Reply #16: You seem to be saying that the only reason to take public transit is that you don't have a car.

[Gormy Cuss]

That's a pretty common reaction from people who've never used it too. It's a mindset that allows the government to marginalize public transit in the transportation budget.

Public transit doesn't need to be seen as an all or nothing deal. In metro areas where the public transit is good, many people use it for work commuting and have a car for those other trips you mentioned. In big cities with excellent system most of us did without owning a car at all and it was easy because service placement (supermarkets, day care, dentists, etc) were heavily concentrated near transit routes. If you wanted to go to the boonies for hiking, you could rent a car for the day.

Reno's big enough that the public transit system should make it feasible to use a car for most M-F daytime commuting, but it doesn't surprise me that the system isn't that good. As long as we underfund mass transit as the ugly stepchild of transportation planning it will remain that way.