Another attempt by the enviromentalists to destroy transit

Montreal PQ - In Montreal's The Gazette, a report on an environmental groups demands that the Montreal Transit Corporation (public agency) test older buses for emissions. It sounds innocent enough until you come to the key sentence in the report.

"The point we're making is we don't want to wait for fleet turnover through attrition," Bruce Walker of the environmental advocacy group STOP said.

That little comment sums up much of the environmentalist movement's attitude towards public transit. Groups like STOP want public transit to price itself out of existence. STOP doesn't just want the MTC to test more of the older buses for emissions, it wants those buses scrapped as of yesterday. These groups refuse any form of reasonable time line besides what they set and don't care about the cost since they think public transit is just swimming in excess money.

Groups like STOP and enviro-weenies like Walker claim to support public transit but continually push to bankrupt it at the same time. STOP refuses to understand that money isn't free to public transit. It doesn't matter where you go in the world, transit systems are screaming for more money for both vehicles and to operate.

If groups like STOP and activist enviro-weenies like Walker get their way, public transit would be eliminated. They would place standards so strict on the industry that it would be impossible to operate the agency unless they obtained trillions of dollars each year to replace the bus fleet every few months and even then it probably wouldn't be good enough for them.

And don't even say "alternative fuels". Environmentalists already have problems with most of what they pushed for already. Bio-diesel? Can't have that anymore since it still uses petroleum. Fuel cells? Not anymore since the cell is considered toxic when spent. Electricity? They can't even agree among themselves on this one.

The bottom line is this. If the public transit industry continues to cave to every little demand from the so-called public transit loving environmental movement, there will be no such thing as public/mass transit in a few decades. These groups would make it impossible to run any form of public transit that is even remotely affordable to the average person.