transportation quotes

If Jesus were here today, he wouldn’t be riding around on a donkey. He’d be taking a plane, he’d be using the media.

I’m no Lance Armstrong, but I do use a bike to get from place to place in Manhattan, a little bit of Brooklyn.

You can know or not know how a car runs and still enjoy riding in a car.

I don’t listen to the radio very much, but that could be because I don’t have a car.

Cycling is a joy and faster than many other modes of transport, depending on the time of day. It clears the head.

If you could take a subway from the suburbs in Boston, where I live, to downtown in 10 minutes, that improves your life over sitting in a traffic jam. People should see that.

On a bike, being just slightly above pedestrian and car eye level, one gets a perfect view of the goings-on in one’s own town.

I cycled when I was at high school, then reconnected with bikes in New York in the late ’70s. It was a good way of getting around the clubs and galleries of the Lower East Side and Soho.

We are going to transform Britain’s rail system from the worst in the world to the best. If you can do a few things like that, when the body gives out, you can say you’ve lived a good life.

I’m the slowest driver in the world.

Fuel prices are at the center of our lives. They affect our ability to travel, stay warm, and feed ourselves.

I’m really good at sleeping on planes. I mean, I smell jet fuel and I’m out; I’m asleep for takeoff.

Flying cars are not a very efficient way to move things from one point to another.

The only way of catching a train I have ever discovered is to miss the train before.

Even though the risks of death are higher driving than flying, many people would rather drive simply because they feel they have more control driving. The facts are that only a few hundred people die a year flying, and 44,000 are killed a year driving.

The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use of his feet.

My neighbor has a circular driveway… he can’t get out.

Modern travelling is not travelling at all; it is merely being sent to a place, and very little different from becoming a parcel.

It’s not catastrophes, murders, deaths, diseases, that age and kill us; it’s the way people look and laugh, and run up the steps of omnibuses.

From the late 1940s, into and through the ’50s, there developed a complex interaction between federal government, state and local government, real-estate interests, commercial interests and court decisions, which had the effect of undermining the mass transit system across the country.

I don’t think people are going to switch over to bikes because it’s good for them or because it’s politically correct. They’re going to do it because it gets them from A to B faster.

The only way to be sure of catching a train is to miss the one before it.

The reality is gas prices should be much more expensive then they are because we’re not incorporating the true damage to the environment and the hidden costs of mining oil and transporting it to the U.S. Whenever you have an unpriced externality, you have a bit of a market failure, to the degree that eternality remains unpriced.

Smell is a potent wizard that transports you across thousands of miles and all the years you have lived.

If we could do high-speed rail in California just half a notch above what they’ve done on the Shanghai line in China, and if we had a straight path from L.A. to San Francisco, as well as the milk run, at least that would be progress.

I like the word ‚autopilot‘ more than I like the word ‚self-driving.‘ ‚Self-driving‘ sounds like it’s going to do something you don’t want it to do. ‚Autopilot‘ is a good thing to have in planes, and we should have it in cars.

If you had to buy a new plane every time you flew somewhere, it would be incredibly expensive.

My opinion is it’s a bridge too far to go to fully autonomous cars.

We could definitely make a flying car – but that’s not the hard part. The hard part is, how do you make a flying car that’s super safe and quiet? Because if it’s a howler, you’re going to make people very unhappy.

Tell them to send everything that can fly.

I love driving my car on any highway.

You and I come by road or rail, but economists travel on infrastructure.

I really do encourage other manufacturers to bring electric cars to market. It’s a good thing, and they need to bring it to market and keep iterating and improving and make better and better electric cars, and that’s what going to result in humanity achieving a sustainable transport future. I wish it was growing faster than it is.

Evolution can go to hell as far as I am concerned. What a mistake we are. We have mortally wounded this sweet life-supporting planet – the only one in the whole Milky Way – with a century of transportation whoopee.

There appears to be something to do with vehicles and movement that stimulates my writing.