9 ms·

> Inevitably they want to use public transit as an instrument for various social policies. Yes, "social policies" like transit that's accessible to the disable

by blintz 10y ago

> Inevitably they want to use public transit as an instrument for various social policies. Yes, "social policies" like transit that's accessible to the disabled, elderly, and poor. Would you prefer planning that tells those people to stay at home where we can pretend they don't exist? > "minimum of screening so that they don't have to deal with people with severe mental issues" What kind of "screening process" do you want? What's your test? > people in city gov refuse to recognize that commuters desires are perfectly reasonable Sure, maybe you can twist your desire for fewer people with "mental issues" to be 'reasonable', but your disgust for them doesn't make good policy. It's not impossible to build transit for everyone; for both commuters, and for the poor, disabled or elderly. As long as people like you can stand to be on the bus with people who are different than you.

briandear 10y ago
I don't want to ride public transport with crazy people or people that want to beg me for money or even just people that have bad hygiene or talk loudly or listen to music without headphones. Why is that unreasonable? Oh and I'd also not be waiting in the hot sun or the freezing cold for a bus that may or may not arrive on time. Then, I get to take a tour of the city while the bus stops every two minutes rather than going directly to where I need to go. Ever been from Newark Airport to midtown Manhattan? You have to take a shuttle "train" to the PATH or NY Transit, then ride that into the City, then walk a dozen blocks or wait on a crosstown bus and then another bus. Public transit has its use, but I generally hate it except in rare situations like Zurich or Berlin. As far as the disabled and elderly, interesting you mention that! How many subway stations in NYC are wheelchair accessible -- how many of those actually have functioning elevators? Of those, how many of those elevators don't smell like a homeless urinal? Very, very few stations in NYC are accessible and all of them are dirty. Public transport would be great if I didn't have to share it with the public.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- flycaliguy 10y ago
  Thank you for saying what so many people keep to themselves. I'm kind of punk so I'm into all that dirty stuff.
- cortesoft 10y ago
  No one forces you to take public transit. You are free to stay home and avoid the public entirely if you want.
- eli_gottlieb 10y ago
  You sound like a massive jerk.
  - ericd 10y ago
    Why? He's being honest about what he wants. He's not demanding it, just expressing a preference. He's also expressing that the public transit system is a complete mess. I'm in Japan at the moment, and I can't help but agree - it's clean, fast, the trains come exactly when they say they will, and everything connects to everything else. It's wonderful, and I wish we had a system like this for ourselves in the US.
    - rsync 10y ago
      From the grandparent: "Public transit has its use, but I generally hate it except in rare situations like Zurich or Berlin." From the parent: "I'm in Japan at the moment, and I can't help but agree - it's clean, fast, the trains come exactly when they say they will" This: (how nice (insert public service here) is in CH/nordic/germany/japan) compared to the United States is always submitted as some kind of perplexing accident - like only some weird burst of cosmic rays could possibly explain why, for instance, polite behaviors on buses are so much better in Tokyo than they are in Cleveland. But it's not confusing or strange at all: a homogenous society is easy to make work. Oh, you have a whole city full of Lars Larsons and Handt Hansons ? Why, however do you make such a place work ? How amazing that everything comes together just so and there is no animosity between net tax payers and net tax receivers. Well, of course there isn't. It's easy to work and live together with people and provide funding for their social benefit when their name is John Johnsson just like yours is. The US is not easy. It's not an easy place. We have interesting problems that are going to be harder to figure out than pedantically pointing at the nordic countries. On the other hand, we invented jazz and stuck a flag on the moon, so we've got that going for us - which is nice.
      - quinnchr 10y ago
        This is silly, there are plenty of counterexamples. See Santiago, Chile and Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia for examples of large multi-ethnic cities with efficient, safe, and clean public transportation systems. This is specious reasoning at best unless you've done an exhaustive study of all public transportation.
- jmknoll 10y ago
  Have you spent much time in Tokyo, Seoul, Hong Kong, Singapore, Shanghai, or Taipei? In all of these cities, public transit doesn't just "have its uses," its the primary way of getting around the city for the vast majority of residents. This isn't about social policy. These cities span the entire range of social policies. All it takes is a government dedicated to building a comprehensive, functional, and intelligently designed transit system. There are still crazy people on the subway in Shanghai. But because its the best way to get around the city, everyone takes the subway. So maybe you see a beggar or a homeless person every couple of days, much like you would when you're out walking around. The problem we get in most American cities is that the transit systems are terrible, so anyone who can afford to drive takes their car, and transit systems end up existing only for people who don't have any other options. So you decide to take the bus one day, and everyone else on the bus is either homeless or crazy, and the bus has to take some ridiculous route to pick up enough people to justify its continued existence. So you never take the bus again, because it was unpleasant and wasted your time. Now we've gotten into a vicious cycle where the awfulness of the system ensures that it will continue to get ever worse. This was a long rant, but what I'm trying to say is that public transit isn't inevitably broken, as many of the world's most successful cities demonstrate. It just can't be half-assed, and it feels like we've half-assed it in most of the US.
cooper12 10y ago
Unfortunately this kind of ableism/privilege isn't uncommon in silicon valley: > 'In only the latest cultural altercation between San Francisco’s tech workers and the city’s impoverished population, one tech worker has declared the homeless are “riff raff” whose “pain, struggle and despair” shouldn’t have to be endured by “wealthy” people commuting to work.' (https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/feb/17/san-francisco-tech-open-letter-i-dont-want-to-see-homeless-riff-raff https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/feb/17/san-franc...) It's the same reason it's often illegal for homeless people to sleep on benches. The elite would rather have the problem swept under the rug. > "In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread." - Anatole France This line of thinking of "efficiency trumps social issues" and that "regulation is always bad" is very harmful for both the workers and customers these kinds of systems are supposed to protect. The parent might find this map (http://projects.newyorker.com/story/subway/ http://projects.newyorker.com/story/subway/) showing inequality along NYC's subway interesting. The subway connects people from widely different economic backgrounds; the social darwinist might not like this but it's essential for giving those less well off opportunities and decreases the insularness of wealthy areas. Sometimes social focus is only ever a bad thing for those who benefit from the lack of it.
- baddox 10y ago
  I realize and appreciate the very unfortunate situation that many poor and mentally ill [0] people are in. I want them to have access to health care, public transit, job opportunities, etc. I don't like when people cavalierly express the desire to be spared the sight of these people. But the thing is, (living and working in downtown San Francisco) I see a lot of what I can only describe as harassment or assault committed by apparently mentally disturbed/ill [0] people. I genuinely don't know how to solve this problem, but I do think that people have a reasonable expectation to not encounter these situations in well-traveled public places. [0] "mentally disturbed" and "mentally ill" are probably not the most precise or appropriate terms to use here. I do not know the correct terms but I appreciate any corrections.
  - eli_gottlieb 10y ago
closeparen 10y ago
>What's your test? Please go stand at the base of an escalator into Civic Center Station on a warm summer day when it hasn't rained for a while, and take some deep breaths. I refuse to be ashamed of my desire to avoid inhaling other people's piss and shit on a daily basis. This country isn't ready for public space. We have too much work to do, to care for the people who will reliably show up to public space they have access to and turn them into urine-soaked, beggar-laden wasteland, before we can reasonably be indignant at the desire to avoid spending time in public space. Like public bathrooms, for one thing. What must SF spend on its (futile) attempts to keep stations clean? Surely that could fund one public bathroom somewhere in the city to redirect some of the mess.
- heavenlyhash 10y ago
  San Francisco is almost unique in this. Of the entire set of cities in the world I have seen, none have a problem like this on a comparable scale. Perhaps it's more useful to ask what led to this situation in this one city, and look for constructive things to do to remedy it. It's certainly possible to have open, public transit that is clean and functional. Walk around Berlin right now and count how many "screening" checkpoints their are in the train stations. Spoiler: there aren't even doors on all the entrances. Somehow, as if by magic, trains are clean and run on time. The strongest smell is from the food vendors in the attached mall. Civil services are possible. And they certainly don't require any draconian "screening" processes.
  - closeparen 10y ago
    >Walk around Berlin right now Transit policy can't create the Berlin transit system. Germany got it by building the constellation of welfare, social services, healthcare, eduction, labor laws, and tenant protection that keeps people's lives on track (or puts them back) long before they've fallen to the point of shitting into subway escalators. The American electorate is quite far from even wanting these things. It's going to be a long climb to get them implemented and working. We will not be preventing destitution anytime soon, and the shit on the streets of temperate, tolerant cities like SF is going to get far, far worse before it gets better.
walterstucco 10y ago
> like transit that's accessible to the disabled, elderly, and poor. Very much this! I don't like public transport, I don't like having to deal with other people when I travel, but I like Uber and private transport even less. If you leave people alone to decide of their own "best", they will certainly destroy community as a whole. What's my solution? I walk when I can, I use car sharing/pooling when I can't walk, I use public transport when the first two solutions are unavailable. I also dislike private car pooling companies, I think they should be public because the goal has to be to give people choices, without harming the community, not making some startup take over our transport infrastructure.
Fnoord 10y ago
> Yes, "social policies" like transit that's accessible to the disabled, elderly, and poor. Would you prefer planning that tells those people to stay at home where we can pretend they don't exist? This is one of the reasons why there's 1st and 2nd class train wagons. If you don't want to sit with "the plebs", get a more expensive ticket and go 1st class together with the other travellers in suit. This does not exist for busses AFAIK. Although one could walk, rent a bus, rent a car, carpool, or grab a taxi (renting a train(wagon) is actually also possible in some countries/regions).
orbitingpluto 10y ago
We have here a bunch of people complaining who have been pushed down the social strata. Instead of not being able to afford their own car or request a luxury class taxi, they now have to exist in the lowest tier. They don't like that, and, they now want, effectively, to elevate themselves above the people who have to piss in a subway station by banning them. At a Christmas party that I went to with several people who have way more money than almost any of you, a wife of a Boeing executive referred to you complainers as "transit trash". She looks at you as you are looking at these problem people. When assigning blame, if you aren't looking upwards to those exerting vast amounts of power, then you are probably the problem. I made sure to call out this woman's trash talk and embarrass her. If you have power you are supposed to be kind to those below you. Without that graciousness you expose yourself as being afraid that you'll be assigned to a lower social strata. (And I take the wholesale disappearance of that graciousness in American politics as a harbinger of American decline.)
- stuaxo 10y ago
  I haven't been to SF so don't know if the subway has toilets in it. It's said that you can judge the civilisation of a city by how available toilets are. In Taipei the metro stations all have toilets in them. In London very few stations rarely have toilets. Of course, this is comparing an new to an old system. If the SF system has no toilets then maybe this would explain things ?

by blintz 10y ago

briandear 10y ago

I don't want to ride public transport with crazy people or people that want to beg me for money or even just people that have bad hygiene or talk loudly or listen to music without headphones. Why is that unreasonable? Oh and I'd also not be waiting in the hot sun or the freezing cold for a bus that may or may not arrive on time. Then, I get to take a tour of the city while the bus stops every two minutes rather than going directly to where I need to go. Ever been from Newark Airport to midtown Manhattan? You have to take a shuttle "train" to the PATH or NY Transit, then ride that into the City, then walk a dozen blocks or wait on a crosstown bus and then another bus. Public transit has its use, but I generally hate it except in rare situations like Zurich or Berlin. As far as the disabled and elderly, interesting you mention that! How many subway stations in NYC are wheelchair accessible -- how many of those actually have functioning elevators? Of those, how many of those elevators don't smell like a homeless urinal? Very, very few stations in NYC are accessible and all of them are dirty. Public transport would be great if I didn't have to share it with the public.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
flycaliguy 10y ago
Thank you for saying what so many people keep to themselves. I'm kind of punk so I'm into all that dirty stuff.
cortesoft 10y ago
No one forces you to take public transit. You are free to stay home and avoid the public entirely if you want.
eli_gottlieb 10y ago
You sound like a massive jerk.
- ericd 10y ago
  Why? He's being honest about what he wants. He's not demanding it, just expressing a preference. He's also expressing that the public transit system is a complete mess. I'm in Japan at the moment, and I can't help but agree - it's clean, fast, the trains come exactly when they say they will, and everything connects to everything else. It's wonderful, and I wish we had a system like this for ourselves in the US.
  - rsync 10y ago
    From the grandparent: "Public transit has its use, but I generally hate it except in rare situations like Zurich or Berlin." From the parent: "I'm in Japan at the moment, and I can't help but agree - it's clean, fast, the trains come exactly when they say they will" This: (how nice (insert public service here) is in CH/nordic/germany/japan) compared to the United States is always submitted as some kind of perplexing accident - like only some weird burst of cosmic rays could possibly explain why, for instance, polite behaviors on buses are so much better in Tokyo than they are in Cleveland. But it's not confusing or strange at all: a homogenous society is easy to make work. Oh, you have a whole city full of Lars Larsons and Handt Hansons ? Why, however do you make such a place work ? How amazing that everything comes together just so and there is no animosity between net tax payers and net tax receivers. Well, of course there isn't. It's easy to work and live together with people and provide funding for their social benefit when their name is John Johnsson just like yours is. The US is not easy. It's not an easy place. We have interesting problems that are going to be harder to figure out than pedantically pointing at the nordic countries. On the other hand, we invented jazz and stuck a flag on the moon, so we've got that going for us - which is nice.
    - quinnchr 10y ago
      This is silly, there are plenty of counterexamples. See Santiago, Chile and Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia for examples of large multi-ethnic cities with efficient, safe, and clean public transportation systems. This is specious reasoning at best unless you've done an exhaustive study of all public transportation.
jmknoll 10y ago
Have you spent much time in Tokyo, Seoul, Hong Kong, Singapore, Shanghai, or Taipei? In all of these cities, public transit doesn't just "have its uses," its the primary way of getting around the city for the vast majority of residents. This isn't about social policy. These cities span the entire range of social policies. All it takes is a government dedicated to building a comprehensive, functional, and intelligently designed transit system. There are still crazy people on the subway in Shanghai. But because its the best way to get around the city, everyone takes the subway. So maybe you see a beggar or a homeless person every couple of days, much like you would when you're out walking around. The problem we get in most American cities is that the transit systems are terrible, so anyone who can afford to drive takes their car, and transit systems end up existing only for people who don't have any other options. So you decide to take the bus one day, and everyone else on the bus is either homeless or crazy, and the bus has to take some ridiculous route to pick up enough people to justify its continued existence. So you never take the bus again, because it was unpleasant and wasted your time. Now we've gotten into a vicious cycle where the awfulness of the system ensures that it will continue to get ever worse. This was a long rant, but what I'm trying to say is that public transit isn't inevitably broken, as many of the world's most successful cities demonstrate. It just can't be half-assed, and it feels like we've half-assed it in most of the US.

cooper12 10y ago

Unfortunately this kind of ableism/privilege isn't uncommon in silicon valley: > 'In only the latest cultural altercation between San Francisco’s tech workers and the city’s impoverished population, one tech worker has declared the homeless are “riff raff” whose “pain, struggle and despair” shouldn’t have to be endured by “wealthy” people commuting to work.' (https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/feb/17/san-francisco-tech-open-letter-i-dont-want-to-see-homeless-riff-raff https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/feb/17/san-franc...) It's the same reason it's often illegal for homeless people to sleep on benches. The elite would rather have the problem swept under the rug. > "In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread." - Anatole France This line of thinking of "efficiency trumps social issues" and that "regulation is always bad" is very harmful for both the workers and customers these kinds of systems are supposed to protect. The parent might find this map (http://projects.newyorker.com/story/subway/ http://projects.newyorker.com/story/subway/) showing inequality along NYC's subway interesting. The subway connects people from widely different economic backgrounds; the social darwinist might not like this but it's essential for giving those less well off opportunities and decreases the insularness of wealthy areas. Sometimes social focus is only ever a bad thing for those who benefit from the lack of it.

baddox 10y ago
I realize and appreciate the very unfortunate situation that many poor and mentally ill [0] people are in. I want them to have access to health care, public transit, job opportunities, etc. I don't like when people cavalierly express the desire to be spared the sight of these people. But the thing is, (living and working in downtown San Francisco) I see a lot of what I can only describe as harassment or assault committed by apparently mentally disturbed/ill [0] people. I genuinely don't know how to solve this problem, but I do think that people have a reasonable expectation to not encounter these situations in well-traveled public places. [0] "mentally disturbed" and "mentally ill" are probably not the most precise or appropriate terms to use here. I do not know the correct terms but I appreciate any corrections.
- eli_gottlieb 10y ago

closeparen 10y ago

>What's your test? Please go stand at the base of an escalator into Civic Center Station on a warm summer day when it hasn't rained for a while, and take some deep breaths. I refuse to be ashamed of my desire to avoid inhaling other people's piss and shit on a daily basis. This country isn't ready for public space. We have too much work to do, to care for the people who will reliably show up to public space they have access to and turn them into urine-soaked, beggar-laden wasteland, before we can reasonably be indignant at the desire to avoid spending time in public space. Like public bathrooms, for one thing. What must SF spend on its (futile) attempts to keep stations clean? Surely that could fund one public bathroom somewhere in the city to redirect some of the mess.

heavenlyhash 10y ago
San Francisco is almost unique in this. Of the entire set of cities in the world I have seen, none have a problem like this on a comparable scale. Perhaps it's more useful to ask what led to this situation in this one city, and look for constructive things to do to remedy it. It's certainly possible to have open, public transit that is clean and functional. Walk around Berlin right now and count how many "screening" checkpoints their are in the train stations. Spoiler: there aren't even doors on all the entrances. Somehow, as if by magic, trains are clean and run on time. The strongest smell is from the food vendors in the attached mall. Civil services are possible. And they certainly don't require any draconian "screening" processes.
- closeparen 10y ago
  >Walk around Berlin right now Transit policy can't create the Berlin transit system. Germany got it by building the constellation of welfare, social services, healthcare, eduction, labor laws, and tenant protection that keeps people's lives on track (or puts them back) long before they've fallen to the point of shitting into subway escalators. The American electorate is quite far from even wanting these things. It's going to be a long climb to get them implemented and working. We will not be preventing destitution anytime soon, and the shit on the streets of temperate, tolerant cities like SF is going to get far, far worse before it gets better.

walterstucco 10y ago

> like transit that's accessible to the disabled, elderly, and poor. Very much this! I don't like public transport, I don't like having to deal with other people when I travel, but I like Uber and private transport even less. If you leave people alone to decide of their own "best", they will certainly destroy community as a whole. What's my solution? I walk when I can, I use car sharing/pooling when I can't walk, I use public transport when the first two solutions are unavailable. I also dislike private car pooling companies, I think they should be public because the goal has to be to give people choices, without harming the community, not making some startup take over our transport infrastructure.

Fnoord 10y ago

> Yes, "social policies" like transit that's accessible to the disabled, elderly, and poor. Would you prefer planning that tells those people to stay at home where we can pretend they don't exist? This is one of the reasons why there's 1st and 2nd class train wagons. If you don't want to sit with "the plebs", get a more expensive ticket and go 1st class together with the other travellers in suit. This does not exist for busses AFAIK. Although one could walk, rent a bus, rent a car, carpool, or grab a taxi (renting a train(wagon) is actually also possible in some countries/regions).

orbitingpluto 10y ago

We have here a bunch of people complaining who have been pushed down the social strata. Instead of not being able to afford their own car or request a luxury class taxi, they now have to exist in the lowest tier. They don't like that, and, they now want, effectively, to elevate themselves above the people who have to piss in a subway station by banning them. At a Christmas party that I went to with several people who have way more money than almost any of you, a wife of a Boeing executive referred to you complainers as "transit trash". She looks at you as you are looking at these problem people. When assigning blame, if you aren't looking upwards to those exerting vast amounts of power, then you are probably the problem. I made sure to call out this woman's trash talk and embarrass her. If you have power you are supposed to be kind to those below you. Without that graciousness you expose yourself as being afraid that you'll be assigned to a lower social strata. (And I take the wholesale disappearance of that graciousness in American politics as a harbinger of American decline.)

stuaxo 10y ago
I haven't been to SF so don't know if the subway has toilets in it. It's said that you can judge the civilisation of a city by how available toilets are. In Taipei the metro stations all have toilets in them. In London very few stations rarely have toilets. Of course, this is comparing an new to an old system. If the SF system has no toilets then maybe this would explain things ?