Buses And Private Cars example essay topic

Buses vs. Private Cars Gao Huan As an essential part of the modern life, traffic is an important index of people!'s living standards. Three characteristics of satisfactory city traffic are speed, convenience and safety. For a developing metropolis like Shanghai, there are two ways to achieve this goal: public transportation and private transportation, or more concretely, buses and private cars. There has been discussion as to which to promote. Now let!'s look at the issue in the particular context of Shanghai. Shanghai is a leading city of China, with promising economic prospects.

Good traffic is vital to individuals! daily life and the business of the city. What Shanghai needs is cost-effective traffic. Though recently we have built many roads and highways, the population over-density, the largely still unsatisfactory road condition and the pollution are nonetheless problems we have to deal with. So at the status quo, public transportation is a better solution. Properly planned and successfully developed, the public bus system of a city, together with the subways etc., can move people all over to wherever they want. Designed for the public, a bus carries many people of the same route on one ride, while a private car can only carry very limited number of passengers.

To move the same number of people to their destinations, there will be more cars on the road than buses, in spite of their smaller sizes. Thus the roads get more congested, the speed of the traffic is lowered and there will be more likelihood of traffic jam. True that cars can ride much faster, but when we take these factors into account, public buses save time for everyone. A bus burns gas for many people, while for the same many, there will be many more cars burning much more gas. Therefore, buses save gas and pollute the air to a lesser degree. When the whole world is confronted with energy crisis and environment deterioration, this is an especially important advantage.

Cars are still very expensive for most of the people, considering the price and maintaining cost. Our national car industry is still rather weak; its relatively low efficiency and high cost make it impossible to render the price low enough. To prevent our car industry from being defeated by the foreign car industry, our government keeps the tariff pretty high. So the whole price level remains too high for the ordinary people. If the government ever wants to promote private cars without harming the development of the national card industry, it needs to develop our car production more quickly.

At present, when crowdedness, relatively low income level and air-pollution are unsolved, we need to put emphasis on buses. In the mean time, we need to improve the city infrastructure and car industry as quickly as possible. Then, when these problems are solved, we can gradually shift to private cars. Anyway cars are convenient, personal and the car-possessing percentage is an important indicator of a country!'s economic power.