I don’t know much about my hometown. I grew up there, but I moved to Austin at 14 and haven’t moved back since. Driving is mandatory in Arlington, and I don’t drive, so I don’t know the city.

So when people ask me about my hometown, I can’t say much beyond what anyone could find out about it from its Wikipedia page. Stadium, Six Flags, Pentatonix (a cappella group), Elizabeth Bruenig (journalist, notable for socialist and anti-abortion views [God help me if I ever have to mention Liz Bruenig during a conference coffee break networking sesh]). Thankfully, this page does contain one perfect, beautiful factoid: Arlington is the largest city in the US without public transit.

I use this one all the time. It’s compelling enough to nudge a conversation onto a more interesting topic, while not being too compelling that it derails a conversation. Also, this fact explains why I don’t know much about Arlington and gives a sense of my feelings towards the city. I’ve used it so much that it’s distorted my perception of Arlington in my head. I guess when you leave the place you grew up, memories fade, and how you view it distills down to a few halcyon scenes (school, dog, home; braying peacocks, buzzing fume hoods) and the few anecdotes that you dust off for small talk every so often.

This factoid of mine was under threat recently: from 2013 to 2017, Dallas/Fort Worth rapid transit operated a single bus route connecting UT Arlington to the airport. Sadly, I never tried it, and I didn’t know about it at the time. This route is no longer operating, though. It was shut down in 2017 in favor of a weird ride-sharing “microtransit” system, basically a publicly funded Uber operated by the startup Via. To be honest, this makes sense: Arlington just has zero infrastructure for any kind of walking: even walking from one block of shops to the next is challenging. The sprawl is load-bearing, so there’s no hope for any real bus routes outside of university areas.

In any case, if you consider this to be public transit, then Arlington still has public transit. But I don’t think people do. I’m going to keep using my fun fact, with the hope that someday, I will be forced to lay it to rest—not because some upstart urbanism-fearing flyover country town has a population boom, but because my fellow Arlingtonians on the city council finally scrounge together the funding for a bus line from UTA to the multi-family housing a mile from UTA.