Mass Transit Popular Again
Peer down from the ninety ninth floor of an urban skyscraper and commuters look like little bugs. Every day thousands of worker bees cram into giant steel buildings to produce a little honey for their favorite customers. Unfortunately there’s never enough room on the narrow downtown streets to deliver all of these go getters to the hive on time. Enter mass transit.
Commuting daily from an outlying community into downtown will test anyone’s patience. Traffic crawls along at a snail’s pace. Parking is expensive. And with sky high fuel prices, every extra mile behind the wheel pinches the budget a little more. All of these obstacles are making mass transit an attractive option for a growing number of workers.
It makes sense to have parking structures and transit centers along the freeways out in the suburbs. Trains and buses can efficiently transport several people at once. Trains often run on electricity and buses on natural gas, so these vehicles generate less pollution.
Alternative fuel filling stations cost a lot to build right now. But buses make strong candidates for alternative fuels because they follow the same daily route and can refuel at the same pump every night.
GM, Honda and BMW have all begun selling hydrogen powered cars to a few well heeled customers in southern California. Large suburban transit centers would be ideal locations for hydrogen refueling stations. It would allow commuters to drive their hydrogen powered vehicles to the train station every day and fill up on the way home, thereby substantially reducing air pollution from automobile emissions. Welcome the future.
mass transit, trains, buses, hydrogen powered vehicles
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