yes
I have to think that $3 or $4 gasoline is going to make the Phoenix light rail system a lot more attractive when it opens this year than when it was started seven years ago.
Not to mention freedom of movement. Screw "public transportation". .
WOW! What a ride. After several bus changes and riding all over the place, I finally got there an hour and a half later.
Yeah right, public transit? Bull$hit.
FYI here in Illinois:
“Doomsday” averted!
Governor Rod R. Blagojevich today commended the General Assembly for accepting his improvements to a long-term mass transit funding bill that provides free public transportation to Illinois seniors. The CTA, Metra and Pace had planned for drastic service cuts, fare hikes, and layoffs if no solution was passed by Sunday.
$494 million in new, recurring funding for the Regional Transportation Authority, which includes the Chicago Transit Authority, Metra and Pace; and another $50 million for transit agencies in other parts of Illinois.
Let's not forget the "benefit" of riding next to someone who probably hasn't bathed in a week.
Seriously though, I wonder how long it will be until some liberal utopia like SF tries to force public transportation on its people. Just like with "no fireplace" days, could "no private auto days" be in the cards?
You could have picked a better analogy than that.....
American economists who think US$3/gallon is expensive and will reduce consumption haven’t traveled abroad, some countries in Europe has had in inflation and time adjusted dollars, well over $3/gallon since the late 1990’s due to high VAT and enviro taxes on petrol.
The question is ‘when will the price of oil affect € and £ currency car owners in the wallet?’, then we’ll know what the actual inflection point has been reached.
Also, using margarine as an example in the first paragraph was intentional irony? The cost/quality of margarine is directly linked to the commodity price of corn, and the commodity price of corn is now being driven by the biofuel sector.
No. “Public transit” meets the need of only a very few people. More oil now! Drill ANWAR, and the Gulf of Mexico now! Drill of the coasts NOW! And start building more nuke power plants immediately.
Two truths about public transportation:
1) Liberals love it because they envision forcing YOU to take trains, subways and blight rail while THEY travel our less-congested roads; less congested because they taxed you into public transportation being all you can afford. Their transportation model is Beijing where the masses (YOU) have to pedal a bicycle while the elites (THEM) ride around in limos. That’s how liberals think.
2) In the South, particularly in the summer, mass transit will never work. Why? Because public transit never takes you where you want to go. It takes you a couple of blocks from where you want to go. By the time you’ve walked the final blocks, you have sweated through your clothes in 90-degree heat and 80-percent humidity. It takes just a day or two of that to decide you’d rather take your car.
Folks think buses and light rail are all the rage, until they have to sit next to some guy that just peed himself a couple of hours before, stinks to high heavens and hitting on the cutie sitting across the isle.
It’s great to talk about what you do in that situation, until you realize the guy is probably mental and hasn’t the faculties to care if he severely injurs you, her or it is he who goes to the E.R.
Yep, your car and $10 bucks per gallon will start looking quite reasonable after a few of those.
After my divorce, I had to bus it for a while. I saw enough to know that’s not my choice. My ten minute ride to work suddenly became 45 minutes to an hour, if I was lucky enough to catch the transfers, otherwise it could be an hour and a half.
Good times... Blah!
Nope. Next!
Efficiency of transport (which is largely illusory) works best in urban areas, but even there more time has to be budgeted for getting to and from, leading to mass inefficiency.
Chicago has a huge mass transit system, which some people plan around in order to decide where to live. That assumes they have a choice. In the part of the Chicago area where I live, the only way you can rely on mass transit is if you live within walking distance of one Metra line station, and your destination is another stop along the same line. Otherwise, it's drive a car.
So, for mass transit to work, people would have to change their place of employment or housing in large enough numbers that ridership would be high enough to justify the subsidies that mass transit always needs.
Otherwise, it's a liberal fantasy that does not deserve federal funding. It was a really good idea, some local government, or even a private enterprise, would invest in t the idea.
Bump
If the fuel efficiency of an automobile increases 30%, as the recently voted CAFE rules require (27 mpg to 35), then the cost per mile driven goes down, and the government regulation ends up subsidizing mass transit's closest competition. People already commute from Warrenton, Va. to DC to work, many of them in SUV's. These people will choose more fuel efficient private vehicles before they even consider giving up the freedom and convenience these transports offer, not to mention their unwillingness to give up cheaper real estate in the suburbs.
Even if the battle between mass and individual transit were purely a matter of cost, and it's not, strengthening the private automobile's competitive advantage by making it cheaper to use, while clamoring for more subsidies for the weakened mass transit is the very definition of insanity, IMHO.
Leaving CAFE alone and allowing the market to work would be better, if one is an advocate of mass transit. Only a massive increase in the cost-per-mile driven will enhance the competitive position of mass transit versus the automobile, and we just legislated the opposite with the new CAFE.
In which alternative universe can the conservation of a commodity be enhanced, by making it cheaper to use? We will, as we have in the past, choose to own more vehicles per household, and drive them more miles, thus eliminating totally the benefits of increased fuel economy, and making it less likely, not more, that mass transit will become a viable alternative.
And toll hikes. A lot at stake for it to happen. Property needs to be seized to finish the build outs of the villages. The Clean Air Act was signed that demands car reductions. And the pesky middle class gets in the way of that utopia.
Ongoing Coverage of the NJ Toll Hike (background on Transit Villages too)
Rising fuel costs never cause people to stop driving and take transit, they will just buy more fuel efficient cars. The pro-transit car haters keep looking for that magic bullet to get people to stop driving, but it never comes. People love the freedom of driving from start to finish without being crammed in with a bunch of other strangers on a vehicle they have no control over.
Except for dense, urban areas, public transit isn’t an option. My time is still more valuable than the marginal change in gas prices.
It takes half an hour and $2 in gas to drive to my office.
It would take a mile walk, 2 transfers, a $2 bus fare and 90 minutes of riding time to take the bus to the office. After that, I cannot leave the office to meet with people during the day.
So, driving costs $4 and one hour of time. The bus costs $4 and more than three hours of time. Add in the value of the two hours of lost time at a low $20/hour and it costs an extra $40/day to take the bus. Even if you count the total cost of operating a vehicle, the round trip driving is only $20/day, but that isn’t realistic, since I am paying for the car and insurance under any circumstances.
What they ought to do is have "yuppie" cars on the trains. You have to pay an extra dollar to get on them and have to be dressed at least business casual. These cars need to be upscale, with advertisements for Grey Goose vodka instead of Colt 45 Malt Liquor and for banks instead of paycheck loan outlets.
What I'm saying here is that the yuppies and the upscale business set need to have separate cars in which they can read their Wall Street Journal and maybe sip a plastic glass of wine (bought at the platform for $6 a pop) without having to switch their wallets from their back pockets to their front pockets and mess up their hair and loosen their ties to make the other riders think they are just as disheveled and hopeless as they are.
What we need are PREMIUM cars on our public transportation trains. Cars with no graffiti, empty fast food wrappers on the floor and no jarring public service announcements on the loudspeakers. Instead, pipe in some Chopin or Mozart music and have a pleasant "dinging" noise when the train reaches a station with a pleasant female voice announcing the name of the station.