transit the better way?

i don't know about you but arround here the push for takeing public transit is huge. we hear catch phrases like "the better way", and are inundated with comercials showing relaxed people on the way to work shown against people stuck in trafic. we are preached to that it's cheaper as well as enviromentaly better. but is it truly better for the average joe?

first what is public transit? public transit has variable forms depending on where you live. lets see there is electrical powed vehicles, trollies, trains, suways, streetcars. these are considdered "clean" vehicles due to being electric. but how much damage and pollution was created to make that electricity? not to mention that they tend to leave all lights on and moters in idle while they are not being used, i live by a streetcar facility and i know that that is normal.

then we have the petro chemical vehicles, they run on gas, diesle, propane, ect. now these all give out polluting exaust while they are running, and they run some almost 24/7. how much they pollute differs greatly amounst the vehicles from extended busses to taxi cabs. now in all honesty taxies should not be includede as they are more polluiteing then if you drove yourself but it is hinted at that they are better than driveing. now all these vehicles tend to use vast amounsts of fuel everyday both by just weighing a few tons to the fact that they are constantly running, even if they don't have any passengers.

then we get into things like schedualing and time taken for trips. ah yes standing at a bus stop in the middle of january as a storm rages arround you as you waite more than an hour for that bus to arrive. no shelter from the wind and no place to go warm up. or alternately go out start the car and drive to work. in all honesty which choice would you take? even in the best of conditions bus scheduals don't always work, even if everthing works perfectly you can be standing in the middle of nowhere waiting an hour for a bus. transit tends to take much longer than driveing because of this. not to mention of course that all that stopping to pick people up takes forever as well, in my experiance transit can take over 600% longer than driveing depending on where you have to go. for example it used to take me half an hour by car to get to work or three hours by bus on a good day.

then we get to cost of takeing transit. transit is expensive at least here, $2.75/trip cash fair i think we are at now. so $5.50/ round trip no stopping. now thats only if you happen to live IN the city, if you have to get into the city double that to $11/ trip to work you know even with gas at over $1/liter it's still cheaper to pay for the gas. and thats JUST to get back and forth to work, any other trips cost that same fare, want to stop off at that new store? thats another fare, want to go over to a freinds? thats yet two more fairs. can you see it add up? there are transit passes available but they ain't cheap like $60/week to use multiple systems.

okay now have you ever tried to go shopping on a bus? you have a choice only 2or three bags at a time or the transit users biggest anoyance use a bundle buggy. it ain't fun and it aint easy. or how about that good deal on a 27" tv, good luck carrying that on transit. could hire a taxi but thats gonna cost ya.

so depending on ones needs transit is realy not all that great a deal for them to rely on. i know that for myself to make transit even close to apealing would be for them to masively upgrade and extend rapid transit such as subways greatey to improve efficiancy. then they would need to get decent schedualings to cut down the time even further, and on top of that they would need to cut fare down about in half to make it eccinomicaly apealing.

hmm an old post but goes along with what i have to say.

there is a push to get people onto public transit. the problem is depending on where you live you may be takeing a risk by getting on a bus. a risk for a takeing a bus? unfortunatly yes.

you see i was on a public transit bus about 6 or 7 months ago, due to a bad driver i was tossed across the isle from where i was sitting getting injured when i landed on the seats across the isle. there was nothing in reach i could grab to keep myself from falling. even worse was the driver didn't want to wait for an ambulance, in fact he wanted to either drop me off or have an injured person ride back to the other end of the route. i was taken off on a backboard when thankfully the ambulance showed up before he was going to leave.

that is just the beginning of the FUN i have had ever since.within a week or two i was layed off my job. i was so hopped up on pain killers i could barely even sign my name on the forms at that point. i was getting phiso therapy for maybe a couple months, not long enough to fix the issue, but i can no longer get it, in fact it is getting worse again. why can't i get it? easy i can not afford it. see the thing is that my car insurance won't pay as i was on a bus, i no longer have coverage from work being layed off, and to top it off the bus company WILL NOT PAY. their view is that since there was no other vehicle involved in the incident that they are not responsible. which of course has left me floating in the wind. now i live in an area that suposidly has free medical care for all, unfortunatly over ten years ago they stopped paying for things like phisio thearapy to save money. i figure their reasoning was that insurance should cover stuff like that.

now on top of pain i am down to my last money i had includeing my meager retirement saveings. i have enough issues with pain while doing nothing so work is pretty much out of the question. i don't qualify for benifits for those temporarily out of work as you have to be willing and ABLE to work, at this point i'm not realy able, and without propper care i won't be. i also know i will not qualify for welfare. i know this as almost 10 years ago i was screwed out of my long term benifits from my company (yup the same one that just layed me off). i tried for welfare after i had been without money almost a year and was severely rationing what food i still had. (by the way you can rehydrate freezer burnt meat in warm water, still tastes like crap but it is food). i was refused welfare on the grounds that i have an unusual liveing arrangement. you see i share my appartment with my parrents who work outside the country most of the time but they have always helped me out plus gives them a home when they are here. i was told that THAT counted as income, and as it was more then they pay i was out of luck. all i wanted was a little bit of money for food, bus fare, mabe even to fix my phone line which nicely crapped out on me thus cutting off all comunication, (besides i am sre my phone would have been cut anyway due to the fact i had no money to pay my bills. food banks are nice unless you don't know where they are or can't afford to get to them.

now i am pretty much heading into the same issues. all thanks to rules apparently put into place to stop frivilous lawsuits and scams, against public transit. so nice that the govenment protects itself and leaves the average citizens in dire straights. there are NO real safety nets anymore, they have HUGE holes that people fall through.

I believe what they are saying is that over a period of time if more people used public transit it would use less resources. Which they are correct. It will use less fuel and other resources due to the decrease in manufacturing from the lack of demand. As you correctly pointed out though the trade off is a significant decrease in the amount of time people have to be productive.

The reason they are pushing for people to utilize public transportation more is two fold. The first one is that it increases revenue for the city, the second is that it saves the city money. It theoretically saves money because it will cost the city less to clean up accidents, which means the city can have less emergency services on staff, which means more money for the city to spend on other projects.

Looking at the big picture, yes, public transportation will put the country in a better position because it will decrease our dependence on foreign oil with the trade off that it will cost productivity. All depends upon what your philosophy is on which you think is the better thing to lose, In the end it all costs the same amount or close to it.

A better solution would be to encourage more car pooling. Also look for things that can run off of solar cells. Such as parking meters, street lights, etc. The issue with solar is that until the efficiency of solar cells increase dramatically it will take a solar array close to the size of the city to power the city, then you have to account for power surges, weather damage, people damage ,etc. The issue with wind farms is while they don't take up as much room they do require a lot more maintenance to keep running efficiently and there are only so many places where you can really get the maximum potential out of a wind farm, plus the danger to wild life.

I'm a big fan of geothermal energy, but like the wind farms above there are only so many places where they are feasible. That doesn't mean that I don't think solar and wind don't have their place, they just shouldn't be looked at as an over all solution to our energy problem, but they should be looked as solutions to smaller problems as outlined above.