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Using Public Transportation

It’s 7:30 AM and I just arrived in Whitefish, MT. My back may be a bit stiff, but I’m not tired, groggy or angry at the general public for lacking winter driving skills. Matter of fact, by taking LINK Transit from my home town of Leavenworth, WA, to nearby Wenatchee, and then Amtrak from Wenatchee to Whitefish, I covered almost 450 miles in about 11 hours (matter of fact the train even arrived early) getting from point A to point B entirely by public transit and not missing a wink of sleep nor time spent skiing.

Sure I could have driven myself and shortened the trip by about 4 hours, and in the process saving about $10 one-way. But if I think about the gas station meal plan and cheap coffee to sustain driving boredom through eastern Washington and the panhandle of Idaho through western Montana, I just don’t think it would have been worth it. Not to mention the wear and tear of my already beaten down car.

But who really cares about how I got from there to here anyway…that’s not the point. The point is is that we, as in Americans, lack the ability to disown our automobile for even the slightest inconvenience. I mean, we may be late for…something…or maybe we need to stop by the store and pick up…something…because we just may want it…for some reason…

Don’t get me wrong, I drive my car more often than I would like to, but I’m pretty confident that if the general public would adopt the use of alternative modes of transportation our mental and environmental health would be much better off. Obviously there’s more to it than that, as the town, city or state needs to realize and assist in making such projects a reality. I’ve lived in Seattle for many years and I’m appalled at how inefficient and completely lacking, public transit is in that city. And because of this, the majority of commuters would rather sit in bumper-to-bumper traffic, sip their coffee and stare at each other. Good thing Seattle has some great radio stations.

So I spent a couple minutes trying to dig up some beta on public transit and here’s what I found:

• There is some good news – use of public transit is up 22% in the last six years – www.apta.com
• The National Safety Council estimates that riding the bus is over 170 times safer than automobile travel (although this doesn’t guarantee you won’t be spit on during your bus ride)
• As for a cleaner environment, public health and energy conservation:
  • vehicles account for about 50% of air pollution nationwide — even higher in polluted cities.
  • surfaces paved to accommodate more traffic result in increased urban runoff, which is responsible for:
           
     

    • 55% of environmentally impaired ocean shorelines

    • 46% of impaired estuary shore miles
    • 21% of impaired lake shore miles
  • Public transportation reduces annual emissions of the pollutants that create smog—volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and nitrogen oxides (NOx)—by more than 70,000 tons and 27,000 tons respectively. These reductions equal:
    • nearly 50% of all VOCs emitted from the dry cleaning industry, a
                  major source of this pollutant
    • 45% of VOCs emitted from the industrial uses of coal
    • 50% of NOx from the industrial uses of coal
    • more than 33% of the NOx emitted by all domestic oil and gas producers
                  or by the metal processing industry
         

So instead of going into ANWR (Artic National Wildlife Reserve) and raping the landscape for a a somewhat small amount of oil, why not simply CONSUME LESS.

Need more:

• Public transportation already saves more than 855 million gallons of gasoline or 45 million barrels of oil a year.
• If all Americans who take transit to work drove alone, they would fill a nine-lane freeway from Boston to Los Angeles.

The above public transit tidbits come from one source I quickly uncovered – http://www.apta.com so understandably, and rightly so, there will be critics. Of course, if you enjoy spending 36 hours a year in traffic delays than by all means keep on driving.
 

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Posted on Thursday, January 11th, 2007 at 10:59 am. Filed under: advocacy RSS 2.0 feed.

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