An Alternate Holiday Travel Experience
What would the holidays look like with more transportation options? and, the hidden costs of being forced to drive.
This morning, my wife and I dressed our kids for the day and grabbed the Secret Santa presents we were bringing to the family Christmas gathering. We loaded up in the bikes and rode downtown to the train station.
After locking the bikes in the covered bike racks, we entered the station. We purchased four tickets (kids under 2 ride free) to Tishomingo at $5 per ticket from an app on my phone and boarded the train. Since the train provides service to most of the nearby towns every 30 minutes, it wasn’t long before we were on our way.
On the train we sat facing each other at a table and benches, similar to an RV dinette. I brought along our favorite card game and we spent the 45 minute trip relaxing, playing the game, and talking. Halfway there my son, still potty training, needed to go to the bathroom, so I took him to the one at the end of the carriage and helped him do his business. Once we got back to the table, my wife got up and went to the snack car for water and pretzels.
Just before the train pulled into the station in Tishomingo, an attendant walked through the carriage and scanned each passenger’s boarding pass. Most used the boarding pass on their phones, but a few had used the self-service kiosk at the station and had a paper pass for the attendant to scan. Once the train came to a stop, we exited the carriage and headed for the last-mile area.
The most popular option for getting from the train station to where you want to go in Tish, for most passengers, are the bikeshare bicycles. These are free to use on days you’ve ridden the train and unlock by scanning your boarding pass. However, my grandparents live just outside of town and we have three kids in tow, so we opted instead for van service.
The minivan driver unloaded us at my grandparents’ house and then headed back to be available for other arrivals. We paid the fare and scheduled a pickup for a few hours later through the same app we used to take the train, and then enjoyed Christmas with my family.
Returning to Ada was just a bit different. We were picked up by the van service, which had plenty of room in the back for the goodies the kids had received from aunts, uncles, and grandparents. After the five minute ride back to the Tish train station, we rented a plastic storage tote for the gifts and brought it to the freight car where it was loaded into a stack of totes containing all kinds of different items being transported home by other passengers. I paid the $5 tote fare and received a claim code in the app to be scanned upon our arrival.
We bought return tickets with two taps in the app and boarded the train. This time I napped and my wife and kids played games as we chugged through the countryside. Before I knew it, we were pulling into the Ada train station and our boarding passes were scanned by another attendant.
We picked up our cargo from the claim area and loaded it into the nooks and crannies of our cargo bike. Then we biked a mile back to our house and began to recover from a day of socializing and excessive food.
This story is, of course, a fantasy. There is no such passenger train anywhere in Oklahoma. If you want to visit family in another town, you have no choice but to drive there. This is the world as we know it and has been for 70 years.
It’s a beautiful thought, though, and a good exercise in thinking about how things could be better. Driving a personal automobile is often thought of as a great freedom, but think about it a little harder.
What happens if you don’t pay enough attention at some point on that 45 minute drive - maybe you look back at your screaming child, or doze off because you didn’t sleep enough the night before? What about things out of your control, like an animal crossing in front of you or another driver making a mistake? These events don’t converge often but when they do the result can be tragic. Everyone knows someone who has died in a car crash. Is it freedom to have the threat of death hanging over every trip?
Most of the time you’ll make it to your destination physically unscathed. But if you’re like me, it’s going to take a bit afterward to recover from the stress of paying constant attention to the road.
Think for a moment about finances. All told, taking the train in my fantastic vision cost $55 round-trip, plus the snacks we bought. This is a very up-front, in-your-face cost, and probably sounds expensive compared to just driving. But let’s think about it more deeply.
Our personal vehicle gets around 20mpg. It’s about 80 miles round-trip to Tishomingo. This means it takes about 4 gallons of gas for this trip. Gas is around $2.50/gallon, so the trip cost $10, right? Not exactly. The IRS standard mileage rate for this year is $0.65/mile, which takes into account fuel, depreciation, and maintenance costs. Using this more wholistic measure, the trip actually costs me $52 - it’s just sneakier.
I’d argue there is another financial aspect that is often overlooked. Because there is no alternative to driving available for inter-city travel, there is an up-front barrier in the form of needing to own a car and have earned a driver’s license. For the privilege of being able to visit family, I need to pay at least a couple thousand dollars (and more likely, tens of thousands plus interest on a loan) for a car, insure the car for a monthly fee, and be legally allowed to drive it. Is that freedom?
Despite the way it sounds, I am not anti-car. I own a car and enjoy the ability to use it when I feel like it. What I don’t like is car dependence, the mandatory use of a personal vehicle to make a particular trip. A great way to provide more freedom to travelers is by giving them choice in mode of transportation. Frequent passenger rail would be an excellent choice to offer for trips between towns, and I hope to see that become available in the near future.
Cover photo by Levi Meir Clancy on Unsplash