Photo Call: Families on Transit Where You Live

Kids
just want to have fun — and they have a surprising amount of it looking
out of the window of a subway car. (Photo: Sarah Goodyear)

It’s time for another Streetsblog Network user-generated slide show, this one about families riding transit.

A couple of weeks ago, we wrote a post about family-friendly transit
that generated quite a bit of response. There was a lot of talk about
whether or not riding transit with children was “feasible” for most
people. There was discussion of better access for strollers. There were
suggestions about route topology and fare structures — all very worthy
angles on the question.

But the value of family-friendly transit can be viewed in
qualitative terms as well as quantitative ones. It can help to build
the ties between parents and children and their communities — and
that’s what we want to see pictures of. Commenter R. Sullivan summed it up:

[T]ransit is FUN for little kids. When my kids were growing up in
Portland, OR, riding the bus or the light rail was like getting on a
ride at an amusement park, no matter how frequently we rode. Plus, we
talked; we spent time together!… [A]nother great thing about transit is
that it offers teenagers freedom. Teenagers are like buses: adults
malign them, maybe not thinking about how important they are.… Parents
operating strollers can find themselves not even imagining their kids
will be teenagers, who will want to travel on their own someday, even
though their kids will be becoming teenage transit riders with
unbelievable high speed train-like velocity. But transit is a positive
thing for teenagers, and, generally speaking, what is good for
teenagers — accessibility, price control, safety — is good for adults.

Fun and freedom are definitely two of the things that come to mind
when we think about kids and transit. Have any shots that illustrate
this? Send them along to us. You can e-mail me JPEGs at sarah [at]
streetsblog [dot] org, or tag your photos in Flickr with “streetsblog”
and “familytransit”. I’ll put together a slide show for your enjoyment,
and to show that taking kids on transit is not only quite feasible in
many places — it’s also enjoyable.