New York and London would get awfully crowded if you had to live in a place where you didn't need a car to be a real environmentalist. IJS. (I did live without one for four years in Philly, commuting on foot, by bike, or on the trolley, but I took advantage of a consultant friend who let me borrow his car when he was traveling on business if I gave him rides to and from the airport. Without Lee's car, grocery shopping and having a social life would've been a challenge.)

More to the point would be pushing for increased fuel efficiency, and for more viable mass transit systems in places like Seattle. DH and I would love to cut back to one car, and to be able to commute to work via mass transit, but it's not really an option with the current skimpy system.

Ah, no, thanks, Katie, I don't think I'm desperate enough to bother someone else. It looks like they might show it on my PBS station at some other point (like in the fall) or something. We'll see. (I googled, and found out you can buy a DVD of the episodes! But it's $500!!!!)

(Hmm, and further searching reveals it's currently on "WETA Plus", which is a PBS station only available on digital cable. Somehow, that makes no sense to me...)

But Susan, you'll have light rail in 2009! Or possibly 2012, I can't remember now.

I have this whole theory about the difficulty of injecting mass transit ex post facto into a modern city, and it being well-nigh impossible, though that may be unfair to Portland. It's kind of interesting, living in Yakima - small city, obviously, but it had a trolley system once upon a time and you can still see some of the tracks and the overhead wires. Amazing the dinky places that used to have that kind of hard-wired public transportation.

That's what I meant, though, PMM. With everyone using cars, the pressure to create a usable public transportation service for the outskirts of a major city is much less. And it's not a matter of rich or poor, either; the best-served neighborhoods in New York are currently inhabited by "minorities" (I use the quotes because as a white Bronxite, I'm in a minority of 14% in my county, which bothers me not a bit.) There's subway stops every three blocks in the South Bronx, for example. And when the subways were built, starting 100 years ago next year, they went right through the poor neighborhoods first, like the Lower East Side.

I think it ties in to what Gar was saying. It's much more wasteful and inefficient for the municipality to maintain all those roads, policemen, troopers, snow removal, etc. than to run a few buses. But they won't because people don't have the inclination to ride a bus because they take an hour and a half to get downtown. So they don't ride the buses, and they get cut because nobody's riding them...vicious circle.

How can it take an hour and a half to go five miles? Are there no bus or diamond lanes? And if it's because the highway's too crowded, well, sorta proves the point.

Oh, and I was just using hyperbole in my OP. But you have to admit somebody with an environmental sticker on their SUV is somebody who deserves to be laughed at. And don't give me the kids line, there were five of us in my Dad's VW's and we all fit fine.

Ah, no, thanks, Katie, I don't think I'm desperate enough to bother someone else.

Yeah, I didn't think so, but I figured I'd offer. At least now you know all about the Happy Ending, though. (I seriously expected the old guy to expire on screen, but he did not.)

Oh, don't even get me STARTED on light rail. I think the project exists, not to give us actual transit, but to make sure the local talk show on our NPR affiliate never runs out of stuff to talk about.

But yeah, tough to add to an existing city, and to be fair, Seattle is tougher than most--basically two long, narrow, hilly spits of land, with a big fat lake between us and the Microsofty part of the suburbs, AND anything you build has to stand up to earthquakes.

New York and London would get awfully crowded if you had to live in a place where you didn't need a car to be a real environmentalist. IJS.

Sure, becase the streetcars were all ripped up to make room for automobiles.

And don't give me the kids line, there were five of us in my Dad's VW's and we all fit fine.

Not an SUV driver, just FTR, but perhaps you didn't know that the laws on having children in cars have changed drastically. In CA at least they need to be in a carseat until they are 6 years old. A parent of 5 today couldn't fit all their children in their VW unless they wanted a citation.

How can it take an hour and a half to go five miles? Are there no bus or diamond lanes? And if it's because the highway's too crowded, well, sorta proves the point.

Stops, surface streets, and transfers. You catch one bus, stop every few blocks, then transfer mid-commute to another bus, which doesn't come for 20 minutes, if it shows up at all.

In Seattle, it is a matter of Rich/Poor, at least as far as I can tell. Seattle's geography makes it hard to put in decent mass transit. We're not built for it.

That's what I meant, though, PMM. With everyone using cars, the pressure to create a usable public transportation service for the outskirts of a major city is much less.

Sure. Okay, but how the hell are we supposed to get our asses to our jobs when we don't have a usable public transit system. I have a mortgage to pay. I have bills. So do the rest of the people in my neighbourhood. We can't just suddenly stop driving in mass protest of the f'd up system. We'd lose our homes.

Yay, Trudy, that's the whole thing! In New York we had Robert Moses, in LA we had General Motors. What happened to the trolleys was a national disaster. Americans got brainwashed into thinking that two cars with 2 or 3 people in them were more deserving of space in the public roads than trolleys or buses with 60. And I agree, some more modern cities, and ruined old ones like Atlanta, are going to be very hard to re-create in the public transportation mode. They were built to sprawl. I've never lived in a place where I had to drive to get milk, and I didn't even bother to learn to drive until I was 28. I went to a school where there were about ten student parking spaces--alloted very strictly according to need--and none of my friends could dream of affording a car, with the insurance and all. But Gar's thing about inefficiency got me thinking about what a problem cars are.

Edit: PMM, please calm down! I wasn't talking about you personally and your situation sounds very, very bad. This is just a little discussion board for a soon-to-be-gone TV show and its low-rated spinoffs, I'm just throwing out hypotheticals. Sorry.