This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars.

What if I told you that there was a piece of technology that could do away with traffic jams,

make cities more equitable, and help us solve climate change.

You might think about driverless cars or hyperloops or any of the other new transportation

technologies that get lots of hype these days.

But my guest on the show this week has written a whole book about a much older, much less

sexy piece of machinery, one that he thinks could be the key to making our cities more sustainable, more livable, and more fair.

The humble omnibus.

We just call it a bus now.

Stephen Higishide is a transit expert bus champion

and author of a new book called Better Buses Better Cities.

And the central thesis of the book

is that buses have the power to remake our cities for the better.

But he says if we want the bus to reach its potential,

we're going to have to make the experience of riding one a lot more pleasant.

Americans take 4.7 billion trips a year on the bus,

but so many of those trips are miserable.

They're slow, they're circuitous, you're standing on the side of the road, sometimes not even with a sidewalk or a shelter.

So it's really a miserable experience and yet public transit is the most efficient way to move people around.

It's essential if we are going to defeat climate change.

So why is the bus a key to the issue of climate change and what is its role as an environmental

technology as much as a transit technology.

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