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People actually do this to themselves daily?
This morning I had to drop off disability paperwork at Kaiser's San Jose facility. Bit of a slog, but I really like my doctor there, so I'm sticking with him as a primary care physician. Meaning all the paperwork has to go through the Kafka-esque maze of bureaucracy that is the Medical Secretaries Office.
Planning ahead, I got there before their opened by about fifteen minutes. I was the only person on the sign-in sheet. I caught the processor immediately after the coffee hit. In and out in ten minutes. Considering in the past Kiri and I have waited an hour only to be told we didn't have the right paperwork, this was very nice. But then I had to drive home.
When I'm driving professionally, I do everything in my power to avoid morning traffic. Even though I'm getting paid to do it, I hate wasting time idling in a long line of cars. My drive to the hospital was counter-commute and early. Coming home I hit the height of rush hour heading into downtown San Jose. I simply cannot believe that people willingly subject themselves to this torture daily just to get to and from work. It took me close to an hour to get home.
Santa Clara County has an excellent public transit agency. I used to take it myself along with a couple of miles of biking. It's not an option so much these days with my hours and where we live, but I'd love to use light rail and buy another bike sometime. There has to be someway to get people out of their bloody cars and onto buses and trains!
Planning ahead, I got there before their opened by about fifteen minutes. I was the only person on the sign-in sheet. I caught the processor immediately after the coffee hit. In and out in ten minutes. Considering in the past Kiri and I have waited an hour only to be told we didn't have the right paperwork, this was very nice. But then I had to drive home.
When I'm driving professionally, I do everything in my power to avoid morning traffic. Even though I'm getting paid to do it, I hate wasting time idling in a long line of cars. My drive to the hospital was counter-commute and early. Coming home I hit the height of rush hour heading into downtown San Jose. I simply cannot believe that people willingly subject themselves to this torture daily just to get to and from work. It took me close to an hour to get home.
Santa Clara County has an excellent public transit agency. I used to take it myself along with a couple of miles of biking. It's not an option so much these days with my hours and where we live, but I'd love to use light rail and buy another bike sometime. There has to be someway to get people out of their bloody cars and onto buses and trains!
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As for your desire to ignore the rest of the great unwashed, a book works wonders.
http://www.vta.org/schedules/schedules_bymap.html
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Why, whenever I mention my preference, is (A) the phrase "great unwashed" always used, and (B) a book mentioned as the solution? Because the one implies that it has to do with a TYPE of person, which it doesn't, and the other fails to solve the problem? A book doesn't remove the person from my local radius. I don't like people anywhere near me, unless I know them, or unless I have some purpose in being near them.
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OTOH, an extra hour in the car is easy to deal with; no looming, and I have a CD player.
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Yup: tax petroleum and/or vehicle registration to a degree that includes _all_ of the externalities of private car use (climate damage, road construction, opportunity cost of the alienation of public land for roads and parking, health costs of pollution and sedentary lifestyles, health and emergency response costs of traffic accidents, cost of impaired effectiveness of emergency responders due to congestion delays, military expenditure thrown at maintaining oil access...etc. etc.).
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First you have to spend probably hundreds of BILLIONS to maybe a couple TRILLION to build the infrastructure you need, if you want transit rail for the majority of the country. And I look forward to the amusing scene of watching the warfare that will erupt when you have to get the rights to run your rail through various neighborhoods that have none. Or you will have to buy and maintain one HELL of a lot of buses. Which are much slower per-person in many if not all cases, unless they're one-stop point to point.
Then you can try to use the tax pressure. Assuming that all those things apply only to the cars, and that there aren't countervailing benefits.
Current "public transit" in my area would have required me to take about 2 hours to get to my old place of work, which was a 15 minute drive; doubled if I got into heavy traffic, tripled if there were accidents or something. But of course anything that would slow ME down would also slow down the buses...
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It takes me 20-25 minutes to get to work from home on most days, by bus. If I took the car, it'd be more effort, more walking and more expensive, and I'd lose my 15 minutes book reading time each direction. Even with the nice public transportation, the car lanes are full of cars driving quite slowly. On the rare occasion that I just have to drive during the rush hours, I always wonder if all the people do this voluntarily...
As for the solution, I can tell you that the things they do here to get more people on the public transportation don't work: it seems that most of the time the changes just mean less buses, less lines and more prices. After that the municipalities wonder why the people don't use the public transportation more, and there are more cuts and price raises...
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The public transit route requires two buses, light rail, and about an hour and a half. Not counting the walking.
I grew up close enough to New York City to know what a good public transit system looks like. We don't have one in San Jose.