Here’s another post from Deputy Editor Michael Betzold about riding the bus. He says that while this is a more critical piece, he fully supports riding the bus.

When you’re doing your bit for the environment but you’re thwarted by the very vehicle you’re using to do your bit, it can be frustrating.

I’m a big fan of the AATA. It’s a system that’s efficient, usually on time, well conceived, but badly underused. Most of the year, I use its wonderful bike racks to cut out the difficult uphill portion of my ride home. Unless I’m feeling energetic at the end of the work day, it’s just way too tempting to pop my bike on the bus and save myself two of the toughest of my five miles home. Partly the reason that it’s so tempting is that it’s not only convenient, but free. My employer, like most smart businesses downtown, provides me a Go! Pass, so I never have to pay for The Ride. And if it’s too snowy or wet a day for my bike commute (as it was a lot of times last winter), I still most often use the bus for my commute.

But here’s the rub: In the winter, aboard many AATA buses the heat is turned up so high it’s sweltering. You’re already bundled up against the cold, and that makes it doubly worse. I used to ride buses in Detroit, and I’m familiar with the Michigan culture’s reaction to winter: Crank the heat up high enough to make you sweat. It’s illogical though, and a waste.

It’s even worse in the summer. I mean, people do need to stay warm, but nobody needs to cool to icicle status. On almost every AATA bus I take during the summer the air-conditioning is at Arctic levels. Now Ann Arbor does have a handful, and sometimes two handfuls, of excessively hot days a year when using AC is reasonable, but it’s crazy for AC to be blasting on high every day for four or five months. The buses have windows. People can open them and catch a breeze.

It’s annoying to hop on the bus and feel like you’re at the mercy of an energy-hogging, out-of-control temperature-control system. With all the energy used for unnecessary AC and overheating on board the AATA buses, I’m sometimes uncertain if the environmental impact nets out as a positive. And I wonder: How can a city that is so forward-thinking on some of its energy and environmental buses condone this useless waste of energy? And how does AATA expect to attract more riders when its buses are sweltering in the winter and ice-cold in the summer?

It doesn’t make sense. Though it still makes a lot more sense than driving a car to work.