Cruising short of maximum potential

I set out, early one morning this week, to do my bit to ease traffic in Hampton Roads and help clean the air. I ended up making things worse. Sorry about that.

At 7 a.m., a new bus pulled up at the Magnolia Park and Ride in Suffolk. Calling it - the bus - sleek would be an overstatement, but it was certainly shiny. And blue and gray and partly green. Get it?

This was one of Hampton Roads Transit's new highway commuter buses, part of the Metro Area Express system - called MAX - that promises to carry riders quickly from city to city in something like ease, while reducing traffic and doing good by the environment.

The seats - a dizzying pattern of mostly blue - are certainly comfortable. They even recline a bit, the better to sit back with a book and an iPod. Too bad there were only two of us there to enjoy them.

I'm told, by HRT officials, that other buses on other routes - there are five covering seven cities - were far more crowded. Mine was empty.

Sure, it was nice to spread my stuff across a couple of seats, to lounge back and crank Yo La Tengo without worrying about offending a chatty seatmate. But I couldn't shake the feeling that my trip wasn't accomplishing the things I hoped to accomplish.

Here I was, in a bus a half-mile long that was gulping fuel and belching exhaust at an alarming rate, idling in the same Downtown Tunnel traffic I ordinarily see from the seat of my efficient, little car.

Sure, I could read a little - "Copperheads," about the anti-Civil War movement in the North - at least when the bus wasn't stopping and starting in traffic and making me a little woozy. It was a stone pleasure to leave the bile and anger at traffic transgressions to somebody else's rising blood pressure. And since the MAX is free for its first two weeks, the experience, and the gas, didn't cost me a dime - or $4 a gallon.

Still, for traffic in our region, and for the environment, I could have arguably done better by driving than I did by riding the bus Tuesday. But with gas so expensive, and with climate change legislation held hostage by the Senate's flat-Earth wing, driving my own car solo every day isn't much of an answer, either now or in the tougher times that will eventually come.

Driving by myself so much offends my frugal soul, if nothing else, and stings that speck of my brain that insists that a cleaner environment is a better one. (You should see my closet.) Plus, my kids want this planet for themselves at some point.

There's a better alternative, of course, but we can't do this alone. If that bus I rode were full (there were three of us on the afternoon trip back to Suffolk), the calculus for the environment and for traffic would be completely different, and completely better.

Simply, if you can lure 30 people onto a bus getting 6 miles per gallon, it's the equivalent of each person driving a car that gets 180 mpg. There's not a vehicle - hybrid, motorcycle, hydrogen-powered, fueled with fairy dust and wishes - that manages that kind of mileage.

It also means 30 fewer cars on the road, standing between you and wherever you're going. It's a lot fewer greenhouse gases warming up the planet.

The MAX isn't perfect. Nothing is. The trip home required a hike to a confusing Cedar Grove Transfer Station, and I'd prefer that the buses be equipped with devices that make all the cars disappear.

But we've dithered so long waiting for perfect solutions and magic answers that the planet is sicker, and traffic is a nightmare.

We can't wait for perfect anymore, or for somebody else to take care of it.

I plan to take the MAX a couple of times a week. I hope you'll do the same. For an area as sprawling as Hampton Roads, the shuttles are finally a real start toward smarter commuting. Standing together in a park and ride a few mornings a week, waiting for the next bus, we might even make the service - not to mention the environment, and traffic - a little better.

Donald Luzzatto is an editorial writer for The Virginian-Pilot. E-mail him at donald.luzzatto@pilotonline.com.