Richard Eldridge, Spanish Professor, posted the following in a thread about the cost of diesel fuel :

1)"The Europeans pay so much for fuel because of taxes, but the taxes subsidize public transportation, which is far superior to the US method of having everyone drive his car everywhere.

2)For example, in Madrid, Spain, a ticket on the subway costs the non senior, non child about 60 cents. For this, he can go on the subway to within ten blocks to darn near anywhere in the entire Madrid Community, and wll not have to park. His trip will almost always take less than 45 minutes.

3)As a result of this, there are far fewer cars in Madrid, and therefore space is not wasted on parking them, so centuries old architectural teasures are not torn down to build parking garages and new apartment blocks with paking built in the the yuppies. Real estate costs less, because it is not rebuilt every 40 years or so, as it tends to be in the US.

4)The GDP in Spain is about a third of what it is in the US, but after riding around all over Madrid for two weeks, I never saw any slums even half as bad as what we have here in Miami, FL. There are a few camps of gypsies and immigrants living in old German trailers around the outskirts of town, but there are not legions of beer-sipping hostile young men hanging out in the streets. The streets are mostly clean and I had an impression that I was safe everywhere--more so than in Miami or Mexico City.

5)The relatively low price of gasoline raises all sorts of other problems: the much higher number of traffic fatalities, the spread of shoping from the city center to way out in the sticks and to unnecessary strip malls all over the place. Who needs car insurance if they have no car? Many, if not most of us Americans pay more for the insurance than for the fuel and even for the car, if we have older used vehicles.

6)I am pretty sure that if I lives in Madrid or Barcelona, I would have only one car and it would not get driven except for special occasions and recreation.

7)I spent a week in Barcelona, two in Madrid and did not see it necessary tro take a cab even once. There was a convenient train from the airport right into downtown in both cities.

8)Last winter, I was in Paris, and although the tickets were about 90 cents US, we did not need to take a cab even once, and took a bus only twice.

9)The fact is that Americans need their cars in US cities only because the cities have been designed to be convenient for cars more than for people.

10)If the French or the Spanish lowered the price on fuel, the result would be more far-out suburbs, increased expenses for insurance and more traffic accidents, as well as the destruction of fine old buildings that cannot be duplicated today."--Richard Eldridge
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I reserve the right to Delete, restart and accumulate answers in this thread in order to have a good discussion about this.....
First I hope people will list the variables which Richard has not taken into account when formulating his views....
For instance :
How many people live in the towns he mentioned ?
How much land area do those towns involve ?
Does culture play a role in how people choose where they live ?
Do geographic features affect population density ?

What is the relationship of the size of area served by a public transportation to the cost of providing a system which keeps the max travel time constant ?

By this I mean , if you try to make it where a commuter could get from any place in Houston to any other place in 45 minutes... how many buses, trains, taxis, would be needed... and how fast would they have to be traveling ? And how much would it cost to ride once you had made those capital investments ?

I suggest that doubling the diameter of a town increases the public transportation needs (to maintain same travel time) by many many times that.... take 20 miles across to 40 miles across as the example...

Does FREEDOM have any role in this discussion ?
Does EFFICIENCY have any role in this discussion ?

Rather than repeat his thread... please use the paragraph numbers I have inserted unless you trim the quote to exactly what you are speaking to....
thanks, have at it ....