The problem with public transport is the public

If a crush of messy, noisy, shoving, coughing, backpack-swinging-in-your-face crowds wasn't in them, buses would be fine. 

I once lived in a small town where the bus was often almost empty, or even totally empty (that was bliss, like having a private chauffeur), because most people living there used cars. They could do that because streets were quiet and spacious, and parking plentiful and free. No problem getting right to the shop or business you needed, which was great for the businesses. 

The town enjoyed these civilized circumstances because it had a low population -- and that largely senior or retired, which meant a population with a certain calm tolerant seen-it-all, just-calm-down mentality not frequently seen in growing, thrusting, densely populated urban centres.

What quality exists in a life spent in a high-rise shoe-box, coming and going via crowded elevators to catch a crowded bus to a crowded workplace? Might the "quiet quitting" phenomenon and the preference for working from home really be not about quitting, but about avoiding too much human proximity? Is it about a Hardy-esque desire to get farther from the madding crowd? Against a background of rising world population that need will only get stronger. 

Overcrowding is a predictor of violence and aggressive behaviour. Among rats in labs, scientists have documented more aggression when a certain ratio of space to individual is reduced, regardless of food supply. The resource the rats are competing for is private space. 

In human society too, privacy is becoming scarce. In London and other European capitals with fast-growing populations in the 18th and 19th centuries this was understood, and large tracks of land were put aside as park space whether by the Crown or conservation societies. Perhaps, being closer to a rural past, the city-designers of the time were used to the lingering longing for natural spaces. Today in parts of Canada, we seem to be filling open spaces in, in a futile quest to make housing affordable by making it denser. Yet, the less space available, the higher its price and the greater a developer's investment will cost. It seems that affordability will only come when population control comes, i.e. not when supply goes up (and only the wealthy can access the supply) but when demand goes down. Should that ever happen the supply of mental and physical health-giving privacy will also go up.

We need to change more than Earth's atmospheric climate; the crisis starts with the climate of urban overcrowding. An end to meat-farming, forest destruction and fossil fuel burning would help, but ultimately Earth's resources are only saved by not drawing them down through the over-consumption which over-population causes.

It's ironic that by allotting less space per person (as world population grows), we consume more nature per bio-region.

The planetary bus is full.

 

Urban History: Tri-via Becomes Deca-via

 My town began life as a small settlement on a small river. From its centre one narrow road went north, one south, and one crossed the river. Three roads: "tri via". Where they met was the place neighbours used to pause to exchange news -- the trivia of the day.

A century later the town is fifty times bigger. City-sized. The "trivia" district has become the "deca-via" district: not three but ten roads in and out. And alongside them the town council has added multiple "transportation choices" (euphemism for "get out of private cars and into socially-correct public conveyance).

The roads which had become highways were narrowed back to single-lane, the rest of the pavement filled with bike lanes and rail tracks. Residential neighbourhoods that had grown up around the original roads were paved for infill, turned into "blended work-life community pods" of dense high-rise blocks.

Now there were jogging paths, cycling paths, skateboard and electric scooter paths, bridges for confused urban deer to cross the roads, tunnels for tortoises to get under them (those which had genetic memory of their home river), and fenced stretches for urban-tower dogs to run off-leash. There were pods within the pods, of community picnic tables and concrete "native plant" (weed) boxes wedged in the intersections of cross-roads. No trees casting shade.

It was too noisy to talk in the community spaces due to beeps of delivery trucks trying to back up where wasn't enough room, and car horns protesting at snarled traffic and ambulance sirens screaming after each rear-ender. Panhandlers stumbled down the concrete medians holding up cardboard signs saying "HUNGRY". 

Traffic signs, pedestrian lights, arrows, instructions, and diagrams painted on the pavement forced drivers to pause and read for so long that they missed their light and blocked the intersections. More rear-enders, and civic officials scold drivers: see what your selfish cars DO?

Dumpsters overflowed at the community picnic spaces which no families used, only the homeless who sometimes slept inside the dumpsters. Crows shrieked and fought over the garbage they left behind. The wooden picnic tables, burnt black, rotted and turned mouldy and were replaced with plastic tables ... which turned mouldy.

Senior citizens who recalled the days when their town was small, spacious and quiet, gazed sadly from the high-rise windows. To them, the "smart city" trumpeted in the popular media was a stupid city. In turn, the media called the elders "elitist". Their concerns, the city councillors assured them, were trivial.

Tree Spotted in Downtown Core Frightens Residents

“Haven't we progressed beyond that nature shit yet?” asked a high-rise building security manager when a tree was spotted in the neighbourhood. It was growing behind a nearby community association's daycare centre. “I mean: nature? Birds? Seriously, in this day and age?”

“We live right around the corner from it,” said one tenant of the high-rise, mouth trembling, on the verge of tears. “Does it harbour disease? Bugs? Poisonous songbirds?”

“And right beside the daycare centre too,” added her companion, disgusted. “Right in front of innocent urban kids. We don't pay high taxes to live in a dense smart city for this. This is dumb.”

City officials couldn't say whether the tree was an overlooked survivor of development or a new sapling unaccountably sprouting from dusty, chemical-laced earth: no biology-trained staff who might have a theory remain in the City's employ after recent staff changes. 

“What I don't understand,” said one City Councillor, “is how this outlaw tree escaped the surveillance cameras. As guardians of the public purse we need to hold the surveillance service-provider accountable. We love pavement here, but we won't allow anyone to pave over cracks in official transparency and accountability. The next thing we know, freedom will replace bureaucracy and leaves will be falling in gutters. They'll land on top of safely-injected homeless people just lying in their sleeping bags, minding their own business.”

Police suspect that Someone might be extracting Something from the bark of the tree in an archaic process once used by illegal substance labs. The Mayor promises to acquire Bark Recognition Cameras for the city. Volunteers from the “Leave Leaves Out” campaign applaud this announcement. “We'll never go Back-To-Bark in this town,” they assure the Urban Purist Support Group.