TELECOM Digest OnLine - Sorted: Re: Clean Technology Bigger than Internet Claims Bill Joy

Re: Clean Technology Bigger than Internet Claims Bill Joy

AES (siegman@stanford.edu)
Wed, 16 May 2007 16:55:23 -0700

In article <telecom26.135.8@telecom-digest.org>, hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com
wrote:

> But the big problem is that we are forced to drive, we live and work
> in sprawl where public transit doesn't exist or won't work. Trains
> are far more efficient than autos but we kill off our trains. Amtrak
> could be time competitive and far more energy efficient on regional
> trips but we starve Amtrak and make it unattractive. The few places
> Amtrak was allowed to improve service were huge successes with greatly
> increased patronage.

YES!!!

Anyone who's had the chance to live in a European city with good
public transit knows that the availability of a good, reliable,
well-planned, integrated public transit system is not just more energy
efficient (and also more economical) -- its availability, and all the
individual and commercial and social responses and asaptations that
society makes to its availability, also combine to make everyday life
simply immensely more pleasant in innumerable ways.

Trouble is, there's a chicken-and-egg problem: you have to have the
whole integrated system and the associated personal, social, and
commercial adjustments to get the benefits; but until you have the
system, the associated responses don't happen; and until you have the
responses and adaptations, the transit system can't be built and be
economically viable.

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