Thesis plus antithesis equals synthesis. You both have valid points. Having driven transit in the 80's the busses were full during rush hours and practically empty the rest of the time. You have to run busses frequently enough to make them practical to use. My "solution" to that would be to use full sized busses for peak hours and van/ light truck based mini-busses for the rest of the time on routes that were not heavily used. I do agree that subways generally carry enough to make them effective. Air travel could probably benefit from some smaller, more fuel efficient turbo prop aircraft to service less popular runs. However, between government regulations and political concerns I doubt that many of the suggestions would be viable.
My 2ยข Butch On 4/28/06, graywolf <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
What makes you think public transportation is more environmentally friendly than private? My only jet airliner trip had about 12 passengers on board. I figure that cost about 100 times as much for fuel per person as driving cars did. The concept that public transportation is cheaper is based upon the unfounded idea that it is always operation at capacity. In fact very little public transportation operates at more than 10% of capacity overall. After all it has to be sized to carry the rush hour traffic, but has to run all the time or it would not be a viable alternative at all. I have often noticed that "Eco Freaks" have a very strange concept of how economics work.
Tom, I'm sure you know very well that when someone (in the context of conserving resources) they're likely talking about mass transit, rather than air transportation. You can throw all the numbers you want at me, but no one's going to tell me that a subway in a major city during rush hour doesn't save energy and reduce pollution, as compared to driving personal vehicles. Just imagine: in Toronto during rush hour, there's an average of 1000 passengers ~per train~. The trains come by on average every five minutes. That's a lot of cars ~not~ on the road. No matter what you may say about "public transportation", "public transit" or "mass transit" in major urban centres must form an important part of any energy-saving, pollution-control plan, IMHO. cheers, frank
