dennis@home muttered:


"magwitch" wrote in message
...
The Natural Philosopher muttered:

magwitch wrote:
Huge muttered:

On 2006-11-01, magwitch wrote:

Just giving drivers a fuel allowance/ration would *force* them to make
alternative arrangements, i.e. car sharing, using the buses etc.
As I always suspected; PT weenies want to see people herded onto
their appalling "service" with whips.

How about making the PT sufficiently attractive that people *want*
to use it?

Doesn't need to be attractive for me, but the PT we have now:
unavailable,
unreliable, uncomfortable and expensive is the way things are, and
probably
the way PT will stay, because at the moment people have a comfortable,
reliable, relatively cheap alternative: endless car travel, which
happens to
be damaging the planet.

So make it relatively expensive then...

Yes, fuel consumption _should_ be made relatively expensive. Just
gradually
up the duty on petrol, as they were doing until a few years ago, giving
society time to adapt and using the extra money solely on public transport
nation-wide.


Buses and trains aren't green you know!
In the west Midlands buses generate more pollution than cars (I expect
elsewhere is the same).
You see hundreds of them running around with no passengers just generating
pollution at five-ten times the rate that the cars do.
At least with cars the thing is being used for a journey, with buses/trains
they are just making a scheduled trip.

AFAICS the only time buses and trains save pollution is during the rush hour
and then only on the routes with lots of passengers.
Running a frequent service any other time is just adding to the pollution.

Now who is going to use an infrequent service?
How are you going to run the service outside rush hour without just
polluting?


Think back to 1987 and the hurricane. Imagine having one of those every few
years or so. It stopped everything for weeks... cars, trains buses, power
supply, water supplies.

With the leaves still on the trees and temperature into the 70s most of this
October it would only have taken an severe anticyclone to bring chaos. I was
surprised we didn't get another one.