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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: tejek who wrote (124094)	9/18/2000 4:22:12 AM
From: Joe NYC	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1571892

Ted, OT, I think one area where mass transit can gain is if they provide speed. In the are where I live, this simple concept completely escapes most of the "planners". For example, there was a study released some time ago according to which the speed of the subway train has not changed since 1920s. This is not a rocket science. All you need is a little bit of electronics to take care of more, and the brain dead union members to take care of less. You could actually end up with a cheaper system. Actually, faster means cheaper. If you have a piece of equipment (bus/train/plane) plus a crew, if it takes 1 hour to get from point A to point B rather than 2 hours, your costs are going to go down by up to 50%. Another example of the brain dead planners are New York City buses. Some genius came up with an idea than the buses should run on a schedule. But of course you can't predict the traffic patterns well enough for the bus to maintain the schedule. So what they came up with is a schedule based on traffic slowed down to a crawl. But what happens on a good day, when the traffic is moving swiftly, the bus needs to actually stop and wait to maintain its schedule, absolutely infuriating the passengers. The need for speed is even greater in less densely populated areas. If you start from point A and going to point B, you can take the most direct route when driving. With mass transit, which runs from C to D that is somewhere along your route A to B, you need to make the C to D part very fast so that the trip A -> C -> D -> B is competitive with A -> B by car. The supposed conveniences, such as waiting rooms with power outlets etc. are basically the wrong way to go. What you want is people to wait less and spend less time traveling. The reason I am skeptical about mass transit is that it is run by the wrong people, the supporters are wrong people who care more about feeling good about themselves than about achieving results, and the employees of all these mass transit schemes are union employees, actually public sector union employees (the worst kind), for whom the convenience of their "customers" never crosses their mind. I hope you understand my skepticism. I am actually talking out of experience. I guess I am the only person on this thread who does not own a car and uses public transportation regularly. The only improvement that I found in the last 17 years I lived in New York City is that the present mayor and the police department managed to get people to urinate less in the subways and he managed to prevent the beggars from assaulting the passengers as much as they used to. Of course he was accused of being fascist for doing this. Joe