Are your headlight lenses getting cloudy 2437

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We lead the world in "drivers" on the road. I forget where I saw it but a study was done on vehicle ownership compared to income. In the US 75% of the people making the median income own cars, in all countries in the rest of the world, only something like 50% of the people making the median income own cars. As you might expect in all countries as income rises, a higher percentage of people own vehicles.

I think though that you are quite wrong on the issue of effective mbutt transit. In the city I live in, Portland OR back in the 60's the city literally gutted and destroyed Rose City Transit, which at that time was the bus system owner and was a -private- company. Meaning they made a profit every year. The city did this because it got overun by greenies who insisted that if the bus system was greatly expanded and lots and lots of more routes were put on line (routes that Rose City Transit refused to put online because they said nobody would ride them and they would lose money) that people would rise up en-mbutte and all give up their cars and ride the bus. Since that time PDX has dumped literally hundreds of millions of taxpayer money into the public transit system and it's been 40 years now and all those additional routes are STILL running at a loss. In fact the public transit system has totally restructured their accounting in such a way as to make it impossible to analyze their books and identify the routes that waste the most taxpayer money. They can't hide the ridership though and you can get on any of the hundreds of lines and see virtually empty busses all day long. I could go on and on there's lots more that's even worse of a waste, but suffice it to say that if you ever want to prove that throwing money into a giant expansion of mbutt transit WON'T increase it's use, come to Portland OR.

The reason the US has a lack of effective mbutt transit is that people DON'T WANT IT. And I think it's obvious why that is. Use of mbutt transit simply takes more time, simple as that. Whether your driving your car to a park&ride or waiting for a bus or being dropped off at the train station, it simply takes longer.

A relative of mine lives in Long Island and commutes to an office in downtown Manhattan every day. He drives. I've visited him and his home is a quarter mile from a train station that goes to penn station and interconnects with a subway that goes to a station that's 20 feet from the building door. I've taken that ride myself it practically carries you there, almost. Yet, even -he- drives every day on the freeways which in NY are crowded. And the NY mbutt transit system will knock ANY city in the US into a chickened hat. If NY with the best damn mbutt transit system in the country has people choosing crowded freeways instead of the mbutt transit system, you know that mbutt transit is a failure as an automobile subsbreastute in the US for most of the population. People don't like it, they don't want it, and most of the folks on the bus would take a private car like a shot if you gave them a new one, and would never look back at the bus. It is simply a matter of money - you are NEVER going to reduce auto ownership in the US unless you make it so expensive that only the wealthy in the population can afford it. People are not "forced" to drive, they WANT to drive.

OK so they got the ball rolling 30 years ago, but they have been sitting on their butt since then. It would have been better if they had never got the ball rolling then maybe the rest rate would have been so high that an agency with real teeth might have come into being.

One of the big failures of the US society-civiliation-culture whatever you want to call it, is that if the majority of people in the society want something that is bad for them, they will get it.

We have no problems with clamping down on bad things that minorities want. For example smoking, when smokers became a minority the doctors and health professionals were unchained and allowed to go do their work, and every year have been making things nastier and nastier for smokers. Eventually in another 50 years we will have it outlawed and the idiots that want to kill themselves won't be able to do it with cigarettes anymore.

But when the majority wants something that is toxic, or more commonly is propagandized into wanting something that is bad for the society, there is nobody and no organization that will stand up and say NO. You can point to item after item, from excessive alcohol consumption, to excessive empty calorie consumption, to gambling, to lift kits on trucks that jack them up into God's butt and make them completely unstable, to blue bulbs in headlights, to 4 hours of television a night that rots the brain - you name it. If the majority has been propagandized into wanting something that's bad, they will get it.

Here is what the majority of people want in vehicle safety in the US: butt-covers. That's all. People want cars with interiors that explode like the Stay Puff marshmallow man when they smack into another car. But, they DO NOT want anything that will HELP TO PREVENT smacking into that other car to begin with. They don't want a cop at the corner writing tickets every day so people will slow down, they don't want to be required to become more educated drivers, they don't want a more rigorious driving test that might cull out some morons from driving, they don't want to drive around with their headlights on during the day, (although note that the majority has had no problems forcing the minority of motorcycle riders to do this) they don't want fewer cars on the road so there's less congestion, unless of course you can give them an ironclad guarentee that THEY won't be the ones taken off the road.

NHTSA has taken the easy way out. They have never gone on record as being an agency that fights with the people they are regulating. Look at just about any other regulatory body, the EPA fines people all the time, the SEC fines people all the time, the RTC put a lot of rich banks out of business, etc. And there's lots of people that don't like that and have tried shutting down those agencies over the years.

But the NHTSA decided early on that they would go with the flow and do exactly what the US population seems to want. Point to one serious threat to the NHTSA's existence over the years. They have never peeed off anyone important simply because they have never tackled the difficult issues - like recalls such as the Wilderness AT tires on the Ford Explorer, the NHTSA did not order that recall, Ford did.

Ted