School's out for summer

I've been busy at work during the last few weeks and I didn't even realize that school year is about to end. This is good. This means that my quiet residential street will remain quiet even around 8am, which is when hordes of drivers rush to work after dropping their kids off at nearby school.
 
In July, not only my street is quieter in the morning but also much safer. We have no sidewalks in our neighborhood (since sidewalks are so non-American), so we walk to school in the street, risking to be flattened by an inattentive driver. I mentioned here earlier that I would gladly see a state-wide rule that no private cars can enter a perimeter of 500ft radius around school, which means kids would actually have to walk to get there, but that's wishful thinking. It will never happen.

I would think that replacing private cars with school buses could solve the problem, but if bus drivers are like this one from New Jersey, I'm much less enthusiastic about the idea. The 77-year-old driver (who shouldn't be even driving in his age, especially not children), had 14 (!) license suspensions and multiple speeding tickets, which was discovered only after he crashed with a truck on NJ highway, killing a student and a teacher in the process. This brings so many questions out of which the most important one is - how come we allow anyone to have 14 license suspensions and still drive a car, not to mention a frigging school bus?!

NJ highway school bus crash. I'm surprised there were only two fatalities. (Source: News 4 NY)

The answer is simple - we designed the entire transportation system in this country around cars, basically shooting everyone who's unable to drive (elderly, kids, etc.) in the foot. As such, anyone who can't or shouldn't drive, would be unable to get to work and provide to his family, which normalizes driving with suspended license as a relatively "minor" violation.

It turns out that it might actually be easier to lose your license not by driving like a maniac, but by simply not paying traffic tickets.

The only way to turn this around is to provide an efficient alternative to driving, predominantly in form of public transport - both short (street cars, buses) and long-distance (commuter rail, high-speed trains). Examples from other countries shows that it's still the best solution. Unfortunately, many Americans can't grasp this concept because they never had a chance to experience it. People who take MBTA trains every morning here in Boston think probably that inefficiency is inherent to public transportation and major delays must be  naturally occurring everywhere in the world.

S-Bahn (commuter rail) connects suburbs with Berlin Mitte (center).

But it doesn't need to be that way. For me, spending two years in Berlin was eye-opening - bus schedules at every stop, electronic displays showing time to next train at every station, dense network of connections from, to and within the city. Then, there were also bicycles, serving short distances well. All that meant I never really needed a car living there and that's because Germans know that there are better ways of getting around town than by car. 

Coming to Boston was quite a shock...

But some of you may say - why invest in expensive public transport that's so XX-century, when soon a XXI-century solution will arrive - the driverless cars! Unfortunately, I have bad news for you. Autonomous vehicles won't be here for quite a while and until then, XX-century public transport combined with XIX-century two-wheeled invention are still our best options.

Still the best way to move around city...