pro-cons article assignment: Public Transportation

Once a country had adequate resources of human and nature, it still needs fields to support its developments. One of the supporting variables for this development is mobility. Information, goods, and human resources cannot move themselves, are they? They need efficient mobility to communicate, to be delivered, and to work more effectively. By the governments’ concern toward this efficiency, they organize public transport services for their citizens.

Public transport is mostly conducted by the government. The variety and quantity of public transportation modes in a particular region are regulated by a specific department in
government. There are many kinds of public transportation modes we can find in this world, for example: bus, tram, train, taxicab, ferry, motorcycle rickshaw, airplane, etc.

In its applications in societies, there are matters about perceptions in its users’ views, mobility operational problems, efficiency consideration compared to private vehicles, and many others. There are perceptions of why we should not take public transportations.

First, private vehicles have more mobility then public ones. By private vehicles we can decide wherever we go anytime, anywhere without considering mass transport cost and routes. Sometimes we cannot freely order when and where the vehicles have to go when we take public transport without considering the cost too much. We can take taxis but then they are quite costly sometime, so they are out of our choice.

Second, public transport cannot cover all the destinations the people want to go. Sometimes the bus stops or train stations are only available in strategic and public important places. When we have to go somewhere that is not reached by public transportation, we have to take the nearest stop to our destination then walk. Maybe some people do not like to walk so they prefer their own cars or motorcycles to travel themselves.

Third, maybe it’s easy to travel alone with one single rucksack on our back by bus or train. Now, imagine when our work needs us to bring three of our client’s televisions to office to be repaired. Can we carry it easily by bus or train ourselves? It is simpler to put them in our car’s baggage and drive it directly to our office. In this case, working with a private car is likely more effective than working with public ones. It’s faster and cheaper than taxis.

But, we cannot shut our eyes on public transportation's greatnesses. In one side, private vehicles seem more practical and effective, but in the other side public transports have their own practicality and effectiveness. Public transportations are able to solve social problem in our societies which caused by private vehicles. Here are some cases:

Public transports are the solving of traffic jams. In big cities, traffic jam is nightmares for everyone use roads. Having cars and private vehicles is not an inappropriate decision but when there are too many cars in a city, traffic jams would happen and it is unwanted. Public transportations modes offer people choices to avoid problems of traffic jam. Now we can imagine, if a car stands for one driver, then it absolutely would waste the space of the provided road. Let us compare it to bus or train. They carry more people in one vehicle so they save more spaces of the road, which means they reduce the possibility of traffic jams. Even there are more advantages for the public transportation modes which have their own track such as train and monorail trains, because they can transport people faster without require any space of the road.

Public transportation is more affordable for everyone. Governments organized modes of public transportation for their people. Everyone can enjoy this government-created transportation service mostly in affordable cost. People can spend lesser budget on public transportation rather than spend theirs to purchase cars or motorcycle. People can just pay pennies or cents to take bus or train to go to work, shop, or school.

We can support reduce air pollution and excessive fuel wasting by using public transportation. One of the most common pollutants we can find around us is gasoline and petrol fueled vehicles. The combustion waste gases produced by gasoline fueled vehicles generate air pollution. In big cities, we can find massive using of cars which is bad for environment and health because they generate massive amount of air pollution. For example: a car needs liters of gasoline to move and there are thousands of people drive cars to fulfill their mobility needs. If a car carries only one person, we can count the amount of fuel needed by one person to move and we can multiply the sum on fuel needs when everyone drives cars. If people take bus or train, they would not waste as much as the car drivers do.

So, which transportation mode should we prefer, public transportation or private vehicles? We know the advantage and disadvantage of each transportation modes. We have to see what kind of transportation mode we need and what kind of mobile activity we have. If we need to carry a lot of things everywhere for our job, for example when our work requires us to carry laptop, working suites, and documents in big number, then we probably need a car. In another case when we work as a distributor which requires us to move a lot of things from factory warehouses to markets, we would need a truck. But, we need to go to school or our workplace is located on strategic area in the city and we can reach public transportation easily from our house, then it would be good when we take public transportation. The point is we should take public transportation as possible as we can to keep the advantage of public transportation modes usage without sacrificing our needs of private vehicles to keep our work well.

source: my pure thought