> > > Interesting to note that the very idea of public transport evidently didn't occur to eric. Is that a common reaction in America? In England it would occur and be instantly dismissed because of the poor state of the system.

I know that the line "in America" is intended to include "The United States of" but I'm going to throw in the Canadian perspective on this one. I'm also going to delete heavily from previous posts because they aren't relevant to my own.

> The wonderful freedom of an automobile is that you can go relatively anywhere. Trains and subways run in pre-determined directions at pre-determined times...and you'd need to live within walking distance to the subway/train depot too.

In Canada, we take this one step further. As must of you probably know, Canada has very low population density, and most of our population lives very close to the US border (simply because the futher north one goes, the less inhabitable our nation gets). If you are in a city and only need to travel around within that city, public transit may be acceptable. (More on that later.) If you need to travel between cities, though, public transit loses its appeal. The first issue is distance--there are three major cities here which I would consider to be "close" to me. Lethbridge, where my ex-girlfriend went to university, is 200 kilometres away; Medicine Hat, where my parents live, is 285 kilometres away; and Edmonton, the provincial capital (where Kaz! lives) is about 300 kilometres away. With those sorts of distances, the concept of commuter trains is almost completely infeasible because of economics. Regular trains might work, but are simply not used (for reasons I am not completely sure about--perhaps not enough interest). The other options are the big inter-city bus lines like Greyhound and Red Arrow. Red Arrow is pretty good--relatively inexpensive and frequent departues--but they have very few routes. In fact, they may only run from Edmonton to Calgary and back. I know that they do NOT run from Calgary to Lethbridge or Medicine Hat. Greyhound runs to every little community in Alberta, but Greyhound has infrequent departures to a lot of places, and a lot of "milk runs" where they stop at every little town on the way to deliver parcels. Such a milk run can take up to twice as long as the same drive would take in a car travelling at the speed limit.

Some comparisons from my own experience: When I was in university, I used to take the Greyhound to get home for holidays and such, and when I finished and got a job, I bought a car. With Greyhound, I would pay about $100 to get to Medicine Hat and back; with the car, the gas costs me about $20 (maybe as much as $30 with the present inflated gasoline prices). If a second person is travelling by bus, your price doubles, of course; by car, the cost doesn't change. By bus, you have to follow their schedule, which may require depature at 2 AM and take six hours; by car, you leave when you want and take three hours to get there. By bus, your luggage must all be packed carefully and is limited to two pieces and a carry-on; by car, you take whatever you want to bring. For me, that has even included my cat--litterbox in the trunk with a seat folded down, food and water on the floor in the passenger side. Such an arrangement would be out of the question on the bus. Anyway, the point here is that if one ever wants to travel outside one's own city in Canada, it is almost necessary to have a car. The economics alone make that the case.

> ...which of course makes it harder and more expensive to add any kind of mass transit later. Things are more spread out. But enough history/urban geography.

Calgary is interesting in that way--our new development regions are desgined with extra-wide traffic arteries to allow for future addition of light rail transit lines. Downtown, they simply shut down one of the streets and converted it to public transit use only. Everywhere that the light rail transit does not run, we tend to have bussing available.

> One of the (relatively new) light rail lines here in Los Angeles ends virtually at the back door of my workplace, but I've never used it. Why? Because I'd have to drive 20 minutes to get to a station, then ride the train for another 45 minutes to get to work. Driving my own car directly takes me just 40 minutes with more privacy and comfort.

I have been very lucky with my bussing. For my entire university career (except the first month) I had access to busses no more than two blocks from my home which took no more than fifteen minutes to get to the university and dropped me off right outside the engineering bulding. I was not typical in this, though. With work, I live half a block away from a rush hour only bus that dropped me off right beside the buliding I worked in, and an all day bus two blocks from my home which dropped me off on the other side of my building. Again, though, I was extraordinarily lucky. As well, parking in downtown Calgary is bad enough that the time it would take to drive down, find parking, and then walk from the parking spot to my building would be more than the time it would take to simply bus down, and the bus pass cost $50 a month while parking every day was about $240 a month (which I learned during our transit strike). Overall, our transit system sounds pretty good, if you base it on my experience.

Some of my friends have had different experiences. If you live in the wrong community, you may be served by a shuttle bus which runs once an hour and stops running at 7 PM. This shuttle bus only gets you to a point where you can transfer to another bus (which you may not connect with perfectly) which will take you to a third bus which actually takes you where you want to go (again, the connection may not be timed right). If you want to do something in the evening, you're out of luck. If it's winter, you may spend an hour or more standing out in the wind in -30ºC temperatures. When the bus is late (which it often is in winter) you either go home and miss the bus, or you keep waiting in the cold. Even with my single bus trips, I often had problems with long waits in cold weather.

For a simpler example of the problems with our public transit system, imagine the issue of grocery shopping. I am curious as to what goes on in Europe for grocery trips, since my experiences with public transit and shopping have been poor. I found that I had to go shopping at least twice a week, simply so that each trip had few enough groceries purchased that I could actually carry them home on the bus. Since you cannot schedule for the end of your shopping trip, you can often end up waiting at the bus stop with your groceries for quite a while, which is a real pain in the winter. Now that I have a car, I tend to go shopping when I want to. I bring my roommates with me, most of the time, and we buy as much as we want. I cannot begin to describe how much happier I am with this arrangement.

> > The bottom line, I guess, is that if you're wondering about what "Americans" think of this issue, you won't get a consensus.

That's for sure.

One final thought: I don't use my car very much. For environmental reasons, as well as the price of gas, I tend to use public transit for commuting to work. However, pretty much any trip that is NOT a regular commute will be made by car, simply because of the inherent flaws in our public transit system. Most of these flaws are probably due to the sprawling nature of my city. Public transit to the downtown core is fine, since we have a lot of people and businesses there, but getting around from suburb to suburb is very difficult.

There is a lot more I could say on this subject, but I think I've said enough to make my point about Canada--or at least, the sprawling cities of western Canada. Maybe some other time, I'll talk about how terrains like farmland, forests, and tundra have affected our city placement.

> koala"going to go wash my car now"mom

Don "Breakfast and a shower--my favorite mid-afternoon pastime" Monkey