Masses Need to Create Mass Transit Essay -- Transportation, Nationwide

We consume 85 million barrels of oil daily. Nearly 6,500,000 airline operations occurred in 2009. About twenty percent of those were delayed (â€Å"Title from H2† 1). As of January 2011, the average price of a gallon of gas was $3.08, and the annual average parking costs for a vehicle in a downtown business district was $1,930 (â€Å"Rising Gas Prices† 1). All these problems have one thing in common; they can be limited, if not solved, by a nationwide mass transit system such as a bus line. Americans have been using mass transit increasingly in the past few years. The only problem is that no system exists to ferry citizens from one metropolis to another one on the other side of the country. Building a ground-based mass-transit system that connects all the cities in the United States of America will lower the demand for oil, decrease journey times to nationwide destinations, and lower transportation costs. Again, we consume 85 million barrels of oil daily. According to this value, we consume a little over 31 billion barrels of oil in a year. Out of a 42 gallon barrel of oil, nearly 19 and a half are converted into gasoline, almost half of the barrel. The average person in America uses about three gallons of gasoline daily (â€Å"Barrels of Oil a Day† 1). Therefore the average American consumes about 945 gallons of gasoline yearly. If each American uses a public bus transit system, which has an average seating capacity of fifty people per bus, then 47,250 gallons of gasoline, or about 1,125 barrels of oil, would be eliminated per bus yearly. That value is before calculating how much gasoline each bus consumes. The American Public Transit Association, or APTA, stated that if Americans used public transit for ten percent of their daily travel, the... ...power private cars, lowering our dependency, and thereby lowering the demand. Most of the weather that would affect airplane travel would not affect bus travel, thereby lowering journey times for those who experience a flight delay. Finally, a one-time pass for a bus costs an extremely less amount than gasoline and parking costs. Other reasons involving why citizens would use this system, which makes the system worth the labor and funds it would take to create it, and how the funds would be collected and used, have also been explained. We as Americans need to convince legislation to create a mass-transit system that would connect all the cities in the country, pay the taxes that will allow it to be created, and, above all other actions, ride the transit system. If we do this, we can limit, if not solve, all three problems facing the United States of America.