Re: Cars make more economic sense than transit: fact

["Matt Cremer" <Matthew.Cremer@Aspect.com.au>]

Iskandar Baharuddin wrote in message <379D8950.37C3DD99@highway1.com.au>...
>Forg wrote:
...
>> 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.
...

But isn't that public transport? Sounds a helluva lot like public
transport to me; you know, where you go & get on a bus with a
bunch of people you don't know, you pay a price for the
journey ...

...
>> 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.
...

[Wheze, cough, splutter]
Why, I hadn't actually seen an improvement in the colour of the Sydney
sky-line.
[Choke, gag, cough]
But that could just be my [flutter, wheeze] imagination.

...
>> 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.
...

Uh-huh. But what about the amount of damage that someone using
public transport _doesn't_ do to a roadway? The amount of roadage
that _isn't_ required to be built, because someone is using public
transport. It's a bit like a free service I'm doing you ...


-Forg (Elsewhere)