Cars are great, right? They're so convenient.
I mean, you can just get in and drive around
until you have to find parking, or pay for gas, or get stuck in traffic.
And also, did you know how much CO2 our national driving habit produces every year?
One trillion metric tons.
That sounds made up. It's not.
And also, air pollution, largely from cars and trucks, causes up to 30,000 premature deaths a year.
You have to do more than give people reasons not to drive.
We have to actually give them good options to get around.
And in the vast majority of the United States, we don't have those. But why?
Ben writes about this for Grist all the time. You should give him a call.
That's not a bad idea.
Hello?
Hi Ben, it's Eve.
Who?
Eve! Eve from work.
Oh, hi Eve.
Ben, we need you to tell us why U.S. mass transit sucks.
OK, sure. Well, our mass transit systems are centered in cities,
but in our biggest metropolitan areas,
nearly three times as many people live in the suburbs. And suburbs are mostly
zoned for sprawl. Suburbs aren't dense enough or designed for walking.
Basically, the suburbs were built for cars. Newer American cities have largely been built like suburbs,
and even a lot of older cities, in trying to compete with the suburbs, were retrofitted to accommodate cars,
which made it even harder for their transit systems to have enough ridership.
So, residents tend to demand policies that cater to their needs as drivers, so you
end up perpetuating a lack of public transit that's not only terrible for
emissions and for air quality, but also just doesn't work for low-income
households that can't afford the cost of buying a car and having insurance and gas.
What? I thought mass transit was getting more popular!
Well, ridership is at its highest point since 1956, but still only
five percent of the population uses public transit to commute to work.
That doesn't mean there aren't cities doing a lot to make transit work:
Chicago, Denver, Minneapolis, even Los Angeles --
which is the most famously car- obsessed city in the country --
all have new transit projects underway.
I bet Heather can explain how cities improve their transit systems.
You should give her a call.
Sure, Ben, thanks a lot. Yeah, I'll give her a call.
Uh, bye.
Hi Eve.
Hey, Heather, what's up? Oh, so just FYI, that was a raccoon in the vent.
Thanks for all your help with that. Oh, so we're trying to figure out
how we can actually make our mass transit systems better.
Just wanted to call and get your input on that.
Wow, I'm so glad you asked!
America spends a lot of money building stuff for cars, which I'm sure comes as a huge surprise.
Most of our national support for mass transit comes out of something called
the Highway Trust Fund. Only about 15 percent of the trust fund goes to mass transit.
One way that we could fix this would be by raising the gas tax --
and both Democrats and Republicans have tried to do this. However, it's really hard because
there's some people with a lot of corporate money that do their best to
block it every time a gas tax comes up. You really gotta show up and vote,
and you've got to do it in the really boring local elections. You have to do a lot of
research and read and annoying alt weekly articles and stuff to get a sense of
what's going on. The federal money that we talked about goes to state and local
governments, and so local people actually are the people who asked for it, and they
decide how it gets spent. And, you should also just show up at city meetings whenever
there's something transit-related that's happening.
But really, you've just got to use public transit more often. You really won't know
how it could be better until you know how it works.
Shoot! Well, I guess I better go get on a bus, then.
Uh, Eve? I don't think we can park here...
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