On Public Transportation
A developed country is not a place where the poor have cars. It’s where the rich use public transportation.
It is a place where you may run into Michael Bloomberg or Paul McCartney on the metro or train.
I write this from Lisbon, surrounded many thousands of youngsters attending World Youth Days (WYD. The logistics of this event must have been immense. Where do these hundreds of thousands of kids sleep? How does one feed that many youngsters? How do you set up port-a-potties for the 1.5 million people who attended the closing Mass with the Pope?
One thing was for sure. It was easy to get around town. Because Lisbon, like many European cities, has a great public transportation system, they had the infrastructure to support an event like this. A bus ride is 2 Euros. A 40 minutes train ride is 3 Euros, and trains run every 20-30 minutes. Out daughter, attending WYD, got a full pass to all public transportation systems. For the entire week, she could hop on any bus, tram, train, or metro system for free. What a wonderful thing! And what a way to absorb the influx of people into the city.
Imagine how this would work out it in the US. It would be a hotchpotch of temporary private bus and shuttle systems. When the event is over, we would be back to an inferior transportation system. Hello Los Angeles or the Bay Area!
Many years ago, I used to take bus 66 or the Mountain View VTA light rail to work. It was very slow, expensive, and perilous. VTA is in no way prepared to handle hundreds of thousands of people. Sadly, the Bay Area transportation system targets only few, often those of the lower social strata.
I hope that the youngsters from all over the world attending World Youth Days, or Jornada Mundial da Jugentude as it is called in Portugues, remember one more thing, in addition to the many life lessons they picked up from this experience. And that is the luxury and importance of advocating for a great public transportation system.