Why Not to Take the Bus
29th April 2022
To commemorate Earth Day, Memphis television meteorologist John Bryant decided to try riding the bus to work. Normally, his home-to-work journey takes about 15 to 20 minutes. His effort to protect the environment ended up taking 2-1/2 hours. Part of the problem was his unfamiliarity with the bus system, but the fastest he might have been able to make it was at least 90 minutes, partly because he had to walk a half mile from his home to the nearest bus stop and another mile to work from the nearest bus stop to his office. The few other passengers riding the bus with him were mostly too poor to own an automobile.
Public transport takes you from where you aren’t to where you don’t want to be, and takes three times as long to do so. Public transport was beneficial when the alternative was walking or riding a horse, but that’s no longer the case. Public transport was also beneficial when people worked in a dense urban core but lived farther out, but that’s no longer the case either.
April 29th, 2022 at 17:15
Ah, but the exercise …
May 18th, 2022 at 11:05
By definition; public transport has to be mass transport. It should transport large numbers of people between specific locations at specific times, or it’s not cost-effective. If a transit system is carrying small numbers of people, then it is wasting money and resources. Private jitneys and uber drivers are preferable to a mal-investment in dispersed transit systems. Several decades ago, the final stage of the journey home from my employment was a full-sized bus I caught at the subway station at 12:36 a.m. It carried me, and the driver, to the end of its route; and then returned empty to the subway. Was that an effective use of resources? I still had a 20 minute walk home from the bus stop; if I missed that bus, then I could take a different bus in the adjacent bus bay that also deposited me a 20 minute walk away but carried more passengers.
May 18th, 2022 at 19:18
Mass transit was designed for the days when everybody clustered in the central city because the technology didn’t allow for efficient communications except through close proximity. Mass transit proponents are stuck in, not the last century, but often in the one before that.