Levitz, E. (2023, May 15). America’s trains and buses are speeding toward a Cliff. Intelligencer.
Retrieved August 27, 2023 https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/05/americas-mass-transit-systems-are-speeding-toward-a-cliff.html
In the recent past, mass transit systems have gone down, especially since COVID-19. In the United States, “ridership sits at about 70 percent of pre-pandemic levels.” Since the pandemic, there are many people that have started working from home and it has affected the transit system overall. Since then the government has put billions of dollars into the public transit system nationwide, but it is still short falling. There will need to be changes like less trains that run, fewer intervals, and cuts overall. It is also very important because it affects climate change because there are less carbon emissions created by public transport than more personal vehicles. For example, diesel buses with enough passengers are better than cars because buses let out less carbon emissions per mile.
This article is connected to environmental science because transportation heavily affects climate change. This article has taught me a lot about the current decline of the use of public transportation, specifically buses and trains. This makes me very sad because I think that public transportation is a great resource and it is a much better alternative for the environment. It makes me want to be more aware and use public transportation more when I can and encourage others to use it.
I agree that the article illustrates the importance of the usage of public transportation. Personally I believe that in certain places such as Menlo Park public transportation has a certain stigma of being a worse form of travel as opposed to driving everywhere. I wonder how as a society we can work towards eradicating this stigma and ensuring people know the benefits of public transportation?
I think you bring up a good point. I think that more people would use it if it was free.
I do think that the pandemic has affected transportation a lot, and people afterward were very careful not to use it as much or not sit too close to someone. This made it bad for their business because they were unable to make as much money. However, now transportation is very common and it could be bad for our ecosystem with all the fuel that is being burned into the air. It’s hard to say whether to have fewer trains or buses moving because that way of transportation is very important, especially for those who do not have a car. Do you think that this will be good for both our ecosystem and us? Will it be a challenging thing to limit the amount of transportation?
I think it is very hard to tell, since ideally public transport helps us and would be the best option opposed to cars, but it is very expensive if people don’t actually use it.