You can’t go far in transit conversations without hearing the terms “choice rider” and “captive rider.” The first refers to someone who has a car available and chooses transit instead, while the second refers to someone who has no choice but to use transit.
Anytime you hear someone using these terms, please point them to this post. For more detail, please see the full argument in my book Human Transit (revised edition of 2024). It’s at the end of Chapter 4. But briefly:
These terms are legacies of 1970s modeling, which required many simplifying assumptions to fit the limited computing power of the time. They reflect the class prejudices of the time, but they have never had any scientific basis. The underlying idea is that “captive” riders will use the service no matter how bad it gets, and that the path to growth is to attract the “choice rider.” This has been disproven over and over.
Transit succeeds or fails by recognizing that most people are in the middle, with some choices and some constraints. That means almost most people can be gained or lost as a rider depending on whether the service is useful to them. Some of the late 2010s ridership loss in the US was among riders who’d be categorized as “captive.” Service was too useless for them so they bought cars. Is this a surprise? If you call people captives, and reflect that view of them in your services, it makes them try to escape!
These terms also do political harm: “Captive rider” is insulting to those who live good lives without cars, while “choice rider” is misleadingly flattering to the most fortunate. The latter term also encourages elite projection, the tendency of very fortunate people to assume that they are the customer for whom transit should be designed, even though there are not enough of them to matter.
When I talk about this, people often suggest other terms for these categories. But the problem is the binarism itself. When you try to define a spectrum by its extremes — especially when talking about something as emotive as social class — you tend to exaggerate differences and encourage polarization, because these terms suggest that everyone is in one of two categories instead of scattered along a spectrum. Using different words can make it less offensive but no less polarizing. So when I have to talk about this, I tend to speak of lower-income riders without cars as somewhat dependent but I would never say captive or refer to transit dependents as a noun. For the other end of the spectrum I often use the word fortunate or to soften and emphasize the spectrum, relatively fortunate.
“Choice” and “captive” sound scientific but they actually serve to insinuate that some people are just more important than others. I will continue to work to strip these terms from the language. Every potential transit rider has some choices, and every one of them matters.
Fair enough, but what words/categories should we use in their place, or is using none at all the point you’re trying to make?
My point is that the categories themselves are misleading.
Amen. We fight this battle constantly. Some of the people I hear use the term choice rider aren’t even using it technically, but are talking about “the kind of people” we want on our service. This historical transit lingo almost gives cover for this type of prejudice. I also hear it come up in concerns about, “those people” on the bus who cause problems, once again assigning the problems caused by individuals to some imagined group that must all act alike. It’s terrible.
It may take more words to talk about the actual real challenges, or about how service improvement will incrementally be useful to more people, but it’s worth it.
I am transit dependent by choice — that is, I’m able to drive and could afford a car, but I don’t have or want one and therefor I rely on transit. As a transit planner (in Los Angeles) I use the terms transit dependent or transit reliant (this is the first time I’ve heard the term captive rider) to describe myself and anyone who can’t physically/legally drive (youth, elderly, people with physical or medical limitations), doesn’t have someone who regularly drives them wherever they need/want to go, or doesn’t have access to a car (by choice or due to financial constraints). For riders who have access to a car, but ride transit, often to commute to work or make trips that are faster by transit, or when they may be imbibing and shouldn’t drive) I do refer to them as choice riders, because the majority of people in most US cities do have choices the minority don’t. In big cities that have a reliable and efficient transit network and where the culture has been for many decades regardless of economic class to take transit (New York, Chicago, Toronto, San Francisco, plus most big cities in Europe) it’s easy to take the position that we should ‘ban’ certain words out of sense of advocacy for others. In Los Angeles it is just simply the case that the vast majority of our riders live below the poverty line — it’s part of the car-centric culture of our region. The goal in LA is not to get ‘better people’ on transit, it’s to build a system and service that everyone will ride including those that have more alternatives, so that we can reduce traffic and congestion, lower green house gases, improve air quality, improve quality of life, and most importantly so that everyone can ride not only with dignity but pride in their public transit system. The reality in most US cities is that our systems are not robust enough to provide coverage, or to be efficient, reliable, and frequent, much less pleasant to ride. Where I think we probably agree, and I preach this at every opportunity, is that our first obligation to improve transit is to those who rely on it most. If we take that seriously, then ‘everyone’ will ride including those who have more options.
It’s just worth knowing that the term ‘choice rider’ is easily misunderstood. In your circles people might understand it to mean someone who chooses to ride transit, but in general parlance many hear it like the phrase ‘choice wine’, meaning these are the better riders. You may not even know you are being misunderstood but it will give that connotation to many people.
The term choice rider has had obvious criticism.
The term captive rider is nonsense. If a writer has actually ridden the bus it becomes obvious that in households that do not own a car some trips are by transit, some are by sharing a used car, some are by trip negotiation with a friend or neighbor for impromptu carpooling and some are by bike or scooter and several are by two feet.