tear on our streets and help clear Medford’s congested arteries — but I don’t think I’m alone in saying you’ll have to pry the steering wheel from my cold, dead hands first. We Medford residents love our cars and trucks. They give us independence and freedom. They get us to work, to church, to Costco even when it moves out of town. A recent survey of 1,000 residents showed 7 out of 10 people drive to work alone either for work-related reasons or by preference. I'm in that category. I’ve been driving my car alone to work every day since I started at the Mail Tribune in 1999. With my schedule — from 8 or 9 a.m. to anywhere from 6 to 8 p.m. — it’s difficult, if not impossible, to find someone in our building with the same schedule with whom I could carpool. Those in better shape than I might suggest I ride my bike those four miles to work, but a) there’s no shower at the Mail Tribune, and we have a policy against bringing unpleasant odors into the office; b) I’d be riding home through a sketchy part of town in the dark half the year, and I’ve already been robbed once; and c) have you tried riding a bicycle in downtown Medford or along Crater Lake Avenue? City leaders might suggest I ride the bus. Fair enough. Rogue Valley Transportation District buses run the hours I’d need with fares that are reasonable. Its website has a nifty tool that lets you calculate how long it’d take to get from Point A to Point B using the bus. I plugged in my address in northeast Medford. To get to the Mail Tribune at 111 Fir St., which now takes 11 to 13 minutes by car, I’d have to walk 17 minutes to get to a bus stop, ride the bus for 15 minutes, then walk another 7 minutes to the office. Total time: 39 minutes. Excellent if you live in L.A. Unacceptable if you live in Medford. (I find even 13 minutes annoying.) I plugged in a random sampling of addresses of my reporters and editors into the RVTD calculator to see if any of them might reasonably take a bus to work. Out of eight examples, only one could ride the bus and get to work in a timely fashion without too much walking on either end. But it was a reporter, who needs her car at the ready to get to midday assignments. Unfortunately for transportation planners, we live in an area that relies heavily on individual vehicle trips. Most of us don’t live within walking distance of our jobs. Stores and services are miles away. And bus routes are insufficient to get us where we need to go without major inconvenience. The city’s newest plan is a start toward addressing our inadequate public transportation system. It suggests expanding bus routes, helping employers encourage workers to take alternate modes of transportation, and giving incentives to developers to implement alternative transportation programs. But they’ve got a huge barrier to overcome: The love affair we residents have with our cars. — Reach Mail Tribune Editor Cathy Noah at 541-776-4464 or by email at [email protected].