If you have never ridden transit before, it can seem like another world. It takes a little while to get used to. Most transit users in the United States do not quickly speak to other people. It’s the opposite in a country like Brazil, where people have told me that people quickly strike up a conversation and share their lives.
Transit use offers benefits that many may not be aware of. Transit users buy a ticket and ride the bus or train. On transit, you may relax, read, write, eat, sleep, meditate or just watch the world go by. For that, some people may think that you would have to pay double the price of a car, but the opposite is the case. With the car you pay big money upfront, and pay a lot to keep it on the road. Some of that will change with electrification, but the basic system and structure of use and ownership, are still in place. This means that ultimately; using a car supports a system that is oppressive to the air and land and water, to the soil, the plants and animals and people. Imagine you are earth, and you are earth under pavement and then imagine you are earth in a forest or not under pavement. Pavement is the prison of the land. Perhaps if we liberate the land by using more transit and less vehicles, we will move toward a sustainable future.
If you ride transit, you don’t have to worry about the problems that car drivers have to deal with. If you have never owned a car, it may not be very obvious what the problems are when you drive a car. Using a car requires: 1. you must pay a lot of money to buy the car before you can drive it. 2. You must get a license. 3. You must get insurance. 3. You must maintain the car. Compared to using transit, using a car is very expensive. Also, if one makes the least mistake, you can get into a hage amount of troublle, you could get killed or suffer long term damage to your body.
Some people have never used a car or a bicycle; they know transit. Some people who ride a bus or a train know it like car drivers know cars, it’s automatic.
Can you imagine how it would feel if in the 1920s before the subway was built, you begin to wonder what it would actually be like to just going to the tunnel, pays some money and ride as much as you want to get to your destination. And then somehow fast forwarding no transit is here and now and functions, it’s not the top subway system in the world, but the New York City transit system does function pretty well for millions of people every single day. It’s got that parochial New York city five. That worn down, beat up infrastructure that you only see when you look at cities that have been beat up and beat down by contagions, hurricanes, tornadoes and floods and fires and wars and somehow it keeps going. The bombs dropped on Hiroshima less than 100 years ago. It seem like they built the thing up overnight.