Posted on 09/01/2018 11:33:14 AM PDT by Publius
I’d say that this article is still focused on transit being a “good” thing.
The idea that transit companies cut services to cut losses instead of raising services to encourage ridership is false on it’s face. Your transit company is loosing money, so you spend more money on more frequent trains and more modern cars, and somehow enough more people will abandon the convince and flexibility of automobiles for train service? The reason other western countries still have functioning transit systems is that until recently people could not afford private automobiles, and the governments highly subsidized transit systems.
In the US, wide availability of private automobiles, coupled with major employers moving to the suburbs drove public transit ridership into the toilet.
Flying cars. We need flying cars.
Americans have become more prosperous in those years. In 1946 there was a Recession on, or rather the tail end of the Great Depression. A far larger percentage of the population in 2018 can afford and avails itself of private transportation i.e. cars and mootorcycles.
Buses = public transportation.
We have a bus system in this small southern city. If one wishes to go to a particular location and return, maybe a five mile one way trip, one must allot the whole day to complete the errand.
The Atlanta Circle is pretty gruesome in the summer. You can burn up your motor parked in the fast lane for an hour.
Either a misdemeanor or a cool name for a band.
I don’t know if anyone has mentioned this, but many many years ago, suburbs around many cities grew along with the extension of transit lines.
Some cities called them “streecar suburbs”, in that, nearby rural land was developed but had access to the streetcars to allow travel into the city.
But then, especially after World War II, suburban development occurred in open land without regard to access to public transportation. It was a given that if you bought a home in those suburbs, that you needed a car or more than one car in the family.
Someone mentioned suburb to suburb commuting, and Washington, DC. There is a great deal of such commuting there along the “Beltway” corridors. The Metro subway in Washington links downtown with some nearby suburbs, but that system will not work for someone who works in Fairfax County, and lives in Montgomery County, for example.
I think I’ve heard that most commuting to work nowadays, is not commuting into a central city from suburban areas. Huge numbers of people live in suburbs, and go to work in another suburb.
People who can afford it transport themselves at their own convenience. Wealth unprecedented in human history caused the decline of mass transit.”””
Perhaps part of the problem, but when the CRIMINALS are infesting the transit systems, no one with a brain wishes to be there.
Too many big city criminals treat mass transit as a containment system which traps riders between stops & allows then free rein to do as they wish.
I lived in Milwaukee in the early 60’s & worked in DOWNTOWN. This news is just plain sad.
Whats the plural of Buss fuses?
I think public transportation will make a comeback.
When I was young, people couldn’t wait to get their licenses at 16. I was a laggard at 17. Getting your own car was everyone’s dream.
My older son didn’t get his license until he was 21. My younger one, now 21, has no plans to get his license. He lives in a large urban area, and takes mass transit everywhere.
They both went to college in a large urban area with lots of mass transit. Many of their peers didn’t have driver’s licenses either, and were glad they were accepted to a school in an urban area where they didn’t need it.
With the rise of Uber to fill in the gaps in mass transit, lots of younger people are very happy to rely principally on mass transit.
My wife and I have three vehicles between us. We’re dinosaurs.
Living in the DC metro area since the 1970’s there are a few things I know.
1. Traffic in the Suburbs or around the Beltway is worse than being downtown. There are simply fewer roads/routes/choices to go from point a to b.
2. The Metro or Subway will almost always take longer than driving and it’s not cheap.
3. Young DC residents love Uber and this has actually put more cars in the downtown areas.
4. They have reduced what was three lanes on a number of city streets to two lanes to make room for a bike lane.
5. They have given pedestrians the “Right of Way” in the middle of a block and in some areas at every intersection at all times.
6. The traffic lights used to be timed on most of the major cross town and north/south streets that allowed you to cover ten or more blocks without stopping and that is no longer the case.
I currently live inside the Beltway and one of the biggest reasons I don’t want to move outside the Beltway is the traffic. Not just the traffic getting in and out of the city but the traffic suburb to suburb.
Relays in a house less than 50 years old.
Can’t argue with that. Well stated.
You can get busted for busses on buses.
I’ve installed minibreakers to replace all of the fuses for the individual circuits in my 90 yr. old house.
Range, Dryer and Main are still fuses.
Thank Mayor Barrett and the rest of the liberal crowd that had to get the millions of Federal dollars to build this boondoggle to nowhere using 19th century tech
Suburb to suburb varies a lot, especially by time of day. I go from Annapolis to Tysons a few times per month. 47 miles.
At 8 am, it can easily be two hours. At 10:30 am, it is often about an hour, not infrequently under 55 minutes, and once in 48 minutes flat.
At 4 in the afternoon, the return trip can easily exceed 2 hours, and has occasionally stretched to nearly 3 hours. At 1:30 pm, the return trip can be an hour and ten minutes.
My fuse box (1950) was almost inaccessible and required holding the flashlight in my mouth to to change out a fuse. None of the local electricians would deal with it because they said the wiring all had to be replaced in the whole house (fabric covered wires) which expense would render it more economical to buy a new house. So I erected a framework that would support me in the necessary odd position and replaced it myself with a breaker box which I moved to a more accessible location.
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