Driving along a scenic roadway in a convertible, top down, hair blowing in the breeze -- it just sounds good, doesn’t it? But, for most of us, the reality of our daily driving life is riding in an enclosed vehicle, sitting in rush hour traffic, stressing about being late for something -- work, an appointment, or maybe picking the kids up from school. Given this reality, it's not surprising that there are quite a few proponents of eliminating private vehicles in favor of mass transportation. But there are other reasons to give up your ride -- let's take a look.

People who are afraid of flying are often told that they're more likely to be hurt or even killed in a car than in an airplane. That comment might make you feel better about flying, but not about driving. If you look at data gathered by the census bureau and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA)  in 2000, there were approximately 20,700 passenger car deaths and related injuries in the United States compared to fewer than 25 fatalities or injuries by bus in the same year [source: National Highway Traffic Safety Administration]. Flash forward eight years to see how things progressed, and the good news is that the number of passenger car deaths did drop. The bad news for private vehicle owners is, though, it wasn’t by much. There were still around 14,600 passenger car deaths and injuries. By comparison, bus accident fatalities and injuries had increased but they were still below 100 [sources: Census.gov and National Highway Traffic Safety Administration].  

In this modern age of on-the-go technology, we have an ever increasing number of distractions while driving our cars: texting, e-mail, cell phone use, not to mention navigation systems and satellite radio with hundreds of channels to surf. In January 2010, a study done by the National Safety Council reported that 28 percent of traffic accidents occurred while drivers were on their cell phones or texting [source: Halsey]. How comfortable do you feel knowing that one of every four drivers you see is sending a text to someone? Hopefully you're not one of those guilty car texters, but it's likely you do spend more time than you should talking on your phone when you are trying to drive. Just think about how much of this you and everyone else could SAFELY do while riding on a bus or a rail transit system.

Private vehicles introduce an element of chaos into our transportation system. Since private vehicle owners operate on their own schedules, there's no way to plan for their movement across a region. As a result, we get traffic jams and congestion. If we were to move from private transport to a publically operated system, we could eliminate factors like congestion and theoretically decrease travel time.