Thought Patterns
by Emanuel
May 24, 2008 at 23:08
filed under art+design+technology, economics, rant, read
Tagged books
I was sent this photo by a friend of mine not too long ago and it got me thinking about how optimistic it was. An image is worth a thousand words we often say, but is the message as black and white in this case as it might appear? For full disclosure, I should mention that I do not own a car, by choice, and that I am a happy member of the local car co-op and frequently use Vancouver’s public transit system, when biking isn’t an option.
Green House Gas emissions have been all over the news these past months/years and if not inciting people to do something about their carbon footprint in their own lives, at the very least it is making sure everyone is aware of the acronym GHG and its nasty effects. As per the photo above, depicting an optimal situation for a bus which would be filled to near-capacity, you would hope that mass transit would make perfect sense, but does it?
Not if you ask Globe and Mail columnist Neil Reynolds, who’s Wednesday and Friday columns this week were based on a report by senior fellow of the libertarian CATO institute Randal O’Toole. Reynolds is the same fellow who wrote a column a few weeks ago incredibly suggesting that taking you car to the market was a smarter choice than walking there, carbon footprint wise.
So what’s in his case? Well it is a two prong attack: firstly he claims most buses operate at an average capacity of 10 or less passengers over the course of day, and the buses need to service distant urban/sub-urban areas that do not have a dense population. Furthermore, the reduces frequency of service in these areas, one might assume, will further reduce ridership of the local transit. It is true that I have often witnessed only a few people in some buses along the routes I take but living myself close to the downtown core this is rather rare, at all hours of the day. The report in question denotes some pretty disappointing figures of transit systems in US urban areas, although the current and on-going hikes in the costs of petrol will certainly encourage more people to use mass transit. His second point is that fierce competition for market share has forced auto makers to offer ‘greener’ technologies and more efficient vehicles while mass transit contracts are obtained via the usual politicking shmoozing and hence no need for better technologies or more efficient buses since it is only the tax payers’ money that we’re talking about and bribes decide what gets purchased. The rising costs of petrol might also hopefully change this if people ever become enlightened to their citizen responsibilities.
Either or, the point is that when it comes to GHG, the solution is obviously not simple and there are not clear-cut answers but the ones that we can all take on a daily basis. Think global, act local has been diluted through too much usage, as slogans over counter-revolutions will often become (think ‘make love, not war’ or ‘religion is the opium of the masses’), yet each of us individually can choose to make a difference. Lastly, as I wanted to highlight with this post, the choices we make might not always be as black & white as we think – although in this case choosing to use mass transit will increase ridership which should be better since it will keep pollution from other forms of transportation non-existent, the very simple point Mr. Reynolds fails to see
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Thought Patterns
on June 30, 2008 at 21:08
[...] made mention about my membership in Vancouver’s original non-profit car sharing Co-op before and, although the very commendable news that the City of Vancouver will be using the Co-op’s [...]