From: lip@s1.gov (Loren I. Petrich)
Subject: Re: The Decline of America: Energy Policy (II)
Organization: LLNL
Date: Mon, 5 Oct 1992 05:33:27 GMT

In article <CINDY.92Oct4211320@solan10.solan.unit.no> cindy@solan10.solan.unit.no (Cynthia Kandolf) writes:
>Mark Wilson writes:
@ In article <CINDY.92Sep27152546@solan10.solan.unit.no>
@ cindy@solan10.solan.unit\.no (Cynthia Kandolf) writes:
@ 
@ >There's still another issue, however, and that issue is space.
@ >Say an average bus or light rail car holds 40 people.  That bus
@ >takes up much less space on the road than 40 cars each holding one
@ >person.
@ 
@ It seems to me that you are assuming that all buses will be filled to
@ capacity all of the time.
>[much more deleted]
>
>I apologize if the rest of the post, deleted from Mr. Wilson's
>follow-up, didn't make it clear that i was talking about heavy
>traffic situations, specifically rush hour, and parking situations
>in high-density areas of cities like downtown business districts.
>These are the situations in which space is the biggest problem.
>I am well aware that buses are typically not full at mid-day and on
>the last few runs of the night (although on Fridays and Saturdays
>here, that last bus can be packed!).  During those times it doens't
>matter much as far as space goes whether people chose mass or
>individual transportation, but that doesn't eliminate the advantages
>of a good mass transportation system for those times when space
>_does_ matter.

	That's certainly correct.

	And as to bus usage, that accords well with my experience.
Here in Livermore, the main trunk route (from Livermore to nearby
Pleasanton and Dublin) usually has a lot of riders, while the buses to
other areas, like the local bus I take, usually doesn't have many
riders at all, sometimes only me.

	Although that certainly does look wasteful, I see even more
examples of wastefulness as I watch _lots_ of people driving pickup
trucks when simple 2-door cars could do.

@ As you expand the mass transit system, you will have to start serving
>areas
@ where not as many people live or work.  As the people density starts
>to
@ drop, you will start to have difficulty keeping the buses full.  This
>will
@ cut into the efficiency of the mass transit system.

>Combination systems, where people take individual transportation (i.e.
>cars, bikes, and so forth) to areas where they can join up with a mass
>system going in to downtown, are an option here.  Again, this keeps
>the main roads from being overcrowded by too many people riding one 
>per car, and allows the cars to be parked in areas where space is
>less of a problem than it is downtown.  

	The most common such compromise is the park-and-ride lot,
usually found near a major bus or rail line. Here in the Bay Area,
BART's management has gotten a lot of criticism for investing heavily
in park-and-ride lots and garages, but it's better that cars stay in
suburbs like Colma or Hayward or El Cerrito rather than go into core
areas like Oakland or San Francisco.

	Public transit can actually stimulate concentrated
development, by making it easy for large numbers of people to converge
on small areas. Thus, a before-and-after picture pair of downtown San
Francisco shows lots of tall buildings near the BART line there --
after it was built. Concentrated development has the nice feature of
putting a lot of facilities in easy walking distance of each other, as
well as not taking up too much land.

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