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.