Quotes & Sayings About Public Transportation

An advanced city is not a place where the poor move about in cars, rather it's where even the rich use public transportation — Enrique Penalosa

Whatever the "Christian conservatives" in America say, there is no one set of rightful opinions that follow on automatically from your belief. If you have signed up for the redeeming love of God, you don't - you really don't - have to sign up too for low taxes, creationism, gun ownership, the death penalty, closing abortion clinics, climate change denial and grotesque economic inequality. You are entirely at liberty to believe that the kingdom would be better served by social justice, redistributive taxation, feminism, gay rights and excellent public transportation. You won't have the authoritative sanction of the gospel for believing in those things either, of course. But you can. — Francis Spufford

Major export is people who are funny and smart, who have advanced degrees, who read on public transportation. — Jennifer DuBois

I absolutely love the public transportation system in New York. No matter what, no matter how people complain, it is the best in the world. — Malachy McCourt

Transit-for-all is about values. Improving public transportation is about giving all Americans the freedom of equal access to social and economic opportunities that enhance our quality of life. Investing in alternative transportation is using the common wealth for the common good. It is an expansion of freedom, creating more diverse transportation. Transit-for-all is a progressive strategic initiative to advance many of our goals at once. It's an economic issue. It would increase mobility of goods and labor. It would revitalize neglected neighborhoods. And it would spur growth and attract development. It's a labor issue. — George Lakoff

And public transportation applied economic pressure. Freedom Riders - African Americans and whites - took bus trips throughout the South to test federal laws that banned segregation in interstate transportation. Black students had enrolled in segregated schools such as Central High in Little Rock, Arkansas, and the University of Alabama. Picketing, protest marches, and demonstrations made headlines. Civil rights workers carried out programs for voter education and registration. The goal was — Christopher Paul Curtis

Responding to non sequiturs - at cocktail parties, on public transportation, in ticket lines at the movie theater - is dicey enough, — Stephen King

For every $1 billion we invest in public transportation, we create 30,000 jobs, save thousands of dollars a year for each commuter, and dramatically cut greenhouse gas emissions. — Bernie Sanders

Poetry must be available to the public in far greater volume than it is. It should be as ubiquitous as the nature that surrounds us, and from which poetry derives many of its similes; or as ubiquitous as gas stations, if not as cars themselves. Bookstores should be located not only on campuses or main drags but at the assembly plant's gates also. Paperbacks of those we deem classics should be cheap and sold at supermarkets. This is, after all, a country of mass production, and I don't see why what's done for cars can't be done for books of poetry, which take you quite a bit further. Because you don't want to go a bit further? Perhaps; but if this is so, it's because you are deprived of the means of transportation, not because the distances and the destinations that I have in mind don't exist. — Joseph Brodsky

Policy is no longer being written by politicians accountable to the American public. Instead, policies concerning the defense budget, deregulation, health care, public transportation, job training programs, and a host of other crucial areas are now largely written by lobbyists who represent mega corporations. — Henry Giroux

In Chekhov, when people leave, a carriage is taking them away forever. The stakes are so high just for someone to make a simple exit. And now we have all this access to public transportation, automobiles and jets and the Internet; we're so easily distracted, but the world is still designed to destroy you. It just happens quicker and faster now. — Adam Rapp

If it weren't for public transportation," Sam said, "my brother wouldn't be getting married today. He and Maggie fell in love along the ferry route
from Bellingham to Anacortes ... which brings to mind the old saying that life is a journey. Some people have a natural sense of direction. You could
put them in the middle of a foreign country and they could find their way around. My brother is not one of those people." Sam paused as some of the
guests started laughing, and his older brother gave him a mock-warning glance. "So when Mark by some miracle manages to end up where he was
supposed to be, it's a nice surprise for everyone, including Mark." More laughter from the crowd. "Somehow, even with all the roadblocks and
detours and one-way streets, Mark managed to find his way to Maggie." Sam raised his glass. "To Mark and Maggie's journey together. And to
Holly, who is loved more than any girl in the whole wide world. — Lisa Kleypas

What Paris has done right is to make it awful to get around by car and awfully easy to get around by public transportation or by bike. — Serge Schmemann

Still, we've gone soft since those days of wartime sacrifice, haven't we? Contemporary humans are too self-centered, too addicted to gratification to live without the full freedom to satisfy our every whim - or so our culture tells us every day. And yet the truth is that we continue to make collective sacrifices in the name of an abstract greater good all the time. We sacrifice our pensions, our hard-won labor rights, our arts and after-school programs. We send our kids to learn in ever more crowded classrooms, led by ever more harried teachers. We accept that we have to pay dramatically more for the destructive energy sources that power our transportation and our lives. We accept that bus and subway fares go up and up while service fails to improve or degenerates. We accept that a public university education should result in a debt that will take half a lifetime to pay off when such a thing was unheard of a generation ago. — Naomi Klein

The failure to invest in our public transportation and public life, I think, is a scandal and a shame, and it should be a national embarrassment. — Mark Shields

Taxes are how we pool our money for public health and safety, infrastructure, research, and services-from the development of vaccines and the Internet to public schools and universities, transportation, courts, police, parks, and safe drinking water. — Holly Sklar

Reathing secondhand smoke, being subject to unfair dairy pricing, and not being able to mime (or lap dance), though they are all tragic, tragic injustices, are not quite as bad as the systematic segregation of public transportation based on skin color. And while fighting for your right to lap dance and mime and breathe just regular pollution is a very fine, very American idea, it is not quite as brave as being middle-aged black woman in Alabama in 1955 telling a white man she's not giving him her seat despite the fact that the law requires her to do so. — Sarah Vowell

You should never rely on public transportation during the apocalypse. Everyone should know that. — J. Cornell Michel

In Copenhagen, there's a long-term commitment to creating a well-functioning pedestrian city where all forms of movement - pedestrian, bicycles, cars, public transportation - are accommodated with equal priority. — Bjarke Ingels

Our plutocracy, whether the hedge fund managers in Greenwich, Connecticut, or the Internet moguls in Palo Alto, now lives like the British did in colonial India: ruling the place but not of it. If one can afford private security, public safety is of no concern; to the person fortunate enough to own a Gulfstream jet, crumbling bridges cause less apprehension, and viable public transportation doesn't even compute. With private doctors on call and a chartered plane to get to the Mayo Clinic, why worry about Medicare? — Mike Lofgren

The House adjourned without voting on the bill, but the following year a similar bill - mandating equality in hotels and restaurants open to the public, in transportation facilities, in theaters and other public amusements and in the selection of juries - passed both chambers. The measure reached the White House about the time the two sides in Louisiana cobbled a compromise that allowed Grant to withdraw Sheridan and most of the federal troops. On March 1, 1875, the president signed the Civil Rights Act, the most ambitious affirmation of racial equality in American history until then (a distinction it would retain until the 1960s). — H.W. Brands

It took him forever to get to downtown Vancouver although Tony had to admit that saving the world by public transportation was a particularly Canadian way to do things. — Tanya Huff

James Russell offers a timely and compelling blueprint for a realistic transformation of America's energy consumption by refusing to fall victim to conventional thinking. Accessible?pragmatic even?Russell's proposals speak to goals on the immediate horizon and underscore the role that intelligent design can play now in America. On a longer horizon, his analysis points to a range of issues about land use, transportation, and coordination of public and private investments to which the design professions have an enormous contribution to make. Here design and policy find common ground. — Barry Bergdoll

Things like water and sewage systems require states in a large-scale society, but states are also a good mechanism for dealing with health care, education, public transportation, and infrastructure. — Cynthia Kauffman

We have seen a central government taking more and more control over public education, over communications, over transportation, over every detail of our daily lives. — Robert W. Welch Jr.

For me, not owning a car means I may spend a little extra time on public transportation, but I can use that time to read, catch up on work projects, and make the phone calls I couldn't get to earlier. Plus, I never waste time at the mechanics or gas station. — Lynn Jurich

Farmers, merchants, manufacturers, and the traveling public have all had their troubles with the transportation lines, and the difficulties to which these struggles have given rise have produced that problem which is even now apparently far from solution. — John Moody

Now our world is at the present time firmly in the grip of a mechanical monster, whose head - if you want to call it that - is the World Engineer's Complex. That monster is opposed to us and can keep all too good a tab on us through every purchase we make with our credit numbers, every time we use the public transportation or eat a meal or rent a place to live. — Gordon R. Dickson

it is very often the case in large metro areas that the geographic locations of desirable housing with good school districts are far from the place where there are the best job opportunities. Meanwhile, lack of access to a car is one of the most debilitating aspects of modern poverty, particularly for those in places where public transportation is scarce and unsteady. According to the 2000 census, 8 percent of Americans resided in a household without access to a car, but that number varies widely depending on class and location. Among the poor nationwide, 20 percent live in households that don't have access to a car, and — Christopher L. Hayes

She is stunned that in this town there are no sidewalks to speak of, no streetlights, no public transportation, no stores for miles at at a time. — Jhumpa Lahiri

But somehow Carter's "battlefield of energy" never really filled up with eager American combatants. It just never felt like anybody was going to be draped in glory for taking public transportation, or carpooling, or turning down the thermostat and wearing a cardigan. — Rachel Maddow

We also have a growing population of unwelcome out-of-town wildlife species that have come here and clearly intend to stay. Two invasive species in particular have caused serious concern: Burmese pythons, and New Yorkers. The New Yorkers have been coming here for years, which is weird because pretty much all they do once they get to Florida is bitch about how everything here sucks compared to the earthly paradise that is New York. They continue to root, loudly, for the Jets, the Knicks, the Mets, and the Yankees; they never stop declaring, loudly, that in New York the restaurants are better, the stores are nicer, the people are smarter, the public transportation is free of sharks, etc. The Burmese pythons are less obnoxious, but just as alarming in their own way. — Dave Barry

Under the rule of the "free market" ideology, we have gone through two decades of an energy crisis without an effective energy policy. Because of an easy and thoughtless reliance on imported oil, we have no adequate policy for the conservation of gasoline and other petroleum products. We have no adequate policy for the development or use of other, less harmful forms of energy. We have no adequate system of public transportation. — Wendell Berry

It was the beginning of his personal crusade to make life easier for the more than forty million disabled Americans. By 1990 he had moved Congress to pass the Americans with Disabilities Act, a sweeping piece of legislation that mandated changes in public buildings, accommodations, and transportation to make it easier for the disabled to function in American society. For Dole, it was his greatest legislative victory. Yet it was also a classic example of the two sides of Bob Dole. Although he was a champion of this federal directive that imposed on states and businesses rigid requirements that were costly and, in some cases, little used, he was also known for advocating a reduced role for the federal government. On — Tom Brokaw

Extreme weather threatens our energy and electric grid, federal buildings, transportation infrastructure, access to natural resources, public health, our relationships across the globe, and many other aspects of life. — Matt Cartwright

What are they teaching these thugs? -Why are there so many of them? -What is the Institute for Higher Aeronautics? -How many of the are there? There are only six of us! Why? -Why is DC public transportation so weird? -Why don't we mug those Eraser goons for money more often? -Fang's Blog — James Patterson

I've got two bikes that get me everywhere I need to go. And public transportation. — Julia Butterfly Hill

A society - any society - is defined as a set of mutual benefits and duties embodied most visibly in public institutions: public schools, public libraries, public transportation, public hospitals, public parks, public museums, public recreation, public universities, and so on. — Robert Reich

Funny how nobody talks on the tubes, isn't it? I rarely catch the tube myself, or lifts. Confined spaces, everybody shuts down. Why is that? Perhaps we think everybody on the tube is a potential psychopath or a drunk,so we close down and pretend to read a book or something. — John Hannah

You can't understand a city without using its public transportation system. — Erol Ozan

The measure of a country's prosperity should not be how many poor people drive cars, but how many affluent people use public transportation. — Michael Hogan

Today's terrorists are pursuing a distinct route. They are increasingly attacking civilians in symbolic targets, such as those of economic importance, or venues of bustling life like public transportation or entertainment, like nightclubs. — Cliff Stearns

It comes in handy in situations like that. People always expect you to be riding around in stretch limousines all the time, but I will sometimes take public transportation if it's convenient, and it does surprise people, you see the heads turn. — Paul McCartney

One important role for the city is to conduct studies to document areas of greatest need, and to facilitate coordination between our public and private transportation options to weave it into a dense tapestry of accessible and reliable transportation. — Mark Noble

Simon would have felt both honored and love, except mostly he felt weird, because he had only a few broken fragments of memory that said he knew these people at all, and a whole lifetime of memories that said they were armed, overly intense strangers. The kind you might avoid on public transportation. — Cassandra Clare

Apartment houses, public transportation, and schools tell us something about the technical development of a society. They do not tell us whether the members of that society are suppressed subjects or free workers, whether they are rational or irrational men and women. — Wilhelm Reich

This is critical to the region. Every other major city has public transportation going downtown. We have a world-class airport now, and this could be an important additional piece to the airport development. This is a significant investment and one that should be seen as a significant long-term commitment to making this a reality. — Debbie Stabenow

It is truly a triumph of rhetoric over reality when people can believe that going into politics is 'public service,' but that producing food, shelter, transportation, or medical care is not. — Thomas Sowell

We're going to stop this preposterous obsession with economic growth at the cost of all else. Great economic success doesn't produce national happiness. It produces Republicans and Switzerland. So we're going to concentrate on just being lovely and pleasant and civilized. We're going to have the best schools and hospitals, the most comfortable public transportation, the liveliest arts, the most useful and well-stocked libraries, the grandest parks, the cleanest streets, the most enlightened social policies. In short, we're going to be like Sweden, but with less herring and better jokes. — Bill Bryson

At Camp One we were met by Director of Public Works Warwick Greene, grim and grimy. He has been working himself to death to make this transportation plan a success. — William Cameron Forbes

Public transportation is for jerks and lesbians. — Homer

Destroyed, that is, were not only men, women and thousands of children but also restaurants and inns, laundries, theater groups, sports clubs, sewing clubs, boys' clubs, girls' clubs, love affairs, trees and gardens, grass, gates, gravestones, temples and shrines, family heirlooms, radios, classmates, books, courts of law, clothes, pets, groceries and markets, telephones, personal letters, automobiles, bicycles, horses - 120 war-horses - musical instruments, medicines and medical equipment, life savings, eyeglasses, city records, sidewalks, family scrapbooks, monuments, engagements, marriages, employees, clocks and watches, public transportation, street signs, parents, works of art. "The whole of society," concludes the Japanese study, "was laid waste to its very foundations."2698 Lifton's history professor saw not even foundations left. "Such a weapon," he told the American psychiatrist, "has the power to make everything into nothing. — Richard Rhodes

Transportation is an essential part of our lives, and in New York City where driving is not a viable option most of the time, public transportation and taxis are the only way to get around. — Simi Linton

In March 2005, I was appointed to the board of the Santa Barbara metro transit district. I was incredibly optimistic about how public transportation can be the solution to help people live in the city and not need a car. — Logan Green

it is easier to mock and deride individual fat people than to fix food deserts, school lunches, corn subsidies, inadequate or nonexistent public transportation, unsafe sidewalks and parks, healthcare, mental healthcare, the minimum wage, and your own insecurities. — Lindy West

As far as I'm concerned, religion is public transportation I never use. This God - I like traveling in his direction, on foot if necessary, but I don't want to take an organized trip. — Kamel Daoud

I went to work at seven in the morning. Around noon time we got the watery soup. And we worked until seven or eight or nine at night, sometimes later. And then I walked back home - there was no public transportation - into that shared room. And if there was food we would prepare an evening meal depending on what was available. And then probably go to bed because it was cold most the time. And then start the day all over again, six or seven days a week. — Lucille Eichengreen

It is such a disappointment in American political reaction and actions. When some of our politicians are flying around the country in private airplanes all the time, using public services as their mode of private transportation, and then criticizing us who are in business. — Arnold Palmer

Apparently, sir you Chinese are far ahead of us in every respect, except that you don't have entrepreneurs. And our nation, though it has no drinking water, electricity, sewage system, public transportation, sense of hygiene, discipline, courtesy, or punctuality, 'does' have entrepreneurs. Thousands and thousands of them. Especially in the field of technology. And these entrepreneurs - "we" entrepreneurs - have set up all these outsourcing companies that virtually run America now. — Aravind Adiga

And our nation, though it has no drinking water, electricity, sewage system, public transportation, sense of hygiene, discipline, courtesy, or punctuality, does have entrepreneurs. — Aravind Adiga

I'm frugal. It's often cheaper to take the subway. And I'm an environmentalist, which my mother instilled in me, so I really believe in public transportation. And finally, I love the proximity to people in the subway. — Chloe Sevigny

If someone asks you to touch his dick over the cloths and he will pay in return, you won't, but when you are in the public transportation, everywhere you touch is someone's dick. — M.F. Moonzajer