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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Brian P. who wrote (16310)	3/24/2000 1:06:00 AM
From: Jacques Chitte	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 769667

Citizens voting for ... what exactly? An enormous boondoggle transit system that leaves some undefined percentage SOL? A series of punitive disincentives, like a parking tax, designed to artificially distort the economics of transport? I would charge that either is dangerously illiberal. In the old sense of course, the Bill of Rights sense. The quixotic idea that the state serves the individual and not vice versa. Take my current home - the San Fran Bay Area. Ten million people unevenly distributed onto ten thousand square miles. To compete with cars or even (ugh!) bicycles, a public transit system would have to have at least ten thousand termini with at worst two interchanges for the long runs. I commute cross-peninsula, so no train, no bus in existence would meet the need. Right now my commute is twenty minutes door to door ... what kind of transit system would do that, I wonder? Do pray tell. And a transit system in order to work would have to efficiently out-compete the car for every transport need: commute, Costco runs, swim team, Yosemite, you get the picture. For an aggregate cost less than owning insuring maintaining fueling he cars we OWN, drive at discretion, scare deer with (heehee!), keep squeeky klene and odor-free (imagine what shares the bus with you. I HATE Vindaloo. Ugh again.). With current technology it simply can't be done. Not without, uhm, massive government subsidy, which means enlightened voters passing a trillion-dollar bond issue. Don't forget - ten thousand transit nodes! I can respect your burning desire to see something better than cars, but not at the expense of my right to think and do otherwise. I like my car a great deal. It's expensive, and I'm invariably stuck behind some horsepower-challenged Microbus, but it's mine and so long as I'm not a jerk in traffic - I can drive it my way on my time. Show me something clear-headed please - no utopianism. And no thinly-concealed communism, either! I'd make a lousy worker ant. Too much individuality, along with the Built-in Conditioner.