Re: A Republican!!!!!! (was Re: OT: sponge burning!)

["s. keeling" <keeling@spots.ab.ca>]

charlie derr <cderr@simons-rock.edu>:
>  
>  I think it does a great disservice to the planet and those who
>  will live on it in the future to dismiss public transportation as 
>  "inferior" (at least as long as "personal transportation" mostly
>  means "personal internal combustion engines").

<screed>
Have you actually used public/mass transit lately, during rush hour,
to get from one side of a city to the other, day after day, leaving and
arriving _reliably_ within predictable time frames?  For extra spice,
add in winter.  To really get your blood boiling, make it a Canadian
winter.

Until you can answer yes to that, you're at best an Ivory Tower
socialist dreamer.  As you're (I assume) using Debian Linux, you
obviously know how badly engineered solutions work out there in the
real world these days.  Why would you expect something as complex,
expensive, and so prone to human error as a mass transit system to
work in a reliably usable fashion?  It can't, and doesn't.

No, an SUV in every driveway doesn't scale well either, for many
reasons.  But if you're too poor to afford one, and find yourself
having to use mass transit on a regular basis (getting to work,
dropping kids off at daycare, shopping, $LIFE), I guarantee you'll
learn to despise everything about it after only a few days of trying
to use it.

If you live in Kansas, or Saskatchewan, a bicycle works much better,
costs a lot less, and is reliable.  Other than that minor subset, mass
transit is an execrable so-called solution.  If all you have to do is
walk to a subway station, then catch a train to your destination, that
may be usable.  On the other hand ($REAL_WORLD), if you have to catch
a feeder bus to get to the station, then another feeder bus to get
from the train to your destination, you can easily find yourself
wasting three to five hours a day either standing around waiting or
commuting (and possibly freezing).  24 hr/day - 4 hr commute - 8 hr
working - 8 hr sleeping == 4.0 hours left in which to shop, spend time
with family, read d-u, cook, clean, pay bills, $LIFE.  Good luck with
that idea you had about taking a course to upgrade your skills.
That'll burn up that 4 hours easily, if you can fit it into the
schedule at all.

Mass transit is a joke perpetrated by greens and politicos.
Eliminating constraints on _privately run_ mass transit might be a
solution that works (cf. "Jitney", or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Share_taxi), but
that sort of thing scares "sheeple", and doesn't get politicos
elected.
</screed>


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