I was on a bus this afternoon, and I was furious. It was baking hot, stupidly crowded, and taking much, much longer than the journey I was making should have.
And I sat there, fuming (I was, at least, sitting down).
I was furious with all the car drivers who, each in their individual cars, were causing this hold-up by insisting on driving into / out of a city centre. Drivers who were probably all also annoyed by the traffic jam without ever stopping to think that
they are part of the jam and that the jam is made up of people like
them. It is not other people causing the jam, it is everybody in their car who is
in the jam. If you are a car in a jam, you
are the jam.
If all of those people were on buses, my bus would have sailed down the city's streets without hindrance. And not only that, if all of those people were on buses there would be
more buses, with better provision and frequency.
If all of those people were even car-sharing - if each car in the queue held 4 or 5 people, as they are (mostly) designed to - then there would have been a quarter or a fifth of the cars, leading to much less of a hellish standstill.
But no. Individual people in individual cars. One after the next after the next after the next. Causing me and the 30 other people on my bus to get stressed and annoyed and uncomfortable and hot and vowing to never leave the house again.
I was absolutely furious. I wanted to write this but figured it would make me some enemies. I'm less furious now, but I'm more aware that making enemies is always a risk for someone like me, and that this blog is here so I can say this stuff. You can read or not.
Public transport needs extra money, but many of those who dismiss public transport out of hand have never been near a bus for years. They don't have the first idea what it's like. And, to be honest, the more people who use buses, trains, coaches, the more money will be ploughed into these provisions, and the better the services will be. I am the first to admit that public transport is not perfect, but carrying on driving your polluting, cluttering, dangerous, arrogant car around causes many, many more problems than the odd late bus.
World Carfree Network(Disclaimer of sorts, incomplete: I know that there are people who really do need cars more than others - those who are disabled and particularly those in rural communities with poor public transport. I'm not talking about those people.)---
Technorati tags: anti-car; public transport; incurable_hippie; traffic jams; rant.
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