I'd rather see drunks on my bus/in the metro than on the road.
I know it's dismissive of real fears and anxiety caused by that kind of behaviour, I understand where it comes from. But intellectually, I know I'm infinitely more safe having effective public transportation than not, even if emotionally I might not always feel the same.
I agree, but at that point I'm in favor of just having a bus that carts drunks and druggies around the city and normal people have no expectation of using it. In my experience in a big city this is already how public transit is used.
Vast majority of public transit riders in big US cities are perfectly normal people. Majority of my office takes transit (or other non-car method) to work here in Chicago. It's similar in NYC and Washington. And yes we all can afford to drive (i even own a car) it just doesn't make sense to take a car downtown, ever.
I've taken the bus all over the city too. Overwhelming majority of people are not drunk or high or anything, and it's not considered weird for normal people to ride the bus.
In fact, i haven't touched my car since i last visited friends in Wisconsin back in May. Most of my friends don't own cars, several can't even drive
Yes, in the US. Public transit does work well here, doing its part to commute the above categories of people around. Anyone who can afford to opts out because point-to-point travel is literally always better no matter where you are in the world.
My experience in the US is that it's not always worse than a car. I tried multiple times going from the San Francisco airport to Oakland. The BART was systematically faster than a taxi stuck in the traffic. I feel a lot safer going to the airport with the BART than with a taxi, because with the taxi I may miss my flight.
Similar experience driving in Los Angeles. So much traffic, whenever there is a train it's better.
Even with the slow ass 2025 CTA and a transfer in the loop, it's faster for me to take the train to get home at rush hour than to drive. Getting to Midway i could technically save 25 minutes driving, but at 10x or more cost.
I think these are just different measurements of safety. I do trust a subway to get to its destination on a reasonable schedule to a greater degree than an Uber, but to me that's a very different question than physical safety. The NYC subway is a great example of this actually, since it does seem to run very well but in the last year has had multiple horrifying incidents.
Again I think these are different concerns. On a plane I am with a section of the public that can hold their life together enough to buy a plane ticket, and I do not feel overtly physically threatened by them. On a subway I am with a section of the public so prolifically jumping over turnstiles that it's a systemic concern for for the subway itself. Concerns about the engineering mettle at Boeing or whoever provides the subway cars for NYC are separate.
I understand that there are uncomfortable experiences in the subway in big cities. But statistically, what percentage of the people get physically hurt as compared to the total number of travellers?
Same applies to planes: the quality of Boeing seems to have gone down in the last few years to the point where I choose airlines flying Airbus. That's my feeling, it is valid as a feeling. But statistically, the likelihood of my flight with Boeing ending up in a crash is very small.
For me it comes down to a very binary decision. Any measurable number of passenger-on-passenger incidents in the NYC subway is enough to give me pause over taking a taxi or Uber. It doesn't happen on planes, and taxis and uber have better audit trails, and the bad stuff mostly happens outside the US, where I live. In both of these situations I'm also at the mercy of a bunch of lazy engineers and a Jira board. It's valid to try to pick the better engineers. But my immediate concern is my physical safety, and the safety of the people I bring with me, and a private situation is always going to be the safer option when the primary threat is the strangers around me.
> a private situation is always going to be the safer option when the primary threat is the strangers around me.
Sure, but what I'm saying is that maybe you over-estimate the threat.
> Any measurable number of passenger-on-passenger incidents in the NYC subway is enough to give me pause
I don't see why you apply that to the NYC subway and not to Boeing flights: Boeing planes have crashed because of technical issues. The fact that they haven't crashed on the US soil doesn't say it's safer to fly them in the US.
So there is a measurable number of deadly incidents that happened with Boeing planes. I find it interesting that it doesn't give you pause at all, but the subway incidents do.
Over-estimation or not, it's safer to take an Uber than the subway or bus. The granularities of the stats don't affect my decision much.
> I don't see why you apply that to the NYC subway and not to Boeing flights
Because again technical and social issues merit different weighting. If I'm flying on a 787-MAX I am at the mercy of all the good and bad design decisions that went into producing it. Those will be relatively consistent between flights for better or worse. The population of people traveling on a bus or subway routinely changes and is much less predictable. That predictability matters a lot here (to me). And given the option between weighting the threat of strangers around me vs. the threat of technical issues with a particular manufacturer, it seems to me that Boeing would have to crash a lot of planes on US soil before it would outweigh the number of people threatened or made uncomfortable on other forms of public transit.
> Over-estimation or not, it's safer to take an Uber than the subway or bus.
Pretty sure it's not. But it definitely feels safer.
I think that you make your decision based on your feeling. Don't get me wrong, it's fine. But it's irrational. You don't avoid the NYC subway because it's dangerous, you avoid it because it feels dangerous to you. That's a valid concern, but you should be aware of the difference. Because I'm pretty sure that the actual statistics will tell you that it is not as dangerous as you feel.
If you said "I take the car because I don't feel safe in the subway", I'd say "it's unfortunate, I wish they could improve the experience in the subway". If you say "I take the car because taking the subway is a bigger risk on my physical integrity", I'll say you're probably wrong.
> Any measurable number of passenger-on-passenger incidents in the NYC subway is enough to give me pause over taking a taxi or Uber.
But any measurable number of car-on-car incidents in the NYC is not enough to give you pause? Uber drivers aren't exactly known for their safe driving you know...
If literally everyone who can avoids it, I'm not sure it works that well
I avoid having a car because I live in a place where I can get by with busses, public carpools and the occasional uber, having a car would mean having to deal with finding parking for it, finding a mechanic I trust, driving in traffic and having to still ocasionally use any the former if I want to have a beer
It's not a matter of quality, it's a matter of preference. I don't own a car. I live three blocks from a bus stop and I Uber everywhere instead, because it's cheap and predictable. The buses are clean, they run on time, but the population is well-off enough that there's almost no reason to take them, and that filters to buses being full of people who for one reason or another (often significant problems integrating with society) cannot pay for an alternative.
If one takes public transit it's because of convenience, cost, or virtue, and convenience is often the leg lacking, because it doesn't come to your house. I have walked blocks to and stood at many bus stops in my life surrounded by unwell people and telling myself that I'm being socially efficient does not smooth that over particularly well.
It's the association with unwell people that I don't get, and I do agree that it feels particularly US Centric
Coming from a place where it's a lot more normalized, I've taken the bus, twice a day for the last say 7 Years, the worst I've seen has been the ocassional drunk person (I've also slept 90% of my commute plenty of times, that's how safe I feel)
Mostly it's working people and high school students (But also, old people running errands or going to church)
I assume most of those druggies/thiefs/etc, know that there's a lot to lose if they get caught messing with people on the bus (And I have seen a couple times a driver refusing service to specific people)
All the drivers know each other, and people on the same route are more often than not in you community and will tell people around
On the same note, a common thief usually avoids "working" places near his own house, because that's one quick way of destroying your life even if police never gets involved
That's reasonable, and as I noted in another comment I've only lived in the US and can only provide that perspective. Though I see a lot of discourse around this dismissed as "US-centric" while avoiding the fact that the US, the melting-pot of the world, is potentially one of the best test-cases for whether public transit works.
All of the situations you describe are just carpooling with extra steps.
Public transit as described in the US is a bunch of strangers with different goals and different jobs getting together in the same car at approximately the same time to go to roughly the same block. As a system it needs to be able to handle those, and when you scale it past the carpooling step, it doesn't.
Perhaps that's the problem to be solved, but if the US isn't handling it, I'm not sure you could point to a country solving the same problem and doing it better.
> Though I see a lot of discourse around this dismissed as "US-centric" while avoiding the fact that the US, the melting-pot of the world, is potentially one of the best test-cases for whether public transit works.
This is extremely US-centric :-). It's the exact cliché of how Americans see the world: "if it doesn't work for us, then it doesn't work at all", suggesting "because we are the best".
Go pretty much anywhere in the world: the US are perceived as the least capable in terms of public transit. I am not saying "it's the worse because there are conditions in the US that make it impossible to work" (which is what you suggest with "the US is the melting-pot of the world"). I am saying that public transit doesn't work in the US because the US doesn't understand how to make public transit work (and because the urban planning was often a complete failure in that sense).
There are many things that the US do really well. And there are many things that the US do really badly. The cliché, which honestly you kind of confirm here, is that the US people can't apprehend the thought that maybe they could learn something from other countries. "If it doesn't work for us, it means that it is impossible". And I'll end by quoting you saying pretty much exactly this:
> if the US isn't handling it, I'm not sure you could point to a country solving the same problem and doing it better.
I don't think I follow, all of those people in my example are taking the same route / the same bus, How is that different?
Or what difference would there be on a carpool / not a carpool?
On the same idea, walking a few blocks is the expectation here, being left on the same block on public transport would be enough to increase real state value
The bus I take everyday usually has:
- A random assortment of (Usually european) backpackers
- Some hospital workers
- A few factory workers
- Some office monkeys like me
- Random people dressed normally that I can't categorize
We just go along roughly the same route at the same hour
This is also mostly true in the US but replace the backpackers with people who often have little or no reason to be on the bus at all; panhandlers or people whose specific motive during the day is to harass people on the bus for money or fun. There are people who spend all day on the bus following its route back-and-forth to harass passengers. It's a not-insignificant amount of people; I have no doubt they exist in some form in other countries and maybe the generalized social solution lies outside the transit system, but I do think it's a product of having truly public transit in a place where the public is a sample of everybody everywhere.
EDIT: The distinction I make with a carpool is that you all know each other - you know the passengers, you know the drivers, everyone knows each other, the social contract enforces that nobody does anything too off-putting. Truly public transit has to assume that every passenger is a stranger to the other, and that's harder.
Not saying that you're wrong at all, but that feels pretty specific to the US. Which to me confirms that it is an urban planning failure.
In many places in the world, it's not remotely like that. I understand that "public transportation sucks in the US", but I feel like US people conclude from it that "public transportation sucks". And this is wrong. It's really a failure in the US.
That's fine, I've only lived in the US and can only provide that perspective. However I cannot imagine a version of public transit that would be so good that I would actually use it - and this includes looking at the options available in other countries, because as far as I know we're still operating with buses, trains, subways, carpools, etc. Until ya'll have free taxis that come to your house and take you directly to your destination, it's just not a comparable sell.
To that extent I think it comes back to preference and maybe culture, and doesn't indicate any kind of failure. In the US we can afford not to take public transit and exercise that preference, in many places, it's not an option.
> In the US we can afford not to take public transit and exercise that preference, in many places, it's not an option.
Public transit is objectively a better solution than individual cars. It's not that other countries have public transit because they don't have a choice. They do: they just choose the better option.
> To that extent I think it comes back to preference and maybe culture, and doesn't indicate any kind of failure.
Sure, it was built like this in the US because of the culture. But retrospectively it was a mistake. Driving an individual car emits more CO2 than taking a bus or a train, period. The US is probably the only place in the world where a swasticar is considered "ecological": it's using a lot of energy, just because it's heavy.
Be grateful you've not been assaulted by a taxi/Uber driver then. On the topic of self driving cars, I'd much rather put a woman in a Waymo at 2am after the bars close than an Uber.
I am grateful and this is exactly my point. On a bus I am at risk of being assaulted by dozens of people who did not need to provide any ID to be there. In an uber or taxi I am likely to have recourse.
I don't disagree, but I still have more recourse as a dead man who hired an Uber with a license plate and never made it to his destination vs. stabbed to death on a subway with 100 people, CCTV and no witnesses.
There have been plenty of people that have got into an Uber or taxi only to find out the driver is unlicensed or has bad intentions. One such incident would be more than enough for me to never get in a car alone with a stranger again.
An Uber i was in pulled straight out into traffic and if not for oncoming cars slamming their brakes we'd have been t boned. Like 4 Ubers I've been in featured a driver watching YouTube.
Sometimes you don't really have a choice. But I basically always choose the bus instead of i can help it.
See my other comment here but this is exactly my point. On a bus with dozens of strangers I have 0 recourse. In a car with someone who at least had to provide some kind of ID, I have more power. Consider that strangers just being present is not likely to protect you.
EDIT: I don't think your original comment included the licensing bit (apologies if I just read it poorly), but it doesn't change my point. If you have to provide some paperwork, however illegal, however incorrect, it is a barrier to crime that public transit does not have, and is a paper trail.
