The case for on-full departure.

• Author: Palmer, Paul

A rhetorical question: what is wrong with our current transportation model built around cars and suburbs? We all know a bushel of answers. Trips are too long between scattered residences and businesses. It is ridiculous to take two or three tons of steel and plastic just to move 200 pounds of us on a trip or to pick up a half pound of potato chips. We are using up precious reserves of fossil fuel for spurious purposes, causing dollars to flow out of the country. And we are producing carbon dioxide that is warming the planet.

So what are the kinds of solutions put forward? How about these? Let's build huge trains weighing hundreds or thousands of tons requiring tens of billions of dollars in right of way and tracks. Or let's buy huge buses weighing 20 or 30 tons to move a few people on late-night scheduled runs based on their main use as commute vehicles in the morning. Let's run these things on predetermined paths (tracks or routes) which require that most users still have to take a car to get to the parking lot to transfer to these behemoths.

A corollary to these ideas is that we hopefully abandon cars but start to use bicycles. Or frequent bus service takes us to the trains.

Along the way we forget about the huge investment we have made in automobiles, repair shops, streets, highways, automobile companies, parts suppliers, etc. Just start over, says prevailing environmental wisdom, with a new model for massive public transportation. Automobiles will still be used for many or most trips as before, but that is a defect of the model, not a design benefit. The immense convenience of a personal vehicle is hardly touched by the new model.

As a social analyst, I try to keep my eye on the intended result, not merely on a particular solution. We need to move people but do it more efficiently. We are not going to eliminate energy use, but if we can reduce the total amount needed, we can more easily convert to renewable forms of energy like wind and solar. Efficiency! That's the key. Not only energy efficiency but also the more efficient use of metals and plastics and human labor and less discard of products or of infrastructure.

Abandoning an existing infrastructure is not the road to efficiency. Running empty vehicles around is not the way to achieve efficiency--ever! Americans are too quick to swallow the predigested theories of public transportation that rely on trains and buses as though that exhausted the subject.

I had the good fortune to...