And another thing...the Grist Ecologists keep going on about mass transit.   Well, I was just reading about how 70 percent of all mass transit riders are concentrated in 6 American cities -- Seattle included.   This is the thing though, even with King County's extensive bus network, I was just driving somewhere there, and I noticed -- there's a crapload of cars in Seattle!!!  I mean, not just on the famous I-5 bottlenecks, but everywhere, Ballard, Wallingford...even with a bus stop every 3 streets, the city is chock-a-block full of cars!!!

So, if a city that has already made massive investments in "mass transit" cannot survive without the car, then it must be a needed technology.

what?!?

the "massive" investments in transit pale next to the massive subsidies in the form of roads and highways.  

"The valuation simply reflects that making cars is now a commodity process.   We know the technology so well, and can make them so efficiently, that the amount of capital involved
is trivial (not so labor)."

when Crysler and Ford are losing $1000 for each car sold and GM losing several hundred dollars that is not due solely to labor costs - it is also engineering and design and and other capitcal based costs.  so, hard to fathom that capital is trivial when losses like that keep mounting.  i know the industry likes to blame labor, but that seems hard to buy.

and GM's Vice Chairman Bob Lutz claims new CAFE standards will cost $6000 per car to implement, which dwarfs the $1000 dollars GM claims health care benefits adds to the cost of a car. that $6000 cant possibly be labor costs and cars can't possibly be made "efficiently" if a modest bump in CAFE facilitates such a cost spike per car(ignoring that over history, the auto industry has always cried wolf over cost)

the "massive" investments in transit pale next to the massive subsidies in the form of roads and highways.

But I'm not talking about roads and highways -- I am talking about city streets.   Such as 45th Avenue in Wallingford and 15th in Ballard.  Here is an area of Seattle that is rich in buses...yet it is trafficked by cars very, very heavily each and every day.

To say that Seattle has spent a lot of money and has a rich "mass transit" system would be an understatement.   And the neighborhoods of which I speak are densely packed, with well paid urban professionals.  Yet, for some reason, they see no reason to give up their cars (and many have two) for simply scooting down to the local brazzerie or what not!

So, if the target audience for mass transit, who is awash in mass transit, refuses to use it to any extent, except for the very restricted long ways commute to the office, then what good is it?  To me, it's pouring money down the drain if you can't get rid of cars even in the Great Green Gob known as Seattle!?!!