This is an opinion column

Huntsville had buses when I was a child living downtown. My mother and I rode them from our rented house on Stevens Avenue to shop at stores like Dunnavant’s.

That’s a minute ago, as they say, but it was how a lot of growing Huntsville got around in the late 1950s and early 1960s. That’s when almost everyone was a newcomer with fathers and later mothers working on Redstone Arsenal.

Everyone rode the bus because many families still had one car. But like everyone, we eventually moved to a new, brick (!) house in a new subdivision out in an old cotton field.

Repeat that move over and over and that was basically it for buses. They hung around for some who really needed them, but it was all about cars and roads then and ever since.