[cerveza_fiesta]

cerveza_fiesta, on 15 December 2009 - 05:36 PM, said:

wish I hadn't bought the Jeep I got as a first car. Basically 4000 bucks down the drain (5000 original price minus resale)

Gothos, on 15 December 2009 - 05:39 PM, said:

why not just take the bus / train?

Slow Ben, on 15 December 2009 - 05:42 PM, said:

Bus/train is boring. And less fun in the snow.

cerveza_fiesta, on 15 December 2009 - 08:26 PM, said:

You have never experienced the backwardness of my city's public transit...and for this you are lucky.

The busses in my city arrive at stops infrequently, off-schedule, go to only a few select locations, are overpriced for the quality of service, posess no express lines and the routing is so incredibly fucked that it takes an hour to traverse a distance that would take 5 in your own car...or 30 minutes on foot.

I'm not even joking.

Plus none of the routes come within 10km of my workplace...literally.

Unless you live and work inside the city proper you can forget about public transit in Fredericton

Other reasons include inter-city travel, which is possible only by motor-coach, which also arrives and departs at infrequent intervals and follow routes that often double car travel times.

Hence why I bought a jeep...also needed something SUV or pickup-like to move across the country in.

Gothos, on 15 December 2009 - 08:17 PM, said:

affordable tho. and gets you places.
then again, american culture is and has been humongously biased towards cars.
how many american cities got a tram system?

Jusentantaka, on 15 December 2009 - 08:28 PM, said:

all the major US ones do, but he lives in the ass end of nowhere, canada. Which has less people in it than poland.

Gothos, on 15 December 2009 - 09:31 PM, said:

true enough. seems pretty odd tho as even my shitty home town of 48,000 has a decent bus system that can generally take you anywhere within the city or the surrounding villages in a timely fashion. could be also that _people in Canada and the USA_ (I originally wanted to insert the proper 4chan terms for them, but I guess someone could take it wrong!) got too much space to live in, and subsequently build stuff as far away from other stuff as humanely possible while remaining sane.

Gwynn ap Nudd, on 16 December 2009 - 02:43 AM, said:

Getting off topic, but American and Canadian cities were built around everyone owning a car, unlike most European cities. Even where there is decent public transport, it is way behind the European equivalent. Here, if you work in the downtown core you can easily rely on public transit, if not (like myself) you are adding 45 minutes or so to your commute if you do not own your own vehicle.

H.D., on 16 December 2009 - 02:49 AM, said:

I'm guessing every city of 50,000 or more people have a bus system. The thing is, the bus is damned inconvenient if you've got a car. And we have lots and lots and lots of cars.

Gothos, on 16 December 2009 - 08:02 AM, said:

hehe. well I've spent my whole life living downtown, be it my small home town (yes it does have a centre of sorts), Warsaw or Szczecin. The small town, well, these days I say that if you can get somewhere within 40 minutes walking, you should do that instead of just hauling your fat ass burning old vegetation. In bigger towns it's usually more convenient to take a tram since it's almost not affected by traffic, and believe me, even in this poor country everyone seems to have like 1.3 cars, and they're all out at the same time. The only reason I'd use a car in Warsaw is if I needed to transport something sizable...

Public transportation can really work, it just seems that America abandoned the idea some time past and nobody gives a damn about optimizing it. Hell, it seems to me like taking the bus in the USA is a social faux pas and will get you ridiculed and laughed at...

cerveza_fiesta, on 16 December 2009 - 01:12 PM, said:

Jusentantaka, on 15 December 2009 - 08:28 PM, said:

All the major US ones do, but he lives in the ass end of nowhere, canada. Which has less people in it than poland.

Yep. And we don't generally welcome change from the satus quo...even if its for everyone's benefit.

Gothos, on 15 December 2009 - 09:31 PM, said:

... and subsequently build stuff as far away from other stuff as humanely possible while remaining sane.

The nearest city having 1,000,000+ residents is 8 hours (or 12 hours by motorcoach) away from Fredericton. Gothos nailed it.

Gothos, on 16 December 2009 - 08:02 AM, said:

Public transportation can really work, it just seems that America abandoned the idea some time past and nobody gives a damn about optimizing it. Hell, it seems to me like taking the bus in the USA is a social faux pas and will get you ridiculed and laughed at...

To be fair, the big cities in canada at least have decently optimized public transit. When I lived in Vancouver on the West Coast...the light rail + busses got you wherever you needed to go in transit times comparable to driving. My city however couldn't be less optimized. I've had this discussion a bunch of times with friends. There are 3 outlying communities that contain housing for a major portion of Fredericton's workers. Only 1 of these is serviced by bus. Taking the bus from that community to the centre of the city logs you about 55 minutes in transit on a long, circuitous route with frequent pickup stops. By car the same trip is 10-15 minutes regardless of traffic. The other two outlying communities are not serviced by bus at all, requiring everyone there to drive at least inside city limits to catch a bus. When they do however, they're faced with the decision of "do I drive an extra 10 minutes directly to work through the city or do I stop here, wait in the cold for a bus, and sit on it for another hour while it dawdles around the city before finally heading downtown". If its not convenient, nobody will use it.

And they wonder why our public transit costs the city millions of dollars a year in subsidy and nobody uses the system.

Plus, despite frequent calls to action on the issue, the transport engineer for the city insists there's "no problem" and that there is no way they can change anything with the system.

===============================================

There's some excerpts from a derailment of a thread in the Inn that I thought would be good for discussion in here.

As you can see in my portions of the discussion, some parts of the world have absolute shit public transport, while other parts with similar populations have the public transit thing completely figured out.

Public transit in Canadian cities is almost invariably inconvenient, possesses poor coverage and is dismal financial failure. That's the limit of my personal experience.

I know in other parts of the world public transit is comprehensive, convenient and is actually capable of making money for the municipality.

Anyway, wondering your thoughts from around the world on this.

What makes a good public transit system? What are the special qualities that make it capable profit?

Anybody involved with municipal transportation at the job level offer any insight from a management perspective?

[Jusentantaka]

Quote

I know in other parts of the world public transit is comprehensive, convenient and is actually capable of making money for the municipality.

What makes a good public transit system? What are the special qualities that make it capable profit?

First off: Which parts? I ask only because my husband was looking over my shoulder and that idea just about killed him, with all the choking and gasping and trying to stop himself. (Which was hilarious, by the by). I guess you could have been meaning smaller cities and the like, but I just don't see the typical bureaucracy allowing a large city's transit authority to turn a profit worth mentioning, and that's pretty much where all the problems are.

As for a good system, I'd say 'on time', but thats never gonna happen. So basically, I'll stick with redundancy. Your day shouldn't be ruined because of a problem on a specific track or bus route, there should be several ways to get to where you need to go, or at least close enough you can walk the rest easily. And these routes shouldn't just be 'ok, theres a problem, enact PLAN BEEE', they should be there all the damned time.

[Morgoth]

First and foremost, apart perhaps from New York (and even there I'm not entirely convinced) I've not been to single city in the US with anything but an awful public transportation system. I was told Chicago's system was good, imagine my surprise.

Furthermore, the idea that a public transportation system has to make a profit in on its own is ridiculous. You have to look at the wider consequences of having an extensive functioning system in a city. You get less traffic on the roads which means less jams, less petroleum spent and less people arriving late at work (which saves society a lot of money). You get less strain on the roads (which saves money), you get less problems from health issues caused by car traffic (which saves a lot of money), there are less traffic accidents (which saves a lot of money), not to mention you create better mobility for the average person which again makes it easier to acquire jobs outside of the standard sphere and so on and so forth.

Also, though I might be beaten down by someone who actually lives there, London does seem to have a smooth functioning, efficient system of public transportation. I'd say the big cities of Norway and Sweden definitely does and I quite liked the one in Paris too. Not to mention Prague and a number of other central and eastern european cities (though how much of that is subsidies I cannot say).

[Mezla PigDog]

I have no idea why Londoners complain about the Tube.

I am almost 30 and can't drive. I have always been a city dweller and I've just never got around to it. The main problem with public transport is that people with cars are completely inflexible and expect to be able to live and work wherever they like without any consequences. Well it turns out the consequences are pollution, bad traffic, global warming and loss of green spaces to make way for car parks. Not to mention people forever sleeping on my sofa bed because they want to live miles away from work and still go to work parties. If people used public transport, it would get better. Public transport won't receive adequate funding to become efficient until enough people use it.

[HoosierDaddy]

See, I would have said that Chicago's public transport was good. What do I know?

[Jusentantaka]

Morgoth, on 16 December 2009 - 10:18 PM, said:

Also, though I might be beaten down by someone who actually lives there, London does seem to have a smooth functioning, efficient system of public transportation. I'd say the big cities of Norway and Sweden definitely does and I quite liked the one in Paris too. Not to mention Prague and a number of other central and eastern european cities (though how much of that is subsidies I cannot say).

I must have gone to Paris and London during off-months, cause their public transit was certainly nothing to be especially proud of. That was something close to a decade ago though. Prague was excellent though, both back then and last november as well.

And whoever told you Chicago had good transit absolutely had to be laughing their ass off the minute you went out to get on a bus or train. Baltimore puts that city to shame, baltimore.

[Thelomen Toblerone]

In London, we all whinge about public transport, but in reality, it's brilliant. In terms of getting to work, it's £30 a week on the train, which is unlimited use (bloody handy at weekends), and it takes me half hour to the square mile, door to door. Were I to drive, it would take me longer due to traffic, cost me £10 per day congestion charge, plus petrol costs (currently £1.03 per litre), plus the cost of a car, and parking permit costs at home and at work (at home alone it's a few hundred quid a year). So just in terms of cost, the options are way better.

Course, if you live in south London it's a bit differet, but here in north London we have great tube connections, overground trains, and buses. I can get anywhere through a variety of methods. Sometimes it's a bit more difficult - for example, I used to go out with a girl who lived in Finchley, a 20min drive away. If I wanted to get to hers by public transport, I had to catch 2 buses and walk, which took close to an hour. But even so, that's not exactly terrible, and that's the exception rather than the rule. If my train's cocked up for work, I could catch the tube or the bus. To get to the Manchester meet-up on Saturday took me a total of 2 and a half hours, which is ridiculously good.

Some parts of Britain have shit public transport though - generally rural areas, where you pretty much have to drive. My girlfriend lives in a village with a train line going through it, but unless you want to go somewhere on that line - and most places in the area are not on it - then you have to catch a bus, which runs about 4 times a day tops, goes all over the shop and takes forever doing it, and then costs about £5 for a single ticket.

The best thing about London transport being so good is that I can get hammered and make my way back almost by mistake (as I have done several times). No worries about driving back or making sure I'm sober to catch the last train or nothing. I'm fairly sure the system runs at a loss, but you have to take into account the benefits it brings. If everyone drove in London, the city would be fucked. As it is, traffic's shocking, and most people aren't even driving. And nearly everyone catches the tube or train to work, without it there'd be half the jobs and so less tax revenue to the country in general.

That's my rambling semi-answer, and I'm sticking to it.

[Cougar]

I agree entirely on the London transport stuff, it's probably the only system outside of Manchester I've used a lot and it's fantastic.

Mezla PigDog, on 16 December 2009 - 10:51 PM, said:

The main problem with public transport is that people with cars are completely inflexible and expect to be able to live and work wherever they like without any consequences.

Actually I'd have to disagree here, villifying drivers is unfair. In the 30s -60s the local authorities created the suburbs to move people out of the cities, the idea was that the suburbs and the estates they created would be contiguous communities linked by slick public transport systems. Unfortuantely two things happened. They ran out of money and couldn't afford the grand schemes and the problem of a shortage of housing was exacerbated by the Blitz. So and I apologise to anyone who isn't familiar with the place, have you ever wondered why Princess Parkway (a dual carriageway in Manchester which leads to a suburban estate built in th 30s around the idea of clearing the central slums) has a huge 30ft grass verge down the middle? It's cos there was originally supposed to be a fully integrated tram link down the verge, this would have linked Wythenshawe to the jobs and the city in an efficient manner. This did not happen, consequently Wythenshawe became a depressed sink estate rat hole this was repeated all over the place, they moved people out of the city, away from the jobs then didn't provide the links to make subarban living compatible with using public transport. The fault lies with the public transport, if it was useable then people wouldn't need to drive in. It takes me 45 minutes to drive in and costs me about £2-£3 in diesel, it costs me £6-£8 to park right next to the Uni and if I can be arsed I can park for nothing round the back. To get the Bus to Bury, the Tram to Manchester, then another Bus to the Uni, it costs me £10.60 and takes me 1.30 mins each way, that's no choice at all. Unless I want to get pissed and find a sofa bed to sleep on.

Quote

If people used public transport, it would get better. Public transport won't receive adequate funding to become efficient until enough people use it.

It's a vicious circle then, cos nobody is going to start using it unless they have to, cos in Manchester it fucking blows.

[Shinrei]

If you live in the major metros, Japan's public transport is an absolute dream. The trains are always on time, delays may happen maybe once a month. The buses are decent in the big cities too. Travel throughout Japan is a breeze too, with various options from bus coaches to bullet trains. It has to be this way though, since despite the nice transport the roads are still clogged with traffic. Mountains and high population make for limited space on the roads.

The drawback is, transport is a little more expensive here relative to other places in the world.


Public transport in my hometown in the US is another story. The bus lines are pretty well put together, but I swear the buses cause more traffic jams than they prevent. And they lose money hand over fist. The thing is, my city is too small to have real suburbs, but stuff is still too spread out to make public transport really effective outside of the main downtown areas. There has been debates about putting in a light rail system, which has met ridiculous levels of resistence. Why? Because the proposal would put the light rail on one of the inbound traffic lanes of a major thoroughfare. So people who drive are up in arms about how traffic would be so much worse because they are obviously not bothering to consider using the railway themselves. And why should they, since the proposed stations will only be convenient to a relative minority...

Changing that much infrastructure is a HUGE undertaking when everything is considered.

[Cougar]

I read something years ago that said in at least one American city either GM or Ford , maybe 50 or 60 years ago had bought up all the tram lines and swapped them for buses. The logic behind it being that if people had to come into work on a bus, they'd just think "fuck it, I might as well go in a car." Worked to by the looks of it.

I'd imagine that in the next 20 years or so all major urban centres will become car free, it's inevitable as even in Britian's small towns the flow of traffic in the peak hours is ludicrous, unmanageable and increasing steadily. I've particularly noticed it since I've been hopping between bus, car and train for the last 3 months in Manchester, it's a journey I used to undertake regularly 12 years ago and the difference in traffic and crowding on the public transport is startling. That and the fact that I'm studying quite a lot of urban planning theory too I guess.

[Menandore]

I've been living in London for a little over two years now and it never ceases to amaze me how much Londoners bitch and whine about how awful the public transport is here. I'm pleasantly surprised by the responses on this thread.

Where I come from (rural Scotland) I pretty much had to drive. I could get a bus or a train to Dundee but then I still had to drive home from the train station and if I found myself in Dundee as late as *gasp* 11pm then I had to either call someone to come pick me up, spend £40 on a taxi or find a couch to crash on. Also worth noting is that a return train ticket for the 30 minute trip to Dundee cost somewhere in the region of £15 IIRC.

Here I can find myself in situations like the one I was in a couple of weeks ago - Flight from germany lands in Heathrow after 11pm on a sunday night. Never really occured to me beforehand to check the last train times so I was a little surprised and slightly worried when I went downstairs to the underground and realised I had already missed the last train to anywhere useful. No problem, jumped on the last train which took me a few stops closer to the centre. Got off at Acton Town where it terminate, quick call to tfl and they tell me which bus to get and where to change. Two buses later and I'm dropped off across the road from my flat. Ok, it took a while (almost 3 hours) but at no point was I stranded and the entire journey only cost me about a fiver.

Also someone made the point about redundancy. I get the train to and from work in the city and if it's not running for whatever reason I can get a choice of buses to the nearest tube stations or indeed a bus all the way into the city (although that would be a last resort as it does take a while). I would never choose to drive into central London and I'm one of those people who grew up in an area where people are entirely dependant on their cars.

[Kanubis]

I grew up in Jersey (the little island, not the American one) and like all Jersey youngsters, I was driving within weeks of my 17th birthday. I had my first car within a year and my first 'nice' car in my early twenties.

This was typical. Almost every family will have a car for each adult and a car for each kid over 17 still at home.

Jersey is 5 miles by 9 miles in size, and it's basically a car per adult. The public transport sucks, so all the tourists use cars too. If a tiny island can't sort out it's public transport it's hard to hold up hope for much of the rest of the world!

I moved to Denmark when I 28. Aside from the first couple of weeks, I haven't driven since. It quickly got to the point where I was happy not to worry about insurance, refueling, breaking down, maintenance etc. I take a book on the train or bus (the bus that goes every 8 minutes and takes me right to the city centre) and feel incredibly relaxed the whole time.

Cougar got the point though... it works here because it's been there and in the public mentality all along. Anywhere where cars are the norm you have the porblem that people won't use the busses unless they're really good. They won't be really good until the trasport companies can see the profit in it. They won't see a profit because they're not used much because they suck. It would take a huge subsidy to improve the service and the sticking point is that they would not be able to expect to see a return for a long while.

[Mezla PigDog]

Public transport in Manchester is fine if you live within the suburbs. It is when people want to live somewhere green and pleasent and still have all of the employment opportunities of a city available to them that they encounter difficulties. I work at the University (in the city centre) and a hospital on the outskirts. I live halfway in between and it takes about 40mins door-to-desk to either location and costs £11 per week. With traffic, parking and walking the distance from the most reasonably priced carpark, it would take the same amount of time to drive at peak hours. I know which is the better financial option and I have a much more simple and relaxed commute than my colleagues who drive from miles away. I have to put up with the scrotes on the bus and I occasionally have to wait for ages in the freezing cold (usually because of weather conditions that cause all the car drivers to panic and clog up the road network) but I can read/listen to music/sleep.

Cougar's comment about Wythenshawe being inaccessible to the city is wrong because you can get there in 30mins on the bus. There was recently a referendum on a conjestion charge to pay for opening up the Princess Parkway tram route to Wythenshawe (amongst other things). The driving majority voted against, naturally. It is vicious circle but it is exacerbated because drivers refuse to even try public transport in areas where it is absolutely fit for purpose. It is understandable since humans are selfish creatures and convenience is everything.

[Cougar]

Mezla PigDog, on 17 December 2009 - 12:13 PM, said:

Cougar's comment about Wythenshawe being inaccessible to the city is wrong

Just let me saddle up my horse.

Sorry but Cougar's point in this instance is correct. I never said it was hard to get to the city from Wythenshawe now, I was merely illustrating the reason why people have come to rely on vehicles. Also I think suburban is a problematic word for us, so I'll make a distinction now between close suburban, like Wythenshawe and what we generally call the commuter belt. I'll be clearer as I obviously haven't explained adaquately. Wythenshawe was constructed pre-war during the 1920s to clear people from the slums into a purpose built suburban village, what people then called Garden Cities (note Wythenshawe's vast and slightly incongrous verges), the idea was to provide a community of lower density housing which retained accessability to the city centre, provided by a rail link. Unfortuantely the rail link was never provided along with a multitude of other amenities which would have turned it from an isolated peripheral suburban collection of houses into a thriving community. With very few actual local jobs and poor public transport to the city (regardless of what the situation is now) the area became very depressed and poor. This is only one of the reasons, I mean you can't uproot people from a vast urban slum and transport them into a new estate without anticipating a breakdown of social cohesion but that isn't at stake in this thread.

WRT the point about cars, the government effectively made people move into the commuter belt and then failed to provide the transport infrastructure to support it. Dislocating people to Milton Keynes and Stevenage is all very well if you have the kind of transport links London has. I spent a summer commuting from Southend (deep Essex) to Kew (Surrey I think) and the transport was excellent. Forcing everyone to move to fucking Rochdale and Eccles and then complaining that the roads are clogged when you've provided no viable (or cheap, remeber I'm not talking exclusively about now, the commuter culture was formed in the last 50 years) public transport is ridiculous (if not entirely uncharacteristic of the government). Moreover the peope who replanned the cities in the 40s and 50s never anticipated the load of traffic. Most redeveloped cities were made to accomodate a commuter belt with cars comming in, hard to believe now I know.

Finally, I hardly think you can accuse people of being selfish for not living where you live, it doesn't make sense. I would argue that the housing up to Wythenshawe and places equidistant from the city centre are some of the most depressed in the country, why would people chose to live there, only parts of the Range and East Disbury are decent. Also even if they were 'nice' areas instead of vast tracts of council owned pebble dashed distopia (yes that's a real category) there is not enough space in Manchester for all the people who work in Manchester to live within a reasonable commute of their workplaces. Hence the above decision in the 1920s right through to the 70s to expand the city commuter belt and far-suburbs to accomodate the overspill and clear the densley packed urban slums.

I can feel I'm about to be accused by Mezla of using my oppressive intellectual stick again, but I'm just trying to explain a bit about it. Also I rue the day when I'm going to be told I'm wrong about urban history by a scientist, regardless of how clever she is and how many buses and trains she uses.

I don't think the reason people don't want a congestion charge is anything to do with selfishness or comfort per see not least to do with the cars. It is just short sighted ignorant penny pinching. If the system had existed from the start, as was promised, you would not have this problem. Turkeys aren't going to vote for Christmas, they aren't going to vote for a congestion charge when they have been let down by successive governments on public transport, then all they will have is a congestion charge they have to pay when public transport fails to produce the goods again.

[cerveza_fiesta]

I was reading an article on CBC awhile back (I looked and can't find it) concerning a small central european city that privatized their unprofitable, underused public transit system.

The private company who bought the system immediately made switch from large 40ft buses with infrequent service and circuitous routing to a system that employed twice the number of 20ft buses with more routes and redundancy. Express routes were extended to suburbs in an effort to bring in more short distance inter-city riders. Ridership jumped significantly along with revenue, and it now makes the operator a tidy profit...up from losing the original operator - the city - millions of dollars a year.

Things I can see as beneficial in the "short bus" type of sytem

• Better coverage of the city means riders don't need to walk as far to get to their stop. This means more people will consider the option
• Greater redundancy means people wait less time on average at stops. This also means more people will consider the public transit option.
• Shorter buses are a more manoeuvrable vehicle, making them less of a hazard and imedance to traffic.
• Loss of a single short bus due to mechanical problems means less impact on the grid functionality than the loss of a regular bus.
• The increase in emissions of running 2 bus engines instead of 1 to haul equal amounts of passengers would nominally be offset by increased ridership of the busses....meaning all the new riders cease using cars.
• Express routes that become popular could be switched back to the long-busses to accept the increased passenger load.
• Express buses would help de-congest artery routes in and out of the city center during morning and evening rush hour by taking as many cars as there are passengers off a given route.

Disadvantages would include

• Sudden spikes in ridership due to unforseen circumstancecs would be more difficult to handle. This could be addressed by having a few extra buses on standby to accept the extra passenger load when the need arises.
• Making a change in a city that already is committed to long busses would be difficult and require investment. 2 short busses cost more than 1 long bus...so even if the long buses were all sold to offset the cost of new busses, the project would require significant capital investment.
• Increased operational costs in terms of fuel, drivers and maintenance. The idea is that increased ridership from a better system would more than offset the increased overhead, but its an important consideration nonetheless.

Its really sad to jump on the bus in my city and see (at a maximum on morning rush hour) at most 1/2 the seats filled. During the day on off-rush hours, any given bus might have 3 riders. This indicates that the system is deeply flawed and isn't serving the needs of the populace. It needs to be changed before anybody is going to even entertain the idea of switching from cars.

I'm a firm believer (along with Cougar I think) that the operators of public transit have to lead on this one. Gas is cheap in N. America and road congestion hasn't reached anywhere near the typical UK levels. Until they address coverage, routing and service issues....people around here are going to keep using cars.

[Cougar]

I actually think the government and local authorities have to lead on this. Forced congestion charging, improved transport links to the city, subsidies for schemes that won't initially turn a profit etc. The situation has got too far now, people won't give up cars without a fight so we are going to have to make them. Make it cheaper (than driving) to use public transport and more reliable and you're on to a winner.

[Shinrei]

Privatized to make a profit, what a concept! The conservative types bitch about the liberals trying to take away their freedomz (in this case their cars) and the liberals bitch against privatization of anything just on principle.

cerveza's story suggests a possible solution for smaller to mid size cities at least, no?

[Shinrei]

Cougar, on 17 December 2009 - 02:30 PM, said:

I actually think the government and local authorities have to lead on this. Forced congestion charging, improved transport links to the city, subsidies for schemes that won't initially turn a profit etc. The situation has got too far now, people won't give up cars without a fight so we are going to have to make them. Make it cheaper (than driving) to use public transport and more reliable and you're on to a winner.

[Cougar]

Privatization of public service industries in this country, especially Rail networks has been one of the most outstanding case studies in ruinous public policy decision making imaginable. They have created less value for consumers with poorer service.

Sorry Shin, but it's gonna be the only way, people don't know what's good for them in the long run and to head your response of at the pass, yes, I do.

[Mezla PigDog]

Cougar, on 17 December 2009 - 02:30 PM, said:

Make it cheaper (than driving) to use public transport and more reliable and you're on to a winner.

I say make it too expensive for people to drive and force them onto public transportation as an angry mob. That's just what the rush hour needs.

My alternative plan is for more cars on the road to speed up global warming and swiftly bring about the end of mankind. Nothing is ever going to get fixed up anyway. We may as well go out in style.