Word: transitions
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...energy debate is turning into a finger-pointing fiasco. While trains and other forms of mass transit choke up with riders and driving in the U.S. declines for the first time in years, Americans go looking for scapegoats. Consumers accuse the oil industry of pushing up prices by holding back supplies. Oilmen blame Washington for snarling them in red tape and overregulation. Congress blames the White House for not providing effective leadership. The President blames the public for not believing that the peril is real...
Others locate the blame in the nation's political and social leadership. According to Walter Dean Burnham, a political scientist at M.I.T.: "Most of us pretty much take life as it is given to us by others. For example, destroy local mass transit systems, promote suburban sprawl ... permit central cities to deteriorate into jungles and stimulate the automotive industry by every advertising trick known to man, and what do you get? A spread-out network of settlement, work, distribution and consumption which has become absolutely dependent on the automobile for its existence." Burnham will have none of the "pundits...
...line in a battered 1969 Chevy: "I'll drive, I'll drive. I'll have to cut somewhere else. Did you ever try walking around this goddam town? Ever try a bus?" (Angelenos voted down a proposal to build a $6 billion, 232-mile mass-transit system...
...patrols of four. Though most members accepted into the Magnificent 13 have had some training in the martial arts, and some admit to carrying knives for protection when journeying alone at night, on patrol they have no weapons and even refused the walkie-talkie radios that the Transit Authority urged them to use. They do not want to seem part of the police. Patrolling, they check out the stations first, particularly those of elevated trains, which are always badly lit. Once aboard a train they split up, striding through the cars looking for potential targets such as drunks or women...
...that can be extracted from coal, and the petroleum that lies trapped in shale rock. Fifteen percent or so would be spent on aid to low-income families that would suffer from rising fuel prices. The remaining 5% would go for further development of the nation's mass-transit system...