Talking about two very different systems I'm familiar with, one in rural America one in a massive American city area. City busses were severely cut for lockdown, keeping drivers safer so ok. Now some lines are gone. Rural service recently cut because of a 'driver shortage' (offering the same starting rate as the local McDonalds). The bus comes half as often, with riders now crowded in to each bus; no more closed-off seats to keep people apart, not any more. I never read the shock doctrine, but I heard someone say 'disaster capitalism' once. Are the busses ever coming back or did we just get done?
This is being used as ammunition against public transit worldwide. It should come as no surprise that the country that systematically disassembled nearly all of its public transit systems because a car company asked them to will do it again.
Do you know anywhere anyone is writing about this where I could get some perspective?
We're still pretty firmly in the pandemic phase. It would be insane for any government to actually bow down to the requests of weirdo op ed writers, think tanks, and globe Twitter users when they can leave it like this now and justify it as a pandemic measure to avoid the negative press and outcry, and then in a couple of years, just make it permanent as the pandemic finally stops being a concern and maybe the next person in office will be the one getting the negative press.
So, since nobody's actually doing anything yet, anyone that would be writing would be writing about a hypothetical years off into the distance. Besides, it's looking more and more like they won't even have to worry about no longer needing to justify it as a pandemic measure, because the pandemic is just going to stick around forever.
Its fucking maddening. Its like the coin thing or the graham crackers but its actually essential to life
I'm sorry, but I have no idea what you mean by the coin thing or the graham crackers. I'm not American, so please excuse my lack of context on those.
There were a bunch of shortages, those the two that immediately spring to mind, that I remember being really obvious last year, but nobody was talking about it, couldn't find any news about it. Maybe it was more that there was just so much other stuff going on that it was ecclipsed, but it was very dissonant not hearing about it but experiencing it totally.
Huh. I'm familiar with the coin shortage, we had money shortages in Canada. Not sure about graham crackers, but I did hear about toilet paper.
I've got some insider knowledge because I work closely with a transit agency. Probably not, of the agencies in my region two are still severely reduced and don't have any intention to return to 2019 services and the other is on the 2019 service without any night service. I don't think the late night trains are coming back either tbh.
