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Who says Americans won’t ride mass transit?
Katharine Mieszkowski, Salon
With gas prices through the roof, our car-crazy nation showed the love for buses and trains. But there’s a glitch.
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AN FRANCISCO — It’s 5 p.m. on a Thursday at one of the busiest Bay Area Rapid Transit stations in downtown San Francisco and the commuters are already pissed off. A Pittsburg-Bay Point train has just pulled in. This is the system’s most popular line and takes workers under the bay to the suburbs east of San Francisco.
The doors on the first two cars are broken and won’t open. As would-be riders cram into the remaining cars, frustrations mount as passengers inside the train refuse to squish in further to let newcomers on. The doors of the train swoosh closed and dozens of potential riders are left standing at the station. One fuming man in a white button-down shirt, who has been left behind, slams his hand on the train window and yells at the passengers inside. “You people are idiots!”
… Like mass transit systems across the country, BART has experienced record ridership this year.
… The rise in mass transit ridership should be great news. Not since the OPEC oil embargo and energy crisis in the ’70s have famously car-centric Americans been so eager to shell out for a bus fare or a train ticket and leave the polluter in the driveway. Automobile transportation is one of the largest chunks of the country’s carbon footprint, so the more that Americans opt for trains and buses, the more that footprint could shrink.
But the news isn’t all that sunny. In fact, the mini-exodus from driving has exposed significant cracks in the country’s mass transit systems, which are struggling to accommodate new riders. Having spent decades forsaking the bus and the train for the convenience and privacy of cars, Americans are now finding that the buses, streetcars, trolleys and trains that they left behind are strapped for cash, if they still exist at all.
(23 October 2008)
General Motors, Driven to the Brink
Bill Vlasic and Nick Bunkley, New York Times
IN late May, senior executives at General Motors confronted a decision that few thought they would ever face: whether to continue developing the next generation of one of the most successful products in G.M.’s 100-year history — the full-size sport utility vehicle — or to punt the program entirely.
It’s rare for an automaker to pull the plug on high-profile initiatives, much less one involving a $2 billion, top-to-bottom overhaul of a high-volume vehicle that once helped it rake in cash.
This was also G.M.’s flagship platform, code-named CXX, which would underpin popular models like the Escalade, Yukon and Suburban, brawny tanks that had defined the auto giant’s image for more than 15 years.
The executives killed the CXX project without a single dissenting vote. And with that, the era of the big S.U.V. was as good as dead, done in by soaring gasoline prices and consumers fleeing to smaller, more fuel-efficient cars.
(25 October 2008)
Pedal-Powered Delivery Methods Save Big Bucks
Robert Jones, Entrepreneur.com via TheStreet
When Daniel Corno opened his Pita Pit franchise five years ago in the heart of Washington, DC, he knew deliveries would provide an important revenue stream. The only question was: How to get hot food to customers’ doors in a dense, urban neighborhood with snarled traffic and few parking spaces?
Pinched by both logistics and expenses, Corno shifted gears, settling on the lowly bicycle as the best way to pedal his pitas. His riders are a common sight on the streets and sidewalks of the Foggy Bottom neighborhood, and teaming up with DCSnacks, another bicycle-based delivery service, helped boost his sales by $2,000 a week.
Besides more timely deliveries and fewer parking tickets, Corno found there were definite economic advantages to the low-tech distribution method. First, salary expenses went down because he didn’t have to build the cost of gas into his drivers’ wages. Secondly, with no motorized vehicles to worry about, his liability insurance plummeted. And finally, much to Corno’s surprise, turnover decreased.
“A lot of drivers think the money looks good until they get their gas bill, do the math, and decide they’re not making enough,” he explains.
(14 October 2008)
