I love mass transit. Mass transit makes a lot of sense. Mass transport even more so. It is public transit that I've pretty much given up on and then only in US type situations. For a counterinstance, as near as I can decode the transit math; Sweden public transit seems not only energy efficient and timely but beneficial to the urban landscape and environment.
I love airplanes private and mass transport. I love shipping both private and mass transport excepting ferry services that are just waterborne public transit. public and private transport via pipelines are also wonderful. Coal slurry, NatGas, water; doesn't matter to me, all generaly good ideas. I don't even mind public transit. I object to running an operation so sloppy that even bribes are not enough to change behavior, we have to resort to punishing alternative behavior as well.
5 comments:
can you eplain? what makes us conditions so bad?
The reason public transit fails is the yuppie class in the suburbs want to keep the city rifraff from having an easy way to come out, rob them blind, and take all the tv's back on the train to the city. You may think I'm joking, but this is the exact scenario we had in my previous city.
The yuppie class in my area, Fairfield Co., CT, loves mass transit--who wouldn't love a subsidized, air-conditioned train ride to work?
With apologies, I meant "public" and not "mass" transit.
We all knew what you meant. That's one of the problems with public transit; they steal the language and twist it.
For instance:
Ever wonder what a "passenger" is? You could go to the APTA website and check but no, passengers are not what is measured, they call them "boardings." And what is a boarding? Aye, there's the rub. A living, breathing person is about 2.5 boardings per one way trip. Yup, when a transit agency talks about a million "customers" of some such fuzzy description they are really talking about 200,000 people.
Man, those CT trains into NYC are some of the sleaziest accounting operations extant.
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