Post by Steven Dale
A thought experiment:
What if you took anywhere from one third to one half of the commuters off the road each and every workday? How would that change things?
Well for starters, your commute would be far more pleasant, whether you were a driver or not. Congestion and delays wouldn’t be nearly as harsh as they are today. If you were a transit rider, you might even get a seat on the subway.
Fifty years ago that would’ve been the case. After all, back then only one person commuted to work in a formal workplace. He – of course – was the breadwinner, but the housewife provided labour in an informal economy of child-rearing, food preparation, tailoring and perhaps a small home-based business making and selling what-have-yous.
And remember: That informal economy was impossible to track and thus, tax free.
That’s not to say that a woman’s place is in the home. Far from it. It’s just to say that maybe the home is the place for half of a household’s economic activity, whether it’s generated by man or woman.
Were that the case, we’d have a lot fewer cars on the road and riders on the subway.
Maybe our traffic and transit problems have nothing to do with roads and wheels and rights-of-way. Maybe traffic isn’t the horrible disease we make it out to be. Maybe it’s the symptom of something far more troublesome than itself.
If so, we’ve got to stop worrying about the symptom and go after the disease directly, whatever it may be.
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Want more? Purchase Cable Car Confidential: The Essential Guide to Cable Cars, Urban Gondolas & Cable Propelled Transit and start learning about the world's fastest growing transportation technologies.
