My personal assessment is that there is no more vile waste of time than being stuck in traffic, burning gas and time. So I've generally minimized my personal transportation costs and stresses by telecommuting that is, working out of my home. But the environmental advantages to getting out of our cars are formidable as well. Cars do it Automobiles contribute to air pollution, global warming and water pollution through their emissions. About 20 percent of ozone and about one-third of carbon dioxide emissions in the United States come from the automobile.
Transportation is also a consumer of land.
Hundreds of thousands of acres of wetlands were lost to freeways before there was a mitigation policy. We continue to lose natural wetlands to freeways and replace them with constructed wetlands, which science hasn't proven really work. Transportation also consumes farmland and is a progenitor of urban sprawl, which takes farmland and open space and leads to more driving, which leads to more of everything else. Figuring it out The first key to my downtown transportation happiness was an arrangement between the county and the trolley system. Racks in the jury lounge had all the latest trolley, bus and train schedules.