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patients and employees linking nine major medical centers with downtown Nashville and a hospital connecting service. In the first 2 months of actual operation, the medical center express service line showed a 61-percent increase in passengers. while the hospital connecting service line showed a 73-percent increase in ridership.

In poverty areas, children typically have never traveled more than a few blocks from their homes. This confinement not only peualizes the poor, but it perpetuates and assures their isolation. The poor are not the only nondrivers. The handicapped, the elderly, and the young also suffer from a transportation system that makes the individually owned automobile almost a neces- sity unless they are able to pay for someone to drive them. Today, 19 million Americans are over age 65; of these, over 6 million live in poverty. As shown in table 1.4, by 1980, over 100 million persons will be under 18 or over 65 years old. The problem of the unserved is not limited to central cities. In suburban areas there is frequently no public transit. For all but two- and three-car families, intrasuburban transportation to shopping and to recreation is almost impossible. Even where there are two cars, sonicone must always assume the burden of driving for the rest of the family.

Table 1.4 Total Population, Population Under 18, and Over 65 Years of Age, 1940-80.

                        total             under 18

1940.. 132, 165 40, 359 9.036 1960. 180, 684 64.561 16.659 1966.. 196. 842 70, 675 18. 157 1980. 235. 212 79. 241 23.063 Increase, 1966 80 38.370 8. 566 4.606

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SOURCE: U.S. Bureau of the Census. Population: Projection Series C., Statis tical Abstract of the U.S., 1967.

Nearly one-third of the urban population suffer serious disadvantages from being served inadequately or not at all by the vast auto-based systems on which the Nation has come to depend. These are the “captives” left to use the transit systems, or do without. If transit service continues to be reduced, many of these nondrivers will be destined to be isolated more and more in their narrow neighborhood worlds while all around them the advantages of automobile mobility benefit the relatively affluent majority more cach year.

To serve the nondriver, it is not enough to provide more of the existing transportation facilities. Although new bus routes and more buses in poverty areas significantly increase the mo- bility of the residents, most trips are still unnecessarily long, tiresome, and expensive. Buses limited to fixed routes, and stalled by traffic congestion, and rapid transit systems crowded17