Me and the Weirdos

The other day I rode TRAX (Utah’s light rail system) downtown. While I enjoyed the convenience of not having to find a place to park, it brought to mind the age-old question of why there are so many weirdos who use public transportation. (And don’t tell me the guy who acted like the money in my hand was his wasn’t weird.)

The only time I have consistently used public transportation here was my freshman year of college when I was living in Salt Lake and had to commute to school in Provo. So I got to know the bus-riding weirdos that year.

Then I went to Seoul, where the majority of people use public transportation, and there were far fewer weirdos proportionally. So these are my questions:

a) Is there a greater concentration of weirdos using public transportation in a place where more people drive?

or

b) In a place where more people drive, does that just mean more of the weirdos are in cars?

BTW, the title refers to a great children's book

Comments

Kevin Lloyd said…
It's like that because government and other programs for the needy (homeless, mentally ill) hand out bus tickets so that people can get to their appointments, etc. It's not like that at all in Brazil (or even Manhattan) because there are more "normal" people that use it out of necessity.
July 22, 2008 at 6:15 PM
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