Flame — HabitableZone

Flame » in reply to I completely share your frustration.

re: I completely share your frustration.
Robert — (archived)

Thanks, Scott.

As for whether it's valid to say that people were so poor they couldn't get out of town, I posted some demographics for Tom below that show exactly that. 27% of the city households had no access to an automobile. Hard to see how mass transit (defined as trainlike systems) could've helped, since they needed to get many miles out of town, to get to high ground. The famous streetcar lines aren't designed to do that.

But I sure as hell agree with you that they could've rounded up enough buses. The only real large-scale (as opposed to tourist-toy) public transit system is NORTA, which is a bus system. I couldn't find the number of buses owned by NORTA (since of course their Web site is literally underwater right now); but you have to assume a fleet correspondingly as large as the number of people who don't have cars; and how many buses are in the State of Louisiana within a couple of hours of New Orleans? Of course they could've bussed those people out if they wanted to.

Things are looking a little better today, though, so maybe the damage will be minimized. I sure hope so.

Log in or register to post.

The whole thread (82 posts)