Cars vs. Public Transit : The Ecological Lie vs. The Unknown Truth

For example, public transit compared to cars....

If we think only in terms of moving people around, public transit is actually less ecologically viable. It is a simple matter of energy : since you use only cars when people want to move, you use just was is needed; but when you use buses and trains, sometimes you'll use too much energy to transport maybe one or two lost dudes, or even run a bus without anyone in.

So I stopped to think about public transit in terms of ecology. It is more ecologic, but not for the reasons most people think it is.

But the two biggest advantages to public transit are elsewhere :
- Socially, anyone old enough to walk around on his own is old enough to go on public transit. That is, you can easily turn public transit into a right of the people, and make everyone move with it, including those who cannot drive. Basically, it makes everyone able to go everywhere without anyone's help.
- Urbanistically, public transit takes less place and carries more people around for the same surface area. That is, you have more space for more people, both as living space and as moving space. This also means that you can have more people altogether. But this isn't the end : public transit, if well done, is less prone to congestion than any private transit system, because you have better planning, a lot better drivers (they train a lot) and because, over all, you need less space anyways.

In the end, even ecologically you are winning, but because you need less space (so more space for nature, other cities, and other fun stuff) and because you also need less natural ressources (except energy, but the Sun is wasting tons of it anyway, so let us just take a little more from our little Life Giver).