> I understand that many (if not most) Americans are too stupid and lazy
> to
> figure out how to use public transit and too chicken shit to leave the
> cocoons of their cars, but would not you expect a bona fide expert
> supposedly trying to solve transportation problems to give a serious
> consideration? If they do not, there is a serious possibility that
> their
> effort is nothing but a PR effort to put some window dressing, a "human
> appearance" on the ugly face of the US capitalism.
I live in a city with a pretty good public transportation system, though one which continually threatens us that it will close down lines because of insufficient funding. And I would never consider living in a place without one. My aunt retired from the Boston area to Cape Cod, and I saw how terribly inconvenienced she and other elderly residents were when they got too old to be able to drive. (She volunteered to drive other elderly people around until she also had to give up driving.)
The trouble is that, unlike Europeans, apparently, Americans have a very deep-seated urge to flee from areas of large population concentration to low-concentration ones. Perhaps this is a hold-over of the old pioneer longing to "light out for the territory." But it makes it much harder to provide public transit for most of the population. Somehow, one would have to persuade the people who fled the cities to move back; a few are doing so, but the overall trend is still massively in the other direction. Makes no sense to me, but I'm a very untypical American.
Jon Johanning // jjohanning at igc.org __________________________________ A sympathetic Scot summed it all up very neatly in the remark, 'You should make a point of trying every experience once, excepting incest and folk-dancing.' -- Sir Arnold Bax