Well, Floyd and me we talked this over, and decided that to wait for a bus is a kind of European-style Socialism. And you just can’t have that good old American freedom if you can’t jump in the car whenever you want, and instead have to stick to some government official’s timetable. Public transportation is really for those people, anyway, if you know what I mean, and so real Americans don’t want to spend their hard-earned taxpayer money on buses and trains. Public transportation is filthy and filled with homeless people practically living on those buses and trains, so nobody in their right minds is going to leave the driving to Greyhound or whoever.
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I think most Swedes would read this story with disbelief. The US started to dismantle public transit systems in the 1940s. Right now in Sweden, just about anywhere in Sweden, you can get from point A to point B with public transit, even public transit bicycles. In a longer trip from town to city, say, Norrköping to a Stockholm suburb, the public transit will beat a private car both in overall price and time to destination. Sweden accomplished this infrastructure buildup even as it had two car companies (Volvo and SAAB). Clearly, car companies come and go, but the need to move about swiftly and reliably persists.
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Really good anecdotal that is a lot closer to the statistical truth. We may not think about cars in that “Mad Men” kind of way anymore. We have always thought of them as methods to enable ourselves a way to make a living. Without transportation of some type, it’s a lot harder to make it.