Pollution, Traffic, and Ending Public Buses

This is an issue that pops up every now and then. Around where I live (and I’m sure where many of you live, too) we have something called “Ozone Action Days.” These days are usually in the Summer when weather conditions are such that pollution is unusually bad in the city. On these days public bus rides are offered for free in an effort to encourage people to ride mass transit to help reduce pollution, Here’s my problem with it: even when the bus rides are free, no one rides the buses. This brings up several problems.

First, buses are big, dirty, diesel burning behemoths. Diesel exhaust is much dirtier than gasoline exhaust. So, buses are really not reducing pollution, especially when there’s only three or four people riding the bus. We would be better off if those people just carpool.

Second, buses take up more room on the road than cars. In the amount of space used by a bus, you could fit two or maybe three cars. If your city has those really long articulated buses, you could fit four or five cars in the same amount of space. So buses increase traffic congestion by taking up more room than cars, and traffic is the biggest cause of pollution.

Let me explain this. Having a lot of cars on the road doesn’t cause a pollution problem. You have a pollution problem when those cars can’t get to where they’re going because of traffic. For example, let’s say that because of traffic it takes me one hour to drive from home to work. If traffic congestion was eased, I might be able to cut my travel time down to 30 minutes, which means my car would be running for half as long, which in turn means it would only pollute half as much. So the solution to the problem is to ease traffic congestion.

So, how do you do that? Well, one solution would be to get the buses off the road since no one rides them anyway. The only bus I have ever seen completely full (aside from a school bus) was the one in the movie Speed, and I don’t think those people rode another public bus again. Taking the buses off the road would reduce traffic congestion, reduce pollution, and save taxpayer dollars (public bus systems are typically subsidized more than public universities).

This goes for light rail systems, as well. Light rail tracks are usually built, not along major roads, but right on top of them, taking up lanes that used to be only for cars and therefore causing more traffic congestion (not to mention train/car collisions). Light rail tracks cause other traffic problems, too. Such as keeping cars from making left turns, and blocking off intersections and preventing cross traffic from crossing. And you can’t use the argument that light rail reduces pollution, either. Light rail trains run on electricity and that electricity is usually generated by a coal, or gas, or (gasp!) nuclear power plant, all of which pollute.

Therefore, we believe that public buses should be banned from city streets on Ozone Action Days, if not done away with altogether.

–J.E. Heath
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