Tomorrow, Bermuda will be having a 'Burn Fat Not Fuel' Day and encourage people to leave their vehicles at home, forgoing them in exchange for walking, cycling or using public transport, which will be free of cost for the day.
It's a noble idea. With our high obesity rates, it's to be commended. But as far as a push to reduce the use of cars and bikes on the road, it's a weak gimmick that will be exposed easily enough tomorrow, I fear. It's more just to test Bermuda to see if they would embrace the government's free transport pledge they laid out at Election time.
Already the PTB is scared that they won't have enough buses available for the public. Peachy. One reason people don't like to take the bus is that they'll be in some congested and uncomfortable bus instead of enjoying a relaxing journey to the city to work. Oh well, there you go.
Also, last time they tried having some promotion for people to use the ferries more, people got parking tickets because there wasn't enough room to park their cars in the car park and they had to park on the street. Ferries have limits on number of passengers as well; imagine the wrath that people will feel if they're denied access and have to get back in their car anyway.
I expect that less people will be driving into town tomorrow, though. More likely, however, is that you'll see many people driving to certain spots closer to town, then choosing to walk in. So traffic into town will be eased, but just outside of town, return of gridlock.
Yep, totally pessimistic here, sorry.
2 comments:
I would totally ride the bus into work, except that on my route the bus only runs every half hour. Not particularly efficient, given the probability of missing a bus is quite high.
I totally understand. Unless you're on the major 10/11 or 7/8 routes, you have at least a half-hour between rides, longer during parts of the day.
From a health/fitness point of view I think it helped with awareness and I think we'll see more people doing activities like walking into town once a week (from say, the Arboretum or Elbow Beach).
However for public transport, the gimmick would never work unless you increase the frequency and spread of all routes. Consider also that many people have to do things like drop off and pick up kids and it's a bigger sacrifice to some than to others, to give up use of a car.
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