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Toolie
05-12-2004, 06:48 PM
I'm going to school for civil engineering and hoping to become an urban planner, like a real-life Sim City deal. I've always had an obsession with road systems but recently I've gotten very interested in mass transit, like subways, busses, light rail, etc.

My favorite highway mass transit system has to be the freeways of Houston. Being a newer city, it was given the advantage to having very little development when highways were developed, and thus the newer city has a very efficient highway design, as opposed to places like Boston and much of Europe. As far as light-rail systems go, the Metropolitan Transit Authority's subway system in New York has to be one of the greatest transit undertakings (short of the Eisenhower Interstate System) in history. It's also one of the most successful, with one of the highest (if not the highest) usage per capita than anywhere else in the world.


The town I live in has never really required much of a mass transit system, except for a hardly used half-dozen bus system and a handful of taxi companies. What kind of mass transit options are there in your city, and if there are any do you use them frequently or at all?

I think that even small towns and cities should develop some sort of mass transit option, whether it be an efficient bus service or well-designed surface light-rail lines. Gas prices aren't going down any time soon, and parking in dense downtown areas can be a pain. If an efficient bus or rail service were available where I lived, I would definately use it and I think the idea would catch on to, capitalizing on the effect of high gas prices. I wish we all didn't require unefficient, gas-hoarding cars to get around at any decent rate.

Ich
05-12-2004, 06:57 PM
That's great. My favorite mass transit system is the London Underground (http://texasdex.com:1234/photos/london/fullsize/LONDON73.JPG). It kicks so much ass.

Pablo
05-12-2004, 07:23 PM
We have a trolley/bus kinda thing out here in the burbs (I get the feeling it'd be more heavily used if we had more than a handful of destinations), but in the city we've got the CTA and, of course, the L.

Cloral
05-13-2004, 02:02 AM
Busses and that's it here. But at least you can ride for free by using your student id. They actually have pretty good coverage and would be a great way to get around if they didn't stop running mid-evening. Because students primarily go to the shopping center and downtown from here, they're thinking of adding regular shuttles from campus to those 2 areas, which would be immensely convenient. It's part of the idea to deal with parking in IV, which is really bad right now.

When I get a car I'm going to get one of those hybrid things. At least I'll be using less gas that way.

Axel
05-13-2004, 04:25 PM
We've got a fledgling bus service around. Because we're a suburban area the bus service isn't exactly convenient for much. Closer to the city things improve, though.