In recent decades, riders on city and county buses have dropped to where a typical load factor or fraction of occupied seats is about 20 percent.

With rising gas prices, the ridership in some city buses has crept upward but lower gas prices probably will bring fewer riders. With buses mostly empty and most cars with just the driver, we are maximizing the consumption of gasoline as well as wear and tear on our roads, highways and bridges.

This is all driven by our spirit of impatience and freedom to drive whenever we want and where ever we want.

Could ridership on public transit be increased in a way to appeal to our wallets? Consider a working person who reports to work at 9 a.m. and leaves work at 5 p.m. Further assume that the worker travels 10 miles from home to work.

Suppose he/she drives alone using a vehicle that gets 20 miles a gallon. This worker would be driving to and from work 20 times in a typical month. This is a total of 400 miles. Suppose the car requires oil changes and routine maintenance amounting to 5 cents a mile. (We will not include car insurance as this would required, even if you didn’t drive to work).

Then in the course of a month, the work to home commute would cost the worker about $60. Suppose a transit company would take this worker’s driving expense and offer him/her the privilege of riding a bus at half his/her driving cost. So this worker would pay $30 per month to ride a bus to and from work.

If the rider was only five miles from home to work, then the cost of commuting by car would be only $30 and the transit company would bill the commuter only $15. In a similar way, a commuter traveling 20 miles across the county to go to work (40 miles round trip) would be paying $60 per month for riding the bus (but that’s half the cost of driving their own vehicle).

What makes this idea more equitable than a single, fixed fare is that it is proportional to the distance traveled and related to expense of actually driving to work. This plan would assure the workers that they would arrive at work less stressed, perhaps enjoying the company of their fellow workers on the bus ride. (They could also use their iPods and cell phones safely along the bus ride!)

Upon return from work, the workers could relax on the bus, reading, cell phoning, using their music players with ear buds or conversing with their fellow passengers. When they reach home, they would be less tense and more relaxed as they greet their spouses, children, pets or tend to their plants and flowers.

Now one hitch in this scheme is the number of buses involved. Even though the above plan offers a nice benefit in dollars, it would likely begin with only a small percent of workers willing to sign up. Our U.S. culture resists most changes in lifestyle, any changes have to be voluntary and financially advantageous.

If our country buses have a load factor averaging 30 percent, then the number of passengers could be easily doubled without needing any more buses. But the buses may have to change their routes and schedules to match up with shift schedules for different businesses.

One great opportunity would be for the staff at our new Western Maryland Hospital off Willowbrook Road. There could be buses running an hour before each shift begins to pick up the staff there and then return them back to their neighborhoods.

The buses wouldn’t stop every block (as school buses do), but at key locations (strip malls, big grocery stores, libraries, big churches, etc.) where passengers would wait to be picked up. With an assured revenue from riders, the transit systems would be able to acquire more buses slowly to match the increase in ridership.

Using the buses primarily to transport workers would not mean that other folks couldn’t ride the public buses. The charges for occasional riders would stay the same. I would hope that a special card would be available for senior citizens available for a modest charge per month; in that way the seniors could travel freely once they stopped driving their own cars.

Shy show and dawn sights

Our March planetarium program is “Earth from Distant Stars,” considering the view of Earth from distant places in our galaxy where Earth would be seen many tens of thousands of years back in time.

Early Homo Sapiens (our species) first appeared in east Africa over a hundred thousand years ago. It is likely that the first tailored clothes were worn about 75,000 years ago. About 50,000 years, a mutation occurred in the FOXP2 gene that likely allowed humans to speak.

About this time, a small group of humans left Eastern Africa, going East into Asia. There followed northward migrations, resulting in our species spreading across Eurasia. The other hominids died off, possibly because they were no match to our species, who could plan, prepare and better utilize what nature offered (all hominids were hunter gatherers).

Our programs last about 45 minutes, are held in Tawes 302, starting promptly at 4 p.m. and 7 p.m. today and next Sunday. There’s a new show in April.

The moon is now a crescent in the 6 a.m. eastern dawn. The moon will appear to the left of the bright planet Jupiter tomorrow morning. On Tuesday, the moon will appear just above the planet Mars. On Thursday, the moon will swing from the morning side to the evening side of the sun.

Bob Doyle invites comments/questions from readers; phone is (301) 687-7799. His email is rdoyle@frostburg.edu .