A while ago on ABBAMAIL there was a discussion about Cars vs Public Transport. I got somewhat carried away in what I was saying that I forgot to check what I had written carefully. I screwed up big time.

So now’s the time to get it right.

I can only speak from my own experiences and from what I have seen, and I have seen a fair bit, in several countries (New Zealand, Australia, USA, Italy).

I don’t like cars, never will, I find them to be a scourge on society. But they have their use, they get people to where they are going, and get them home again. I prefer to use public transport for that, but living where I am (Wellington, New Zealand) that is not an inconvenience, we have an excellent service that will take you around town and out to the outlying towns about 18 hours a day, and almost 24 hours on weekends. I understand full well that this is not always convenient for everyone for many reasons, such as the transport may not go near where they need to be, or perhaps it doesn’t go there at the time they need to be there. Maybe it doesn’t exist in your town.

But I still don’t like cars. Many of the drivers THAT I HAVE EXPERIENCED are not much better. I could spend minutes at a pedestrian crossing waiting for a driver to stop to let me cross, and when they do it’s usually a young male driver, less than 5% of people who stop FOR ME are women. I’m not saying this is true for everyone, in fact I doubt it very much, this is just my experience. Also, a couple of times when someone has stopped for me and I cross, I’ve had to stop short halfway across the road as some idiot just barges on through the crossing without noticing I’m there.

And then there is trying to cross a road where there are no crossings. If I’m at a corner I always check to see if oncoming cars (From behind or in front) are indicating to turn, and if they are not I still keep my eye on them, so many drivers I’ve seen just don’t know how to use an indicator.

I’ve been stuck on public transport on a street just as school is coming out, and the amount of parents who don’t stop to let a bus through (common courtesy in NZ, they have a timetable to adhere to, one car can wait ten seconds while the bus goes through) is amazing, I’ve been on a bus stuck at the side of a road for about five minutes waiting for someone to let them through, PS – that someone who let the bus through, quite coincidentally, was my brother-in-law. The trouble here is that this makes the bus late, which means later services also become late, so it has flow-on effects.

And still we have more drivers who don’t know a green light from a red light, or even an amber light. Red means STOP. Amber means SLOW DOWN to STOP. Green means GO. Amber does NOT mean SPEED UP to get through before the light turns RED. This really confused me in the USA, as there is some rule there about turning right on a red light. I’m not sure what the full rule is, no doubt some American will be able to fill me in, but when I first experienced it, I was horrified to think someone had run a red light with me in the car! Then she explained the law to me! PS: I don’t think I’ll ever get used to riding in American cars. Over here the passenger sits on the left, over there they sit on the right, it feels odd.

I’ve seen the roads of Los Angeles backed up for miles, and I was only there for 24 hours, maybe I arrived on a bad day. I’ve used the public transportation systems in San Francisco and Melbourne, it’s OK. Melbourne city was good enough, but the outlying areas were a bit much to get used to, maybe with time, but San Francisco was very easy to get used to. Fayetteville, NC, was almost non-existent, while I don’t recall seeing any kind of Public Transport in Toledo, Ohio. Mind you, Ohio wasn’t exactly overcrowded with cars, even though there were cars from many states there in early summer.

As a passenger in a car I’ve experienced many kinds of drivers, verbally abusive, speedsters, “I’m right-you’re wrong” drivers, risk takers, and even one taxi driver who took me the wrong way up a one-way street - fortunately it was the middle of the night, but I still wasn’t impressed. And just as many cautious drivers. To me, the biggest risk takers were the drivers who’d been driving the longest, as they were more confident, even over-confident, in their skills. It was scary.

Petrol prices are going up, and they won’t come down, so until a cheaper fuel alternative, and preferably a renewable source, is found, the cost of travel will be going up steadily, more so for individual vehicles than mass transport vehicles.

And yet, I still don’t like cars, maybe when the whole world has converted to eco-friendly cars that have automatic indicating and brakes… Then again… Maybe it just needs to be when they eliminate human error (Or in some cases, stupidity)… Umm… That’s not going to happen…

People drive cars, some are good, some are bad. I’ll take public transport while I’ve got it. I’ll admit though, some drivers of public transport are just as bad.

Dean