Argumentative Essay On Public Transport System

America’s infrastructure is notoriously bad. With a D+ rating from the American Society of Civil Engineers, even the highways are crumbling in the land of the car. Its public transportation is falling apart as well - that is, where it exists at all in this country. More than twenty million people live in the metropolitan area surrounding New York City; in New Jersey, the road system dating back to the colonial era (when only two million people lived in the entire country and they travelled by horse) struggles to keep up with the growing population and their obsession with commuting long distances alone in their cars. New York Penn Station and the Port Authority Bus Terminal both are overcrowded, dirty, and in disrepair. The area’s traffic is

First, it extremely environmentally clean. This is true in a number of different ways: fewer toxic chemicals are released, less CO2 is emitted, and fewer raw materials are wasted on underutilized vehicles. To begin, transportation makes up 29% of all greenhouse gas emissions in the United States; 57% of this (17% of all greenhouse gas emissions) is from passenger cars, SUVs, and pickup trucks. As stated before, people often use their personal vehicles alone as single-occupancy vehicles. In comparison to the emissions from one single-occupancy vehicle, bus transit can reduce CO2 emissions by 34% per passenger mile, light rail can reduce the same by 64%, commuter rail (cities to suburbs, ex.: New Jersey Transit, Long Island Railroad, etc.) by 67%, and heavy rail such as subways by 77% at average occupancy; at full occupancy, the same modes of transportation can decrease CO2 emissions by 82%, 86%, 90%, and 89%, respectively, per passenger mile when compared to a single-occupancy vehicle (United States). Such improvements, with potential mass transit usage, have been estimated to be able to reduce an individual household’s carbon footprint by 30% by eliminating the use of one car (American Public Transportation

Yet again, there are two ways in which public transportation has a positive impact. Regarding poverty, public transportation not only creates jobs, but it also allows for people without the money to afford to buy and maintain a car to be able to access jobs that are farther away from their homes, allowing for vastly more opportunities for employment and access to more, better jobs than just what is in the immediate surrounding neighborhood. First, as with any investment, investing in public transportation infrastructure and service creates jobs by itself. For every billion US dollars invested in highway road infrastructure, 8,781 job-months (months worth of employment) are created. If the same billion dollars were instead invested in public transit infrastructure, 16,419 job-months could be produced (87% more job-months) (Barry). In addition to the direct job creation comes the second form of improvement: public transit gives poor people who cannot afford cars the option to go to jobs that are farther from their