Marcie Ratliff
Winonan

“Give me your tired, your poor and huddled masses, yearning to breathe free.”

So says the inscription on the Statue of Liberty. Yet the “breathe free” part is coming under attack, or so said Al Gore in “An Inconvenient Truth,” and so have said so many scientists that anybody who denies that air pollution is a problem is kidding themselves.

We here in Minnesota tend to think that crowding is not a problem, that urbanization will not affect us so much as it has Los Angeles or London or Bogota or Beijing or any of the other great cities of the world. Of course, it’s too cold to do anything here, so we have the privilege of lots of cold, clean (for now) air to breathe.

In spite of our American penchant for personal automobiles and all the freedom they entail, two alternate modes of transportation are on the rise: bicycling and riding the bus. I feel I have extra right to write about these two, because, for most of my life, they were my family’s and my own primary modes of transportation.

It is a fact universally acknowledged, by people who live according to stereotypes, that riding the bus is for poor people, and that buses are creepy, and illicit things happen on them, and they never go where you need them to go.

My family is generally a single-income family, and we have a single vehicle. For the five of us. So, how does this work? For us, the bus system is the best thing ever invented.

Saint Cloud has a lovely transit system, which is free (yes, free) to any Saint Cloud State University student. Buses run almost every day of the year, so my dad takes the bus to work every day. That leaves the car at home for errands, saves gas and wear and tear, and reduces his chances of death in a car accident (true).

The rest of us, then, can use the car. But we try not to.

I worked at the public library in Saint Cloud all summer, and I rode my bike to work every day except two, when two unfortunate events coincided: it was pouring, and I missed the bus. I used a car then.

I am not advocating for a carless society. However, I think we can change our habits so that they don’t revolve around cars necessarily. City living is especially conducive to carless people. The central region of the Twin Cities, for example, is relatively feasible to navigate with the light rail, the Northstar line, and the bus system.

I traveled to London over spring break this year with a group of other Winona State University students. Like a lot of Londoners, we used the subway, a.k.a. the tube, to get around. And we unanimously decided that Minneapolis needs a tube.

Nothing like sitting in a train, whooshing through a tunnel, watching the stations of London slide away behind the windows, sitting next to other people’s lives. It works. You get where you need to go without risking death driving London’s narrow streets.

Riding public transit also gives you time to think. Most of the time I do not even use my iPod to do the characteristic generation-Y leave-me-alone-I-am-in-my-own-world thing. I get lots of poems written on buses; I never lack faces and sounds to keep my mind occupied.

I still don’t have a car, and I just got my license (yes, my license) this past summer.

I won’t lie—I do love to drive. I get a raccoon’s excitement whenever I hear keys jingling and see their metal shine in my hand. I like their weight, I like the chug of the engine starting, and I like to accelerate up to 70 on the freeway or slow for curves on country roads.

I like the sound of the road under a car and how everything rushes by on either side of me, a blur of beauty whose details I will never see.

Oh, but I can see the details. I like to run or bike where I drive and try to notice the small things along the way. Birds and squirrels don’t dart away so quickly, and I can hear the wind in my ears and smell the moisture in the grass at the side of the road.

Sometimes I run past newly-mown fields and get grass in my socks. I see fuzzy caterpillars undulating their way across the asphalt.

Stuff I would miss even at 30 miles per hour.

Not having a car of my own is extremely inconvenient at times. But I get over it. I have the ability to walk, and I will use it.

Contact Marcie at [email protected]