I can agree with this. If we moved to public transit through the utilization of railways and bus routes, would you say the cost of maintenance then moved to the Local and State governing bodies? One might conclude that roadwork costs would decrease positively with the reduction in traffic. There would also be higher maintenance costs, all offset by taxes.
What about the logistics of these operations?
The initial start-up costs?
The time?
The petty small suburban neighborhoods who claim buses increase homeless presence in their neighborhoods?
There would also need to be a fundamental cultural shift on the Professional level.
I know we don’t really have all the answers. I just want to make sure we are aware that moving this needle is more than dropping a couple magic bus lines down in each major city, and running a railroad from Point A to B. We do need less cars. I wish I could walk to work. All of this requires an almost mind-boggling amount of preparation and then work to even get started.
Gotta be realistic, otherwise we’ll never get anywhere.
It’s a lot of work, but it doesn’t really require new thinking. We can absolutely throw resources at the problem. More buses, more trains, faster, safer, more reliable, more more more.
Making jobs closer to people is absolutely a societal shift, but we don’t have to tackle that, at least not right away.
If we have a hundredfold increase in existing public transit schemes, we’re already most of the way there to breaking cars’ stranglehold on society. It’s a solved problem, in an engineering sense. We know how to do it. We just don’t know how to fund it…or to get the political will to do it.
