EuroYank- Thanks for dropping by. Hope you find more interesting articles to ponder upon. I’ll stop by your site soo.

Windspike-A common fare system would go a long ways towards simplifying public transit, and if publically funded at a regional or even national level, there’s no reason why that couldn’t be a reality.
Free (read- tax subsidized and therefore accountable in theory)public transportation would encourage many more to use it, but ut will still need to become more flexible to allow it to be practical, especially in the west where cities extens for dozens of miles.
Thanks for the great common sense ideas.

Thanks for the post. I happen to live in a city with fine (albeit unreliable sometimes) public transit system. And as a stay at home father of two very active boys, we use it all the time. They love to take the train, bus, boat, etc…on the numerous adventures.

The trouble here is that the various systems throughout are not interlinked with a common fare system. That is, every time you get onto a different system, you have to go through the process of paying the various agency for the fare. This is not a huge deal, but if they were all interconnected through some kind of super-agency, we could reduce the number of administrators and overhead, interconnect the fare system, and reduce the costs of running them.

…in the end, I do think the ultimate solution is to make public transit free and make those who use private transit pay heavily for using it. In Japan, gas is so expensive and tolls so heavy on the roads, most people find other ways to get where they are going. That said, it is not free to get on the train. But don’t you think if the fare was zero dollars, more people would use public transit?

Excellent blog with many topics I will explore in more detail.

Would appreciate your review of mine.