Speaking of religious conversions...

Again the LA Times is talking about how car loving Southlanders are increasingly taking the bus and mass transit. The price of gas is really making people thing about something they use to take for granted. It's like when you go swimming and you start thinking about your breathing like nothing else. One interesting side effect of the increase in mass transit is the increase in it's perceived safety. Bryanne Sykes noticed the following transformation:

"The good thing with gas getting more expensive is, more and more people are riding it," says Sykes.

In the past, when she got back to Long Beach about 9 p.m., the lonely walk to her car, down a dark street between the tracks and a park, was eerie. "I would stay on the phone with my husband as I walked," she said.

"In the last month, it's me and 10 other people with briefcases and computers," she says.

The sprawling distances of parking lots make our human scale distances forbidding and frightening, so it's good that safety in numbers is making mass transit feel safer.

Challenges still exist, the requirement to make multiple transfers dissuades people from taking mass transit. However, if citizens in one of the most car dependent places in America can share the ride more often, there is hope.