Not to interfere with the arguments here...
Circa 1979-1981, I was white kid in my early teens living in Birmingham. Often with a friend from school, sometimes on my own, I'd take a bus to get to the Birmingham rail station and then take the train to downtown Detroit [[I recall the station was maybe 1/3 mile E of the Renaissance Center). We'd walk to the RenCen and wander around inside exploring. In this era, there was a small video arcade we'd hang-out at for a while, then eat lunch at the Olga's Kitchen, followed by either more wandering or seeing a movie at the theaters there, before reversing the route to come back home by around 5PM.
45 years later, in retrospect, taking public transportation about 20 miles [[about 5 on a bus, 15 on the train) each-way and going into King Coleman's Detroit as a 12/13 year old boy is amazing, but I know many of you can relate.
As a teenager living in Birmingham, I played with radio receivers, and would listen to the Detroit Police Tactical Service Section Bluebird units that would have an under-cover officer riding around on a SEMTA bus in Detroit, with a marked or unmarked DPD TSS cruiser following-along. If the undercover officer witnessed criminal acts on the bus, he/she would radio to the cruiser, they bus would be stopped, and they'd either arrest the offender or at-least boot him or her from the bus. The Bluebird program was disbanded at some point, I think in the 1990s.
Circa late 1990s, I lived in Riverfront Towers in Downtown Detroit and enjoyed having a monthly pass for the Detroit Monorail, which I could access via the Joe Louis Arena station, just a 3 minute walk from my apartment door, to get to Greektown, the RenCen, Cobo Hall...
I also had a friend who was a D-DOT bus driver -- or I should say a recently retired D-DOT driver, since he was shot by a passenger. He had a lot of fascinating stores to tell, mostly sad or scary, of things that occurred on his bus [[he was a driver for around 10 years) as-well as some disgusting policies D-DOT had regarding incidents on the buses [[basically summed-up as -- keep moving, so the buses stay on schedule).
I'm in Las Vegas now, and while Clark County's public transportation system is funded a lot by various taxes imposed on tourists, it's otherwise the same basic reality that pretty much every other urban area mass transportation system faces -- the perception, usually based on reality -- that it's not safe, therefore anyone & everyone who has reached a status in-life where they can afford alternate transportation will have & use it, and it's mostly the dregs of society that take the bus. Here in Las Vegas, I can listen-in on the Regional Transportation Corp public transportation buses, and other than the 'Deuce' bus which covers the Las Vegas Strip, the negative stereotype is reinforced [[confirmed?) on a daily basis -- buses having to dump off all passengers at the next bus stop & return to the yard because of a "bio" [[various bodily fluids), crazy passengers being disruptive/assaulting others, incoherent passengers, passengers wanting the driver to contact EMS because the passenger has an old wound, etc. This is all in-addition to the expected inconveniences of having to take multiple bus routes to get to your final destination and the time.
God bless the decent, hard-working people that are taking public transportation, especially in areas where parking a car isn't a hassle, but the reality for most of the USA is that if you're in your 20s and not able to own & operate some sort of car [[ability to get a drivers license, pay auto registration & insurance plus gas & upkeep), you it's likely mostly due to your own poor decisions and not surprising that if given the option, much of society would prefer to not be confined near you on a bus.
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