Location: Slovenia
Bus route: Hoce-Maribor
Monday, December 17, 2009
I'm standing at a bus stop waiting for the bus. The sky is cloudy. I look over at the clock of the nearby church. 4:05 PM. The bus still won't come. Not surprisingly, as the road lanes are jam packed with endless lines of cars and trucks. The air is filled with exhaust fumes and the noise in unbearable.I have time so I'm counting the passing vehicles and how many people are sitting in them. In a single minute, I count 48 cars with one person, 5 with two and 3 with three people. A simple calculation shows that about 66 tones of steel passed by, carrying about 4.5 tones of passengers. Crazy. A 93.2% of steel mass is being used for transportation of only 6.8% of human mass.Finally, the bus is here. I step on and pay the fare. My eyes glance over at the seats. A young man's sitting in the back. Including the driver and myself, that makes three of us. So, this 18 tones heavy bus is transporting 3 passengers. Let's calculate again. The math shows unbelievable ratio: 98.8% towards 1.2%.The bus takes off. I look out the window. Still, lines of cars, bumper to bumper. Across the road, I see a supermarket with a car-filled parking lot that's three times larger than the building itself. I'm trying to find some bicycle riders or pedestrians. None anywhere. The bus passes by the first stop, then the second, third, fourth, fifth. Why didn't we stop? Because nobody got on or off.
That's the state of the Slovenian public road transit. Majority of people in cars, some in buses, a few on bicycles and almost nobody by foot. Such a shame and most of all extremely irresponsible behavior of all towards the environment."Is the car really more important than the environment?" I ask myself as I wait again for the empty bus with cars speeding by. I count. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6... 1126... 147,688... 18,663,744... 650, 098,434... The line is getting longer and the dark cloud above us is growing bigger and bigger.
