Re: Cars make more economic sense than transit: fact

[Iskandar Baharuddin <brengsek@highway1.com.au>]

Forg wrote:
> 
> Mark Gibson wrote:
> ...
> > Mass transit is generally a major scam perpetrated upon innocent taxpayers.
> > The fact that it rarely pays for itself and the fact that most people
> > rarely, if ever, use it strongly support my point.
> >
> > If all mass transit disappeared tomorrow, society might be inconvenienced
> > for a few weeks, but life would go on.  If private road-based motor vehicular
> > traffic disappeared tomorrow, society would be well on its way to oblivion
> > within a week.  Face facts.  We don't need mass transit to get by.  Those
> > few places that do are overcrowded and would benefit more by reducing their
> > population density.
> ...
> 
> Mate, you're living in a dream world. The entire financial structure of
> the world would collapse; all the major financial centres are in major
> cities that could not operate without public transport. Even Sydney is
> not big on a global scale, and single-day train strikes make the place
> grind to a halt; and that's just one form of public transport. I haven't
> seen any figures for daily use, but for the peak hour there are 5 or so
> lines, with 1000 people per train every 3-5 minutes; let's say 15000 per
> line in that hour, or 75000 extra cars you would put on the road during
> that single hour. There is NO WAY that wouldn't turn the
> already-polluted city into a big smog-blanket, let alone the fact that
> doubling the width of the roads wouldn't help (which you couldn't do
> overnight one night, anyway).

Not if the government allowed pay-to-use car pools. There are
quite a few people who would be prepared to invest in vans or
minibuses to ferry paying passengers in and out, 7 to 20 at a
time, at a price to be negotiated.

However, at present this would be an economic crime.

> 
> Sure, you need both. But more cars, in their current form, basically
> means more dead people.

Have you checked the stats lately? Fatalities have been coming
down steadily.

Do you want to ban cars because they are not perfect yet? Or do
you want to set a deadline for perfection?

> 
> Of course public transport doesn't pay for itself, it isn't supposed to.
> Are you saying that you pay, directly, for the roads you use? Sheesh!!

Of course we do. Where do you live? Car drivers pay considerably
more that the cost of building and maintaining roads and
bridges.


-- 
Regards,

Izzy

"Stop the world - I want to get off!"