The world is changing! When my grandparents were born, they had to use the trolley or the public bus system to get around. Cars were restricted to the top wealth elite of society. When my parents were toddlers, cars became more affordable and it was common to see each family having at least one car. Today, with the United States having 0.8 of a car per person, challenges have arisen as well as the need for an efficient public transportation system to be implemented, in order to substitute, what used to be the solution, cars.(Transportation Energy)
The main challenge to public transit is to overcome the preconceived stereotype of being inefficient and only used by the lower classes. As a result, these solutions are not easy to implement, however, the city of Detroit, once known as the “Motor City”, is leading the way in the United States with some innovative and creative answers for this problem.
The key assertion to this idea of mass transit being developed in Detroit is to integrate the population. The population must live in denser areas because: first, it is not efficient, time wise, to have a bus line to a neighborhood where only a few families live, and second, it costs a lot of money. Families must be reallocated to more packed neighborhoods where the same bus line might be used by hundreds of families at the same time (Blueprint America).
Another focal and vital point that will decide if this project is going to be successful in Detroit is how to include the people living in the suburbs in this solution. For instance, the city of Miami has a public transit system that could have been extremely successful. The Metrorail connects some suburbs of Miami to a final stop inside downtown Miami. If more rail lines were added that connected other suburbs to the city and an inner-city transit system was created that linked the suburban population from this central station to other inner-city areas, this system would have been a success. This system that was partially created in Miami is what the city of Detroit is trying to implement.
Another reason why the Metrorail is not effective in Miami is because the suburban population does not find any incentives to ride public transit. If they can ride their car, why would they take a collective transport? Well, this is the part where the government comes in. In our current tax system, there are tax exemptions from which some are related to pollution. This could be applied to reward public transit riders. If a rider chooses to take public transit daily instead of driving his car to work, he could be awarded a pollution tax exemption. This would encourage even more people to switching transportation modes.
Lastly, one of the positives externalities that most people don’t seem to recognize from adhering to a public transit system project like the one in Detroit is that they bring many economic benefits. One of them would be the creation of thousands of jobs from the construction to the operation of these systems that would tremendously help local economies that have had its unemployment rate stagnated at 9.1% (Bloomberg). In addition, mass transit would bring more development to poorer regions of the city as has been the case throughout history.
Conclusively, as it can be seen, the solution to the problems cars are causing us today is not easy. Even more, just like the city of Detroit, we might have to sit and watch other big American cities fail before politicians and lawmakers decide its time to act to change this scenario. However, just like the city of Detroit too, the public transit solutions are attainable and will benefit the population in the long term. The world is changing, it is up to us to "catch-up" with it, and this example of how to use public transit is one way to do it.
Work Cited
Blueprint America: Beyond the Motor City. Dir. Aaron Woolf. Prod. PBS. 2010. Film.
Willis, Bob. "U.S. Employment Stagnated in August." Bloomberg. 02 Sep 2011: n. page. Web. 21 Sep. 2011.
Stacy C. Davis, Susan W. Diegel, and Robert G. Boundy (June 2011). "Transportation Energy Data Book: Edition 30". Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, U.S. Department of Energy. Retrieved 2011-09-20.See Table 3.5, pp. 3-9
In the United States, any talk of reallocating people would be seen as excessive government control of personal liberty. Although the government could provide incentives for people to live in denser housing, it could dictate where people live.
ReplyDeleteHow exactly do you propose the reallocation of people to denser neighborhoods so as to not cause dissatisfaction amongst them because the people would want to demand compensation for this move?
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