The "smart" bus

If you've been living somewhere other than under a rock for the last few years, you've probably noticed that you hear the word "hybrid" a lot. Ok, "a lot" is an understatement - "hybrid" has basically become the second most common word in the English language after "the." Your typical hybrid car is one that runs on a combination of gas and electric power which gets over 40 miles per gallon and is usually driven by hippies, yuppies, or any other types of people who might be called "'ppies" for short.

If we can "hybridize" cars to make them fuel-efficient, why not buses? Those big old hogs irresponsibly tool around town, carting kids to school, rock bands to their venues/drug dealers, and compulsive gamblers to Atlantic City, all the while getting something like 6 miles per gallon. Now we could make every bus a gas-electric hybrid to improve that figure to 15 mpg or so. Unfortunately that would not be a feasible solution, as approximately 78% of Americans pride themselves on not being part of the "Prius crowd" and would refuse to ride in such a vehicle.

Fortunately there is another way to make vehicles more fuel efficient rather than resorting to that ridiculous gas-electric mumbo-jumbo: just make them smaller. The "Smart car" is an example of this technique. This Gary Coleman of vehicles has been popular in Europe for years and is just starting to take hold in the U.S. The top 3 reasons to drive a Smart car are as follows:

3) To save gas.

2) To feel like you're playing golf all the time by cruising around in something the size of a golf cart (except without room for your clubs).

1) To "live on the edge" and add excitement to your life by knowing that you're completely screwed if you're ever involved in a crash with anything larger than a pygmy ground squirrel.

If we can shrink cars, why not shrink buses? The fact is that most buses don't use anywhere near their full capacities. I mean it's not like the notoriously global warmers known as the Partridge Family needed those extra 5 rows of seats! Shame on them! As punishment for his egregiously large carbon footprint, David Cassidy should have to be smacked upside the head by Al Gore with the skin of a dead polar bear every day for the next 10 years.

So why not apply the Smart car idea to create a Smart bus? It would allow people to transport fairly large groups around AND save gas and the environment while still maintaining that ultra-cool "bus image."

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The Smart car-bus hybrid might look something like this:

When people see a bus like this, you can rest assured that the first word that will come to their minds regarding the people riding inside is definitely "smart."