It seemed like a perfect plan: my teenage daughter, nearly ready to leave for college, would get a summer job.
Hopefully she could find something nearby, but anything accessible by public transportation would work. She pounded the pavement, hit the local malls, filled out dozens of online applications and finally found a job in east Chula Vista. It wasn’t within walking distance but was only a 20-minute car drive away. However, as part of pushing my daughter toward college life and independence, I expected her to take public transportation most of the time.
Early in my life I was a huge proponent of public transportation. I put myself through college working for the local transit company, writing marketing copy to convince people to get out of their cars and ride the bus. I advocated for rain shelters at bus stops, helped design transit centers, and wrote impassioned letters to the editor scorning the selfish masses who were addicted to their cars. I rode the bus everywhere, and from my hard plastic seat I looked down at drivers knowing that while they were yanking out clumps of hair in traffic-induced rage, I could read or daydream as I stared out the window.
And then I bought my first car and never set foot on a bus again. The love affair was over. I discovered the joys of using the freeway, getting places quickly, not standing at bus stops in the rain, bringing groceries home with ease and singing along with the radio.
After moving to San Diego I experimented with the trolley. It’s a good way to get to a ball game, especially to avoid paying $20 for parking. Public transit is a great way to move fifth graders across town on field trips. I know the routes that take me anywhere students might want to go: Hometown Buffet, the movie theater, Petco Park, the San Diego Zoo. The trolley even makes for fun excursions; when my kids were younger I’d fill a summer day with a “trolley field trip,” riding to whatever spot sparked our interest, getting off and meandering, then taking the trolley back home again.
Here’s where public transportation breaks down: practical daily use. Imagine my surprise when I found out that neither the trolley nor the bus is useful for getting from San Ysidro to Eastlake. Walkable neighborhoods, prized locally, don’t have great access to public transit, and the areas with most access to transit aren’t always walkable.
For my daughter, the best-case scenario on the bus involved a walk through a sketchy neighborhood — mine — to the bus stop, a transfer in downtown Chula Vista, and another short walk through the commercial business parks of Eastlake. While I do want to my child to struggle a little in the interest of character-building, a two-hour bus ride for a two-hour shift was ridiculous, especially if it ate up half her daily wages.
Enter Plan B: the trolley. She could walk the few blocks from our house to the trolley station, alternately pretending she didn’t see the stares of creepy guys in cars as they slowed down to look at her and putting on a hard face that dared anyone to even try to look twice. More than once she was so uncomfortable that she ran nearly the whole way down the hill, despite her work wardrobe of skirts and sandals, arriving at the trolley station sweaty and disheveled. At the other end of the trolley trip she’d walk quickly past Eye Candy, the bay-front strip club, hoping the men in the parking lot would be too distracted to notice her. My husband, leaving work, would meet her and she would drive the rest of the way to work.
Although it was a time-consuming, inelegant solution, it helped her practice a handful of adult skills: holding a job, moving through the community independently, using public transportation and honing her driving ability.
It helped her acquire a few other skills as well. For example, she has perfected the cold-eyed “What are you looking at?” stare, turned with venom on drivers who slow down to whistle or catcall. She has learned to pretend to take pictures of license plates if cars pull up alongside her. She can walk with confidence and awareness of her surroundings, or fly down the hill at record speed toward the relative safety of the trolley station. She knows to pick a trolley seat next to an elderly lady, and to ignore the mentally unstable riders who talk to themselves or pee in inappropriate places. She has learned that although taking public transit can be unwieldy and even scary, she can use it to get around.
Unfortunately, she has also learned that around here, she probably doesn’t want to.
