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US spends billions on roads rather than public transport in ‘climate time bomb’
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 01 Mar 2024
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No need to spend so many billions of taxpayer money expanding roads if people use buses.
But people don't use buses, mostly because they are slower than driving, and too expensive. Free buses would save money in the long run because you wouldn't spend as much on roads.
So buses are not treated as a serious solutions transit (except for few places with dedicated bus lanes) , and neither are trains.
Kind of a catch-22: public transport sucks after decades of neglect and underfunding, to the benefit of private transportation like cars.
As it is, it's seen by most as the solution for people that can't afford cars, so it's got quite a reputation hurdle to overcome too.
I'm from Montréal, and it's a shock how unusable public transport is in the US. Everything's a solid 30+ minutes away by foot even when bordering the city, and buses are so slow and infrequent you're still better off walking. So, I take the car, and I can understand how people that never experienced good public transport would be hesitant to fund it any further.
Classic America to be fair: butcher every public service until it's unusable and then use that politically as a demonstration of how terrible it is and how we should just hand it off to private companies.
This is happening in Sweden too right now.
According to Das Kapital it's an inevitable outcome of any system that rewards the owning class when they present capitalist solutions. Representatives depend on experts to represent, and the owning class will promote and endorse experts trained to justify their interests.
Ultimately, regulatory departments get captured by the industries they are supposed to corral.
People would use buses if the government spent our tax money on public transportation instead of roads. There would be more, faster, safer buses.