Some Knowledge

With higher prices for fuel, I wonder if public transportation will come back.  Sure, there are still some bus lines and a few subways in this country, but in general, there is little in the way of public transportation.  We live in the age of the automobile, and people want to drive themselves anywhere they go.

In a way, it’s very wasteful to have a road filled with cars, all with one person inside, all going in the same direction and basically to the same place.  You can have a freeway all choked with cars any rush hour and wonder why they don’t just put in an electric train down the center of the thing to carry lots of people at the same time without all the excess weight of the cars.  It would be 100 times as efficient to put 200 people on a train and save 200 cars worth of gasoline.  Of course, the thing is, people are not really all going to the same place.  They don’t live in the same place and they don’t go to the same place.

I’ve used the bus for commuting before.  You have to plan ahead.  It’s annoying to have to wait at the bus stop in the rain or in the cold, and you have to usually walk a bit further to where you are going.  Still, you don’t have to park and you don’t have to buy gas, and a bus ticket is only about a dollar.  Maybe somebody should design and build a nice efficient electric bus that can travel silently and put lots of them on the road and make a profit off selling tickets to people who don’t want to drive.  Maybe they could have bus service between cities and the suburbs that will make it less of a mess in the morning to drive in traffic jams.

Mass transit is more efficient than single-user cars.  The problem is that it takes a lot longer to get anywhere on mass transit than it does to drive someplace.  You would have problems if you had to wait for a trolley to get anywhere in an emergency.  You would have a long waste of time and a lot of extra miles to travel if you wanted to go somewhere that was not directly on the bus line.  Maybe if cities and communities were better organized mass transit would be a more workable option.  Maybe if the price of gas gets higher, more people will start thinking about taking public transportation and save their cars for weekend trips to visit friends.