[clue-talk] Hello CLUE

[Matt Gushee]

Nate Duehr wrote:
> T. Joseph Carter wrote:
>> On Mon, Aug 07, 2006 at 05:52:08AM -0600, Matt Gushee wrote:
>>>> In most cases you're not given the opportunity. Your taxes usually go
>>>> for creampuff projects like light rail that benefit 1% (and that's a
>>>> high estimate) of the populace.
>>> I'd be interested to know how you arrived at that figure.
>>
>> As would I, actually.  The trains are usually pretty full on the way to
>> and coming home from the center.  They've got a lot of riders even in the
>> middle of the day.  Hardly 1%.
> 
> I believe RTD publishes per-capita numbers in their annual report.  I 
> believe when I went looking for it, it was on their website.
> 
> The total number of riders on RTD's entire system the last time I looked 
> was in single-digit percentages of the Metro area's population.

That's no surprise. The numbers probably only get higher than that in a 
handful of well-known cities (New York, Boston, San Francisco, 
Philadelphia, maybe Chicago, ...). But I wanted to see if Collins had 
some actual data behind that remark, or if he was just manifesting his 
ideology ;-)

Anyway, drivers also benefit from public transit, since it relieves road 
congestion, albeit by a small amount. Without radical changes in the way 
society is organized, small differences are probably the best we can 
hope for.

Then there's peak oil to think about. The pessimists say it's already 
happened, and the optimists put it forty or fifty years in the future. 
Either way, anything energy-efficient is going to become more important 
to all of us.

-- 
Matt Gushee
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