From Rosa Parks’ principled stand on bus segregation to the current debates over urban transit access, transportation often plays a big role in discussions of equality and equity.
However, what is less often discussed is the strangely personal, community-building effects of using public transit. When you take a bus in Chapel Hill, a subway train in New York or a metro in Madrid, you’re thrust into a diverse group of people.
For once in your routine, all categories of people are headed the same physical direction as you, subjected to the same delays as you, breathing the same cramped air as you.
Class divides, social barriers and gender have an inexplicable way of fading into the background when passengers come together on public transportation. When you squish onto a crowded subway car full of bankers in fresh-pressed suits and laborers preparing for a day of work, sometimes it seems that these small nods, the smiles at their babies or just sharing a row of seats can affect our mindset.
We don’t have a lot of concrete research to parse for you. But we do want you to think about this enduring phenomenon in this age of social media echo chambers. If we all interacted with people — as on the bus — from a random sampling of our community, would we have a more expansive vision of who is in our community? Would we have a little more compassion for people unlike ourselves?
We’re not sure, but it seems to us like riding the bus every day with our neighbors, in the truest sense, could be one more step toward allowing our nation’s “imagined community” to become a concrete reality in our minds. Maybe something as simple as a bus ride in Chapel Hill might even give us a little more empathy for people we don’t understand — something this country sorely needs today, most of all.
