Importance of transportation

Many of the world’s major cities were built long before the car appeared and people realized the need to built efficient road systems. Current traffic management problems may be connected with old city planning.

The thing that saves some of these cities is an effective public transport system, usually below ground. London has an old but effective underground train system known as a tube, and a comprehensive bus and train system above the ground. Hong Kong has cheap, swift and effective public transport in the form of Mass Transit Railway, buses and ferries.

But there are newly built cities, such as for example, Dallas, Baltimore and Los Angeles in America. Dallas is a wealthy city in Texas, which has grown up in an era when cars were considered to be essential to move about. It has an excellent road system, as does Baltimore, another new city with wise city leaders who insisted on building good roads. However, the public transport system in both Dallas and Baltimore is extremely poor. As a result, travel in these cities is easy except for peak hour, when a twenty minute run can take more than an hour traffic jams. Los Angeles suffers from chronic highway blockages, despite efforts to encourage people to use public transport.

Cities with good road system can use other methods to reduce the number of vehicles traveling together at peak hour. Flexible time is one good method: offices open and close at different times so people are traveling to and from work at different times. Vehicles carrying more than one person can use special priority lanes, which mean they can travel more quickly. There are even systems to make peak hours car use more expensive, with electronic chips recording the presence of a vehicle in a given high traffic area at a given time.

Дата добавления: 2015-08-20