Equitable travel is essential for accessing library services

I'm listening to That Librarian as an audio-book that is narrated by author Amanda Jones. It’s a compelling story about Jones’s efforts to combat attempts at book censorship, and to challenge hateful people who subjected her to cyber-bullying.

This is off-topic to the main focus of That Librarian but I was deeply concerned about something that Jones said about teens being able to access the Livingston Parish Library in Louisiana: “Kids younger than sixteen cannot drive alone. They wouldn’t be in the library unaccompanied anyway unless they were dropped off.”

I live in a metropolitan area where I take for granted that I can just walk or take the bus to my public library. And being unfamiliar with the Livingston Parish area, I wondered about options other than travel by car for being able to access Livingston Parish libraries.

I input addresses for some of the LPL branches into Google Maps and there were no bus-stop icons anywhere. I next went to Google and looked up bus routes serving Livingston Parish Library branches. Google’s AI Mode informed me that there are no fixed-route buses serving the Livingston Parish area and a demand-response service that riders have to book ahead of time has a safety policy in which young people ages 15 and younger can’t ride unaccompanied. The library branches are also located along fast-moving multi-lane highways or country roads that don’t have infrastructure for safely walking or riding a bicycle.

So while LPL has a digital library (Hoopla, Libby, CloudLibrary, etc.) — while its Outreach Department has a bookmobile that makes regular stops in the community and appears at community events — that doesn’t eliminate every reason that people might need access to physical branches of the library.

At whatever age, library patrons are dependent upon traveling by automobile to be able to access Livingston Parish libraries. Plus young people face the added limitation of needing someone who is legally an adult to drop them off or travel with them.

I really want to envision a future where fewer people drive. But to achieve this goal, we need to ensure equitable access to reliable public transit. We need sidewalks and protected bike lanes going everywhere that people want to go — including branches of their local public library. Not just in big cities but in rural areas too.

I think that equitable travel options are absolutely an issue for accessibility of services in libraries. Right up there with ensuring access to the diverse perspectives that are frequently targets of censorship. This issue needs to be on every library system’s radar for how to better serve its community.