My Personal Experience Of The Seven Day Transportation Challenges

In all honesty, I did not think that the 7-day transportation challenge was going to be very difficult for me, as I have been using public transportation for six years up until my recent purchase of a car last August. Between October 28 and November 8, I used the number 8 between Panorama Hills and the University of Calgary, the number 20 between Northmount Drive and the University of Calgary, and the number 20 between the University of Calgary and Foothills Hospital. Due to the consistency of the timing of my use of public transit, I saw the same crowd of people each day, with little variance: students like myself going to and coming back from the University of Calgary. The two communities I passed by did have slight differences though; in

However, I did face a challenge on the very first day of the challenge and it was related to my career opportunities in the future, a topic that I will discuss more within the context of the interplay between transportation and employment for those living in poverty. The issue was that I needed to go to Canada Olympic Park between classes for a career mentorship program workshop for the City of Calgary. With travel time being either 40 minutes or 15 minutes, depending on if I took public transit or a car, I opted to cheat that day and drove to school. I chose to put the workshop as a priority, because it was linked to my ability to use this program to network with professionals in the field that I was interested in after graduation. If transit had been my only option, I would have had to make a choice between leaving quite early from the workshop (around halfway through the workshop) and missing my next class at the University. Due to my other advantages such as being able to work for the city of Calgary and attending the University, I also could have paid for a cab or used my network to ask for a ride if need be, a luxury that is not available to those living in poverty. This

A factor that I dealt with in this challenge, employment, is one that I would like to briefly discuss. Roughly 20 years ago in Alberta, the amount of welfare payments and the income earned from minimum wage work were roughly equal (Anette Tezli, Personal Communication). The government made the decision to cut welfare, and one consequence of that has been an expectation of those in poverty to be involved in some sort of employment, seen through the implementation of welfare-to-work programs (SOURCE). More than half of those in poverty are considered to be working poor, which is defined as “individuals under the age of 65 … whose income is below Statistics Canada’s Low Income cut-offs, and who earned more than half of their income from wages and salaries or from self employment” (Sharma, 2012). Having a job requires transportation to and from the job, and the organization of public transit leads to a few barriers for some of the working