1. Introduction
Nowadays, many kinds of transport can be used. However, even though they appear to be attractive, there are still plenty of advantages and disadvantages of using public transport. In developing countries, there are several problems which are related to public transport. Firstly, they may not have the right to commute freely in the country. This often happens in several countries in the world. National transport organizations have the right to control the transport systems. For example, they cannot use public transport services without permission from the local authorities in order to protect the environment, or ensure the efficiency of their own national transport industries. Foreign investment over years has gone to the road and airline industries. Secondly, public transport is a common good. That is, many people can use it at the same time. Passengers can afford it for one reason, which is to avoid driving. As a common good, the agreement on a solution will be more difficult. It is nearly impossible to exclude some people. For example, highly organized, determined, and even violent farmers sometimes prevent the introduction of railway lines across their land. These are issues of interest. The important concept is that public transport is essential for more mobility. Access to education and to most employment is for the majority of people and must be achieved legally at the lowest possible cost.
2. Advantages of Public Transport
When using public transit, it is essential to make sure that one is aware of the disadvantages and advantages of using this means of travel to make an informed and correct decision regarding one's journey. One of the leading disadvantages of using public transportation is that it is undependable. If one is taking a train or a bus, the chance is high that it will arrive late or not necessarily when one needs it to arrive in order to get to one's destination. Public transport can be a good idea when one is travelling alone or when one is travelling on a planned schedule and has extra time. Public transportation, depending on its geographical location and the time of day, may evacuate individuals from being victims in a crime incidence or in accidents. It is safer and less accident-prone than those individuals driving private vehicles. Public transport systems are also good for the environment. They cut down on traffic congestion and the amount of pollutants in the air, making for cleaner air without it having an actual effect on productivity. Public transportation can be a fun place in which to converse, and it no doubt fosters better relationships between individuals.
2.1. Environmental Benefits
Environmental benefits derived from public transportation are far-reaching. These benefits include reducing air pollution, solid waste, fossil fuel usage, and water usage, among others. Many studies have sought to quantify these benefits by examining their impact on a region's overall air quality and quantity. The most frequently mentioned positive result is lower levels of airborne pollutants, which leads to both health and economic benefits. Since most residents of urban areas face congestion, society incurs an external cost to mitigate this congestion and promote public transportation. This cost involves the negative externalities associated with car use, such as air pollution, noise, and traffic congestion. Public transportation can reduce congestion, allowing us to subtract the external costs and benefits of air pollution, noise, and traffic congestion from the total costs and supply them to a perfectly competitive market. By doing so, we can achieve the optimal level of public transportation trips, which would improve life in the city. Another point to consider when describing the environmentally friendly nature of public transportation is improved safety. From an operational standpoint, public transportation is much safer in terms of accidents per passenger-mile compared to auto travel, especially for subway lines and light-rail lines. Although the safety difference for buses is not as pronounced, bus accidents tend to be less serious. However, when these safety benefits do not materialize, the costs can be extremely high. Overall, an efficient public transportation system is crucial for reducing private driving trips.
2.2. Cost-Effectiveness
Public transport use could save households $5.4 billion to $17 billion per year in consumer savings. These are significant savings and present a large benefit of public investing in metrorail and buses. More importantly, most of the cost of congestion is a type of waste caused by underpricing. This additional consumption caused by congestion is not worth the pain and suffering that individuals go through. Most of the money paid in congestion may be accepted as "benefits" because they provide the avoided costs of additional road capacity. This is effectively done by increasing traffic on the roads to such a degree that people are expected to use the roads or take a longer travel route. Public transportation offers an important line of protection from the epidemic of obesity dissolving too many people today. People drive instead of walk or bicycle as retail centers and restaurants have left city centers and clustered together in outlying areas, partly because people are driving too many cars operating at a dangerous speed for pedestrians and cyclists. Promoting high-density, mixed-use development can reduce vehicle trips, which improves health for the world. Additionally, this also has great environmental protection; it can be reduced using city building initiatives instead of using the city. Data show that subway travel burns the most calories compared to transit and personal vehicle travel.
2.3. Reduced Traffic Congestion
The advantage of public transportation over using a personal car in cities is clear and straightforward: the impacts of congestion are user charges and negative externalities, while the costs of building roads are real costs. It is much cheaper to move ten or twenty people on a bus than in ten or twenty separate private cars, especially if the city has invested in bus lanes or a separate bus rapid transit system. It is also easier to manage the number of buses at minimum cost to respond to variations in demand and to re-route them in response to traffic breakdowns or road construction. The greater the share of the population that chooses to use public transport instead of private cars, the more quickly these four advantages will turn into overall savings for the country duly reinvested in more and better public transport. Aside from reducing the costs of losses to the country as a whole, investing in improving public transport contributes to other PSB values, especially to respecting people's right to efficiently move within a city. Reduced traffic congestion, or traffic decongestion, is the ultimate goal sought by any number of possible solutions proposed to address traffic congestion. Public transport has a better chance than others, particularly because it can address the three determining factors in congested urban roads: the capacity of the road, the demand for road space, and the drivers' related behaviors. While improved public transport will decrease the number of private vehicle operations and consequent congestion externalities, it will actually likely increase the level of congestion charges required to maintain the actual congestion levels.
2.4. Promotes Physical Activity
Physical activity is essential for maintaining the health of a person. It is recommended to have at least 30 minutes of daily physical activity, which, by using public transport, is easy to do. The reason is that many people take some time to and from public transport, and as a result, promote their well-being. While walking to the bus, subway, or train station, they are already doing physical activity because daily physical activity is essential for maintaining health. Also, this walk connects to the other exercises they may have during their daily routine. Because those who take public transport, in addition to the walk, also go through a great physical effort to follow the vehicle timetable, as many times they are late for the public transport and have to run to reach it. Moreover, in their daily running, they gain cardiovascular and muscle strength. According to the American Heart Association (AHA), physical activity increases the strength of the heart and other muscles and reduces the risk of heart disease and stroke, in addition to diabetes, hypertension, and obesity. People who are regularly active have a lower risk of suffering from these disturbances. The practice of activity also contributes to the improvement of mental health, as it is able to increase self-esteem and reduce symptoms of anxiety and depression. Therefore, it is very good that many people use public transportation, as it not only reduces traffic but also provides a healthier and faster lifestyle.
3. Disadvantages of Public Transport
Overcrowding on public transport is a significant problem in many countries. This is often due to expensive or poor public transport options, leading to a reliance on private cars. Disability access is often lacking in public transit, which means those of us who have opted out of owning and driving a car due to disability are then stuck. This problem is twofold. It means that many people are unable to access a mode of transport which is ideal for disabled people, and that current public transport users who become disabled are then unable to enjoy the benefits of their department's work and get to work in a reasonable amount of time and for a fair price. Traffic congestion is a big problem for everyone within the city. The main disadvantage is that public transports are not as comfortable as one would like. Standing all the way is sometimes difficult, especially for old people. Public transport can sometimes be unreliable, but even with this issue fixed, it's still the cheapest and cleanest option. There are a number of very good arguments against public transport. The first point is that this system needs the infrastructure, i.e. railways, bus stands, stations, and stops, etc., which are difficult to build. The next point is that it requires government financing, which would cost other significant requirements. Furthermore, it can be completely funded privately, which would fully solve the problem of the state budget. One more disadvantage is that traveling by public transport may mean longer travel time.
3.1. Limited Flexibility
Public transport offers the potential to improve weakened signal coverage in built-up areas. The ability of public transport vehicles to carry communications equipment also encourages their increased use as a primary incident reporting system. Experience has shown that, while public transport cannot replace high levels of individual motorized transport use in all instances, it does offer significant potential for reducing the stresses placed upon the physical transportation infrastructure in the most densely developed urban areas. Creating an urban hierarchical circulation system, with public transport at its core, has been found to be an invaluable means of increasing the effectiveness and efficiency of the overall pour circulation system. Increased use of public transport can only be accomplished with the bolstering of structural economic policies designed to keep costs down. One example of such a policy area is the use of land-use controls to maximize operational flexibility. Data collected by the International Urban Operations Driving Simulator program - which is the first study of its kind to conduct experiments centered on short-term analysis of multidiscipline aspects of urban operations - actually began to invalidate many commonly held beliefs about public transport. It is widely believed that public transport offers the greatest benefits when it is functionally most similar to the private motor vehicle - in other words, when it has full operational flexibility.
3.2. Potential for Delays
The rising cost of fuel has resulted in more people using public transport. What are the advantages and disadvantages of public transport? What problems has this caused? How can these problems be solved? Delays are a part of everyday life at the present time. Trains, buses, and coaches together with trams and metro are often unable to keep to their scheduled timetable, and this is a source of great inconvenience. Park journey times are unrealistic because delays are always likely to occur, and this, in turn, leads to overcrowding as passengers wait for the next service. With less and fewer people relying on public transport for their journey to and from work, delays lead to workplaces being short-staffed with staff shortages and long queues being the common complaints in the service industry. At a time when similar complaints are being made about the privatized water and electricity supply companies, the public's confidence in public services in general is low. With increased competition for public services in recent years (including public transport services), the demand for high-standard services has never been higher. But short-term contracts, often with different operators, hopelessly inadequate infrastructure (e.g., signal and track problems and poor road surfaces), and a lack of investment in replacing outdated equipment make it virtually impossible for private sector companies to improve services.
3.3. Overcrowding
Many opponents of public transport find this mode of transportation inconvenient to their interests since it frequently happens that public transport is overcrowded. This is nothing out of the ordinary during rush hours when citizens are hurrying for work or returning home. As a result, public transport users cannot leave or get on the next station. One more disadvantage occurs: drivers stop the transport to prevent breaking rules, and at the same time this action makes it difficult for other public transport types to move along the street - there is a widespread discrepancy in regulations for public transport, provided for separate transport systems. There is no question that one of the disadvantages of individual transport is traffic congestion. While talking of public transport, it is low utilization that is nearly the same disadvantage of public transport as traffic jams of urban streets in individual transport. On the surface, traffic congestion and low public transport utilization have much in common. Both tend to generate recurring delays and some travelers' inability to meet specific deadlines. With a closer look at the nature of these problems, however, their differences appear to be more significant than their similarities. The traffic congestion phenomenon is fairly straightforward and as such, easy to address. First, it is self-solving, the problem disappearing as soon as the demand for road space decreases somewhat. Due to this feature, traffic jams may be considered a mere nuisance that occurs during relatively short times of the day. Furthermore, it is essentially infeasible to eliminate this problem by expanding roadway facilities, because most of the time roads are only partially used. With the help of a price markup for road use or, in other words, road pricing, a balance may be achieved between the number of people wanting or needing to use the roads at certain times and the economy of the urban area. In short, road pricing appears to offer an adequate response to the entire problem and should certainly be utilized on a wide scale.
3.4. Safety Concerns
Safety plays a larger role in any solution that aims to divert automobile traffic onto public transportation, cycling, or walking. There is no argument that the fact that public transportation is more dangerous (injuries and/or passenger-mile) than traveling by private car has to be a significant obstacle to attract car drivers to use public transportation. Of course, there's also a moral obligation to reduce the higher accident likelihood of public transportation, with 94 percent of taxis, 83 percent of buses, and 55 percent of light rail cars involved in collisions or vehicle damage incidents in the last three years. However, safety and security concerns for passengers at and on trips to/from transit stations and stops can be equally important to combat traffic congestion. Both anecdotal evidence and research have shown that fears of crime on transit can be so severe that some people choose to drive their cars rather than ride transit. While the risks of riding public transportation have to be managed, there are several reasons why the perception of risk is larger than its magnitude. For example, even though pedestrians and cyclists have approximately the same risk per passenger mile as bus riders in traffic, it is often neglected that car drivers also have a substantial risk of injury. To the authors' best knowledge, the general perception of increased crash risk during transit rides in traffic has influenced a number of international studies that have aimed at assessing exposure and risk comparisons. These studies could then help to better inform transit riders of these real accident statistics, which may help to attract more people to using public transportation. Since transit agencies pay claims for injuries and property damage incidents and have to renew capital after collisions, safety concerns have a direct cost to transit agencies and could urge them to help to diversify traffic volumes. For all these reasons, the safety (but also security) for pedestrians and cyclists during their trip to/from the public transportation stop or station should not be neglected.
4. Conclusion
In conclusion, a higher number of disadvantages than advantages can be seen in the use of public transport. However, I believe that if the investment is made, it could be improved, encouraging people to use it. It could lead to better health and a decrease in greenhouse gases, and it could be a possible solution for the traffic around the city. It will only depend on individuals to want to make a difference in the current world. In conclusion, public transport has many advantages and can have many disadvantages as well. If you need to get somewhere, a car or a bike do not help, but if you need to relax or if you want a person to make you company, feeling comfortable, the car is your perfect choice. Also, with the alternative, there are also disadvantages. In public transport, it is much more uncomfortable than being in your own car. You do not only have to deal with uncomfortable situations but also many annoying passengers, who are not aware of people who want to rest or sleep. Public transport can be so slow. Your time is everyone's but yourself's.
