My father-in-law has often wondered out loud how much a city like ours (about 250,000 with surrounding areas) actually spends on public transportation. We have many buses scooting around town, powered by natural gas but most of the time they have only a hand full of people in them. With a pretty limited schedule the buses are used predominately by those who need them most, those with disabilities who cannot drive themselves and those who cannot afford other transportation. I have a few ideas that might work to reduce the amount of huge empty buses.
1) Volunteer drivers - This would/could only fill part of the gap, but perhaps we could call on the good citizens of our town to drive each other in time of need. You could need to set up volunteers who could adopt a person in need or have a hotline that people could call and have volunteers drive over to pick them up and drop them off.
2) Smaller Buses - This one is pretty easy, the smaller the bus the smaller the initial cost, smaller the fuel bill and less empty space.
3) Cut back on regular routes, run busy routes more frequently and fill in gaps with Transportation Taxi's
Question:
Have you ever used your current public transportation? If so what was your experience like?
I rode the bus to work daily when I lived in Phoenix. The buses were typically full during rush hour in the morning and evening, but empty during the day, so the city had to have vehicles big enough to accomodate the heavy-use periods.
ReplyDeleteI think the biggest problem with this public service is not the oversupply of vehicles, but the lack of demand. In America, people simply like to drive their own car more than sharing space with others. This creates more pollution and traffic than necessary. If more people used public transportation, the routes could run more frequently, go more places, and cost less. So the real question is how to get people to use it more? Boh! I don't know! How about requiring everyone who owns a car to volunteer time as a bus driver once per month? :-)