[Leica] Re: Small cars

[msmall at aya.yale.edu (Marc James Small)]

At 11:08 PM 4/26/06 -0400, Don Dory wrote:
>Marc,
>Not everyone would have to change.  As I said, small changes by large
>numbers of people can have a huge impact.  Here in Atlanta, the existing
>limited train is not used by many people out of fear of "them".  One of our
>most congested roads had the train line extended out with a express bus line
>going even further out.  It is currently little used but possibly will be
>more used as people at the margin try the less expensive option.
>
>My personal transportation choice are all manual four cylinder versions that
>get fuel economy in the same range as yours.  When we replace my wife's
>Civic in four or five years hopefully a hydrogen vehicle will be available.


Don

You and I are close on this evaluation and I'm not arguing with you.  But
the circumstances in Atlanta, Georgia, do not apply to most of the US, and
I just do not see any significant number of people turning to mass transit
outside of the areas where it is already in place and functional.  This is
mainly a matter of cost but, as you note, mass transit has come to be seen
as vehicles for the dispossessed and so many of the middle class have
difficulties with using it.  I grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in the
1960's, and we then enjoyed a wide web of street cars and buses which
allowed me to travel all over the urban area without a problem.  But, then,
in those days the Presidents of Gulf Oil and Westinghouse and Alcoa and US
Steel rode street cars to work (they all lived in the same town as I did).
H J Heinz, also from that town, rode the street car.  It was just a part of
life.  Hell, when you went to a Pirates game or to see the Steelers, you
rode the West Liberty car out to watch it, as there just was no parking at
either Forbes Field or Pitt Stadium.  Today, there is ONE street car line
left in Pittsburgh, the one I grew up riding downtown for choir practice
and the like, and the bus routes have shrunk by 3/4.  That magnificent web
of bus and street car I knew as a kid is long gone.  (We lived in three
different houses in Pittsburgh:  in every case, I could walk less than a
block, get a bus to a street car stop, and then get downtown, where other
street cars and buses made the entire city at hand, and we only paid a
single fare, as transfers were then the norm.  As a kid, I rode for five
cents;  when I turned fourteen in 1964, that went up to a dime -- that's,
respectively, thirty cents and sixty cents in today's money -- but today a
ride on mass transit in Pittsburgh runs something on the order of $2.50 and
there are no transfers, so each leg is another dive into the pocket, and
exact change only, mind you.

The town in which I now live, Roanoke, Virginia, tore out its street cars
in 1945 and the bus routes are primarily connectors of shopping centers and
downtown.  The system is not very attractive for use by an office worker
living in, say, Raleigh Court or Virginia Heights:  yes, they can walk some
many blocks to their nearest bus stop and wait 20 minutes for a bus and
then be dropped off five or six blocks from where they work.  But since the
commute is around two miles and adequate parking is available, gas will
REALLY have to go through the roof to get the City Fathers to expand the
bus service and to get that office worker to make the shift to a mass media
system they regard as ineffective, inefficient, and expensive.

There are things that CAN be done, of course.  What about allowing folks a
Federal tax deduction for work commutes on mass transit?  That might be a
spur, as they cannot deduct their automobile expensives for to-and-from
work travel.  Other thoughts are percolating about, but, unless these are
adopted, we are stuck in the system we have created over the past thirty or
forty years.

Marc

msmall@aya.yale.edu 
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