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Chicago commuters would be nuts to drive downtown thru rush hour everyday-aggravation & wasted time of stop & go traffic and criminally exorbitant parking fees when they arrived. The subway got me from Logan Square to the near west side UofI campus in relative comfort in 15minutes-- it would've been a 45 minute drive.---In fact, I used to hop on the subway to study in the hot weather before air conditioning was so prevalent.
OTOH- when I was a kid in the 50s, you could ride a street car for literally pennies. Now, thanks to govt labor unions, it costs a couple bucks-- a significant chunk of an hourly minimum wage. That needs to be fixed to encourage greater ridership.
As far as the original question of the thread about the fallacy of the article-- the author is comparing apples to oranges-- he takes over all costs vs. passenger miles of pub trans 24-hr service to the commute in cars. The numbers would change to favor pub trans if ridership increased in off-peak hours.
Anecdote about the CTA-- I had a friend who drove a bus on the Mich Ave route, before the days of cell phones. "I had a small fender bender with a guy who pulled out of a parking place without looking and clipped me. It was about midnight and there was only one sleeping drunk on the bus. I got out and went looking for a phone to report the accident. When I got back in 15 minutes, it was standing room only on board and everyone was holding their necks and grimacing."
A coworker (I work in the suburbs now) tells me that her old parking lot downtown is up to $42 a day for parking. Who can afford that on top of the expressway tolls, gas, and aggravation of driving downtown? It is probably $250-275 a month to commute from one of the farthest flung Metra stations, which you’d easily spend in a week driving. FWIW, my area has buses to/from the train station but only during peak hours because the lots have limited parking.
Tell that to all the people in the big Northeast Metros. People from the minimum wage earner , to Executive is on transit. Not all regions of the country, see transit thru your description.
Most of the places that are mid-sized or larger have public transportation. Whether it is efficient or will get you to where you want to go is another question. I do know people who have managed to live in mid-sized cities with suboptimal public transport who have used it to get downtown. The issue is that for people who don’t live downtown or who are in more suburban locations, public transport is usually a bust.
To be effective you need to have an integrated payment system. We do now and it makes using the system so much easier. We have our opal cards and tap on and off on trains, public and privately owned buses, ferries and light rail. The trip planners online are really good and you know exactly which bus to wait for and where.
The system patronage is increasing so rapidly that they had to introduce a new train timetable last year.
Many cities are moving away from diesel buses to low emmision buses, and the same is true of taxis and other vehices.
The doo gooders in big cities are busy taking away lanes from cars and giving them to one in a million bikers but have no qualm running dirty diesel buses all day. Why aren't all city buses electric? That's one segment that hybrid/electric should work nicely.
That's right. Most of the country doesn't, that's why I mentioned the most transit oriented. The Northeast.
Almost any reasonably urban area has decent public transportation. Rural areas are not served even in the northeast.
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