this post was submitted on 10 Nov 2023
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If everyone who normally takes the car would switch to taking the bus, all of a sudden you'd only need one lane in places where you previously needed two or three, because cars are very space-inefficient, so that makes a big difference.
Also, it's not quite true that they'd require the same amount of roads. I don't know about where you're from, but where I live buses use about a quarter of the roads and you can still easily get anywhere by bus.
Additionally, salt isn't used for rail vehicles at all.
I think public transit is important, good for the environment, and should be a much larger budget item everywhere.
But your math simply isn't true everywhere. You can't take 20 cars off the road and put them all on a bus, because those 20 cars aren't going to the same place at the same time. Urban areas that already have busses blanketing the city and running constantly, the math works and you just need additional busses to up capacity. But for where I live, on the edge of suburban and rural areas, you'd need a thousand more busses on the road to cover every route and destination. And these are places where most roads are only one lane in each direction. The major highways would still need several lanes because of the additional busses to fill demand for additional routes, and smaller roads would need to be widened in many places to allow for the larger turning radius of a bus.
So you need the same amount of salt to cover the same amount of road. Maybe some areas could recapture a lane or two for bike lanes and pedestrians, but you still need to salt those, and they won't have the benefit of being driven upon, which crushes ice and moves it out of the way. One or two slip and fall lawsuits later, and municipalities are just going to close them any time there's a little snow.
Once again, I'll say that the argument against cars is compelling. We should work to provide more public transit, because it is better for society to have reliable public transit. We should protect bike lanes, because it is better for our health and the environment, and encouraged freedom and development for adolescents. We should make more residential areas walkable because it is better for communities to be walkable. It fosters relationships among neighbors, encourages the support of local businesses, and improves the health and wellbeing of everyone who lives there.
Those are the arguments that get you there. Talk about the good it does, not the bad it doesn't. People who don't already agree with you will pick the one thing that doesn't ring true and key in to ignore and dismiss the rest.