No, riding the bus is not the answer to inflation. Here’s why relying on buses is a bad idea:
1. Inflation hits bus fares, too. Why would anyone, except elites who don’t know any better, think that bus fares are somehow immune to inflation? They go up as inflation goes up. I know, because I rode buses for years.
2. Every now and then the workers go on strike, and then you have to depend on cars, if not your own car, then on other people's cars.
3. Buses don’t go where we want them to go, nor as often as we’d like. People want to go lots of places that buses don’t go to, and even when the buses do go where we want, we sometimes needs to take two or three buses to get there. Plus, they seldom go as often as we’d like. In bitterly cold weather in Minneapolis, it was common for the buses to be late, just when you’d want them to be on time. Only in Rio de Janeiro, a densely populated city, did the buses come by so frequently that I never bothered with a schedule. But most of America is not densely populated.
4. As a rider, one has no input on where the buses go nor how often they come. Those things are decided by the elites.
5. It is impossible to haul things on the bus. In a poorer area of Minneapolis, I would see blacks taking taxis from grocery stores, because taking a bus with several bags of groceries was out of the question.
6. Right now there are many parts of the country – rural areas and towns – where bus service is non-existent.
7. Attempts to get people to ride the bus often backfire. When I was in Taiwan, the elites had tried this, with the result that many took to riding motorcycles.
Buses and other forms of public transport are a supplement to the main type of transportation, which is cars. And that is all they can ever be. Telling people to take the bus is better than telling them to buy a Prius (a statement that is the twenty-first century version of “let them eat cake”), but it’s not much better.
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