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Less Road More Bullet Train
Building more roads doesn't work, say traffic experts -- the capacity
of more highways to breed more traffic has been widely observed: "by
adding capacity to a crowded [highway] network you could actually slow
things down." Still, highway-building proceeds apace, prompting some
federal highway officials to predict that congestion will quadruple in
the next twenty years. What
we need is a bullet train, eh folks?
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Latest
Transportation News
Commuters put in an average of ten forty-hour weeks behind the wheel each
year, says Bullet Train researcher, Dr. Tor McPhor. And this is just one
quarter of our time spent behind the wheel. The rest is divided between
errands (dropping off car-bound children, picking up the dry cleaning)
and amusement (driving to the restaurant or the gym). This constant round
of errands, drop-offs, and pick-ups mainly affects women.
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Society
News
"[The
private car] is a State subsidy equivalent to giving each car user a free
pass for the whole year for all public transport, a new bike every five
years and 15,000 kilometers of first class rail travel," says The
Guardian, in response to a recent Heidelberg study.
Nearly half
the elderly in rural areas are in poor health; 60% are not licensed to
drive. "I deplore the national tragedy of drive-fly-or-rot that turns
vital human beings into prisoners with no one to talk to and nowhere to
go," says writer Paula Boyer.
"A poor
Roxbury mother taking mass transit at rush hour pays for 80 percent of
her costs a few miles in the inner city. A stockbroker driving his BMW
to the suburbs at that peak congestion period pays only 20 percent....That's
tacit car welfare," says Douglas Foy, Director, Conservation Law
Foundation.
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