"Andrew Oakley" wrote in
message ...
On Thu, 18 Aug 2005 17:02:00 -0500, wrote:
prices are too high.I Believe in parking all vehicles (including my
own
vehicles) and SHUTTING DOWN! AMERICA!
Well, in the UK we pay 91p a litre (US$6.17 per gallon) and our
economy is doing just fine. Then again, our biggest island is only
700
miles long, so you run out of land to drive on after two tanks of
petrol (gasoline).
There's also differences as far as public transportation
usage as well. As the suburbs developed with the
help of the car, it's become harder to backfill the
suburbs with public transportation like light rail. The
suburbs were designed with the car in mind, not with
rail or other forms of mass transportation.
Going back on-topic, being on an island only 700 miles long makes
radio transmissions a lot easier - for instance, we can have one
transmitter covering the entire nation (eg. BBC Radio 4 on 198kHz AM
Long Wave). It must be quite odd living somewhere where you have to
re-tune AM depending on where you are.
What about FM?? Is it strictly local, or do some BBC stations
occupy the same part of the dial all over the place??
Then again, I guess the US sees
itself as more of a federation of states rather than one big
country,
so maybe you don't see that as odd.
Depends on who's doing the thinking. The ACW got rid of
a lot of the federation of states' idea.
Out of interest, does the US have
the RDS system whereby FM radios retune themselves automatically as
you drive around different areas? Does such a system exist for AM
when
you drive really long distances? In the UK that obviously isn't a
requirement... ;-)
RDS here is more of a cutsie thing, where the station's
id or some other message pops up on screen. You can
use ye olde scan and seek functions to find new stations
as you travel, however. For travelling long distances,
people I know tend to bring CDs/MP3s, or use videos
or DVDs to placate the little ones. I'm still holding out
on the latter two, because I had to watch out the window
if I was bored, and I'm not going to blow several hundred
dollars just to install a video unit in my car.
--Mike L.