Time to get the noisy ‘green’ buses off city streets
By Letter to the Editor on April 22, 2021.
Editor:
Now that his worship Spearman is leaving, would it be possible to convince one of our leaders to seriously look at the money poured down the toilet by Lethbridge transit. These noise-polluting, road-wrecking, house-jarring “green” fuel-wasting empty buses must be taken off the road.
Kurt Veer
Lethbridge
-1
And replaced with what Kurt?
Mini vans Johnny…….. Transit everywhere is a sink hole of money.
well said, j57! i am on board!
So “regular” noise polluting, house jarring, diesel fuel wasting machines are OK? Complaints with no suggestions. Very helpful.
J57 replace with 8 new electric buses $900,000. each infrastructure, operating costs not stated batteries disposal cost ? Governments are supposed to pay?
You don’t mean those behemoths that I see driving around, with zero or oftentimes one passenger?
well, if we limited or otherwise discouraged the stinky, noisy, sundry and ubiquitous personal vehicles that litter our roads and air – say, with a large increase in gasoline tax…except for the aspects of the transportation industry that deals with moving essential goods and services…those buses would be rather more full, no?
No, as a sage wise old man long since departed stated, “Pay it or walk”. Turning to a massive money loser only to lose more money is at best a pipe dream.
the reason public transit in lethbridge is a money loser is mostly because people choose to drive. they choose to drive because it is more convenient, as it saves a ton of time relative to using our transit system, and allows for multiple stopovers very easily.
transit systems work very well in larger centers because there are more people that either cannot afford to run cars, and/or, getting around is thwarted more by traffic congestion, and/or the prohibitive costs of parking and/or finding spaces to park. this does not at all apply to lethbridge, where traffic is minimal, and parking is free to as cheap as it gets.
if lethbridge, or any place, truly wished to move sundry vehicles off the roads – which are far more polluting, energy inefficient and noisy collectively than are mass transit vehicles with people aboard – discouraging the use of private vehicle usage would be the only way a place like lethbridge gets on board, so to speak. taxing gasoline in large way that makes using a private vehicle too cost prohibitive relative to taking public transit is one way of doing this.
with more users, the public transit system becomes a money maker, and more efficient for users as routes and service would vastly improve; wait times would decrease as would the time it takes to get to where one is going. again, mass transit works well enough where ridership is high.
my overall point is simply this: buses with passengers aboard are environmentally less intrusive than are private vehicles that typically have 1-2 occupants. even if private vehicles had 4-5 occupants at all times, a reasonably full bus is less of an overall pollutant. therefore, save for convenience, we would benefit by discouraging private vehicle use and the consequent improvement and use of a public transit system.