NORMALLY, WHEN PEOPLE talk about an MBTA bus, it’s to complain. It’s hot in the summer, cold in the winter, crowded, late, and infrequent. We’ve all been there.

But those complaints miss something wonderful: the temporary community we form just by being together.

I frequently hand over my $1.70 to ride the 71 bus between Watertown Square and Harvard Square. It’s not long. On light-traffic days, it can be less than 20 minutes, On days when cars clog the roadways, it can take half an hour. It’s not perfect, but it’s the connection I need.

Early one evening, I got on and was drawn to a nearby family: a mom with two girls and a baby, the girls wearing their hair in long, black ponytails that matched their mom. Along Mount Auburn Street, another young woman stepped on board with the same long black ponytail. “Auntie!” the two girls cried as she stopped for a chat before settling in with the mom and picking up the baby.

Around the same time, a young teen couple hopped aboard with familiar youthful energy. He had a high school sweatshirt on. She held onto his arm, leaning into him. They flirted, took selfies, laughed, and rested.

The community on board could be one small part of the cure to our national epidemic of loneliness.

This web of connections provides us with a sense of community. A study of daily commuter transit data in Singapore gives us the math behind something many of us know in a more satisfying and personal way: We see the same people every day. The authors call this “an often-ignored type of social link: weak, passive, and indirectly enabled by daily encounters.”

Familiar strangers, as they’re known, are a key part of our lives, even if we never know their names. The interactions have been shown to not only leave us feeling positive but also with feelings of belonging, and those feelings help us feel less lonely. By creating a sense of recognition through low-effort interactions, these familiar strangers provide us with emotional reassurance and lower the barriers to later interactions. They can also expand our connections beyond our close networks.

Make no mistake, loneliness is a huge problem. In 2023, then-US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy warned of an epidemic of loneliness, one that is already having consequences on our society.

In the introduction to his report on the topic, Murthy noted that loneliness “is associated with a greater risk of cardiovascular disease, dementia, stroke, depression, anxiety, and premature death. The mortality impact of being socially disconnected is similar to that caused by smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day, and even greater than that associated with obesity and physical inactivity.”

A Harvard Graduate School of Education survey found the highest rate of feeling lonely among those 30 to 44 years old, with most saying they feel “fundamentally separate or disconnected from others or the world,” and blaming the problem on “living in a society that is too individualistic.”

Is it any wonder? We’ve built ourselves into this isolation. I see it on the street out my bus window. Across the US, slightly more than 62 percent of commuters drove to work alone in 2024, compared with the 3.7 percent who took public transit. In the car, we have no way to see the strangers around us, but when we’re on the bus, train, walking, or biking, we cannot help but notice the humanity in our lives.

Bus riders aren’t immune to this isolation. Most of my fellow riders have headphones firmly in place, or are buried in a bit of reading that protects them from the greater world. And it’s easy to dismiss how significant this connection can be.

But even with their headphones on, you still see the same faces. Like the trans woman with the multi-colored hair, or the lady who regularly carries an orange shopping bag. Then there is the guy who always carries his bike helmet, but never has his bike.

Seeing the regular faces means you also see the new ones, like the woman who got on one day and told me she was headed to Somerville. We had a wonderful chat about her work on student enrichment programs.

Some mornings I see families get on together, and take the bus for a few blocks to school. Often, the parents will walk their children right up to the school door, but sometimes you can see those parents giving their children a bit of independence.

One morning, a mom, dad, and two sons got on, and when they reached the school, I overheard mom ask, “Do you want dad to take you, or do you want to go on your own?”

The boys got off on their own, the mom reminding the older brother to look after his sibling.

The parents stayed on the bus, continuing their morning commute together.

The bus will hardly be the solution to the loneliness epidemic; that will require far more connection and care. But if we stop thinking about our transportation system as just something to be endured and begin thinking about it as something worth our time, perhaps it will even change our attitudes about where we invest and the importance it plays in our lives.

Maybe if we see buses and trains not just as transportation connections but as human ones, we’ll give them a bit more grace.

Chuck Tanowitz is a recent master of public administration graduate of the Harvard Kennedy School. He is vice chair of the Newton Economic Development Commission.