5 ms·

"Yes, but poor people use public transportation to come from bad neighborhoods to good neighborhoods to rob us! We must ban all expansion of public transportati

by op00to 10y ago

"Yes, but poor people use public transportation to come from bad neighborhoods to good neighborhoods to rob us! We must ban all expansion of public transportation!" This exact sentiment is echoed by many in the US as a reason to not expand public transit. When asked about criminals driving cars to commit crimes, they were not open to bulldozing the roads over. It's gross.

th5234 10y ago
The crime rates are much higher in the United States than in Europe. This website claims rape occurs at a 3 times higher rate and murder at a 6 times higher rate. I couldn't find any good statistics for robbery but I imagine it's in that range. Yes, crime has been decreasing in the United States for around a quarter of a century, but it still occurs at a much higher rate than Europe and almost an order of magnitude higher than in Asian cities with good transit like Tokyo or Shanghai. http://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/compare/Netherlands/United-States/Crime#2010 http://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/compare/Netherlands... Whether irrational or not, any public transit paradigm has to take the realities of crime and the citizens' perceptions of crime into account if it's going to be successful. And if the crime rate was as low as it is in Europe, it might be easier to get European levels of support for public transit. This implies the need for better policing, earlier social interventions, etc.
- RobertoG 10y ago
  It seems to me that it's all the same problem. If you have strong public spending you have more educated and less desperate people and better public transport.
  - yummyfajitas 10y ago
    To get the same transit in the US, we'd need to spend 5-10x what Europeans/Asians/anyone else in the world spends. https://pedestrianobservations.wordpress.com/2013/06/03/comparative-subway-construction-costs-revised/ https://pedestrianobservations.wordpress.com/2013/06/03/comp... In the US, public spending is generally a way to funnel money to cronies of the inner party (e.g. transit worker unions, construction unions, politically connected consultants). Various other interest groups - mainly NIMBY homeowners - will also demand their pound of flesh. We need to fix our social technology ( http://thefutureprimaeval.net/social-technology-and-anarcho-tyranny/ http://thefutureprimaeval.net/social-technology-and-anarcho-... ) before we can build such things. Luckily we have people like Kalanick taking baby steps in that direction.
    - dannypgh 10y ago
      Wealth is getting increasingly concentrated in this country, and not into the hands of union workers. I think your description of the role of public spending is misleading at best. I could say, equally (if not more) fairly, that all spending (public and private) is generally a way to funnel money to cronies of the capitalist system (e.g. CEOs, shareholders). Maybe a more useful thing to discuss is what the money does in the process. Transit workers do provide labor that makes today's transit systems possible, after all.
      - yummyfajitas 10y ago
        True; wealth is primarily getting concentrated in the hands of middle class (who become upperclass) homeowners in NIMBY cities. See the work of Matthew Rognlie on this. (Growth in home values is the entire source of increased r in Piketty's r > g.) If you want to claim that the US government spending $2-4B somehow funnels money to the capitalists, it's tangential to my point. Wherever the money gets lost, the point is that the US is simply not capable of building transit the way the rest of the world does.
- dannypgh 10y ago
  Rape and murder are both crimes where the odds are good you know your assailant. I don't believe the overall rate has much to do with transit. Of course, you admit it may not be rational- but in theory education can ease irrational thoughts, and this is likely simpler than solving the problem of crime. http://nypost.com/2014/01/05/odds-that-youll-be-killed-by-a-stranger-in-nyc-on-the-decline/ http://nypost.com/2014/01/05/odds-that-youll-be-killed-by-a-... http://www.911rape.org/facts-quotes/statistics http://www.911rape.org/facts-quotes/statistics
  - M_Grey 10y ago
    >Rape and murder are both crimes where the odds are good you know your assailant... ...Or are engaged in a criminal enterprise (for murder, not rape).
wcummings 10y ago
>"Yes, but poor people use public transportation to come from bad neighborhoods to good neighborhoods to rob us! We must ban all expansion of public transportation!" This is why the (Boston) red line doesn't extend to Arlington.
- subpixel 10y ago
  Replace "poor" with "black" and you have the reason public transportation has been suppressed in large parts of the US. When I lived in Atlanta a suburban city official explained that "we all know the sort of people who hang around bus stops" while killing plans to expand bus service.
  - Karunamon 10y ago
    I'm sorry but that official's statement does not even kinda imply race. Like it or not, bus stops and train stations accessible by everyone are hotbeds of panhandling, pickpockets, and sometimes worse. An area where people just pass through on their way to somewhere else far away, distracted and in a hurry, is a great place for criminal behavior.
    - tzakrajs 10y ago
      It's a dog whistle for racists. Please don't apologize for racists.
      - Karunamon 10y ago
        Your proof that the statement is some kind of coded language is what, exactly? Parent's assertion? Please don't assume racism where none has been proven to exist. I absolutely refuse to cease challenging unsubstantiated statements because of this conceptual boogeyman, and so should you.
        dsr_ 10y ago
        You are arguing about whether a non-attributed quote which was explicitly intended to show racism via coded language actually shows racism via coded language. If this were an attributed quote, you could go look up the source and argue context. It isn't.
andruby 10y ago
Is that quote a real statement or an exaggeration? I can't phantom how people could blame mass transportation for increasing robberies.
- URSpider94 10y ago
  It's real (though flawed) logic that's been used repeatedly to stop the expansion of public transport from inner cities into more wealthy suburbs. For a long time in the USA, the prevailing wisdom was that only poor people and criminals ride the bus/subway. That's changing now that more and more people, young and old, are gravitating to car-free city life.
- logfromblammo 10y ago
  You can't fathom it. A fathom is the distance between fingertips. "To fathom" in a literal sense is either wrap your arms around an object to measure its size, or to drop a weighted rope to the seafloor, and haul it up, counting one fathom for each double-arm-length of rope hauled in. "To fathom" in a figurative sense is to acquire more than superficial knowledge of a topic--to attain a full depth of understanding. To be unable to fathom something is literally being unable to wrap your arms around it, and figuratively unable to wrap your mind around it. A phantom is an intangible apparition like a ghost or specter. It is not usually used as a verb, but if it were, the meaning would probably be similar to "to ghost", which is either to work invisibly or to vanish suddenly, without warning or explanation. As an adjective, it means that the modified word does not truly exist. People in the US are still very class-aware, even if they are not obviously racist. Anecdotally, at a pool party in her suburban McMansion subdivision, I overheard a black grandmother express dismay at the possibility that someone might build a high-density apartment building in the neighboring cattle pasture, because they attract (literal quote) "that kind of people." Nobody wants poor people in their neighborhood, because it is presumed that even if they don't steal anything they can pick up, they will crash all the property values in the surrounding area. As someone not particularly fond of driving a car, I would love to be able to get around on public transportation, like I did in Chicago. But that requires density to be cost-effective, and for too many people, density equates to too many poor people living near their stuff. So it's more of a two-part process. The mass transit and the housing density go hand in hand, and the NIMBYs are afraid of both.

by op00to 10y ago

th5234 10y ago

The crime rates are much higher in the United States than in Europe. This website claims rape occurs at a 3 times higher rate and murder at a 6 times higher rate. I couldn't find any good statistics for robbery but I imagine it's in that range. Yes, crime has been decreasing in the United States for around a quarter of a century, but it still occurs at a much higher rate than Europe and almost an order of magnitude higher than in Asian cities with good transit like Tokyo or Shanghai. http://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/compare/Netherlands/United-States/Crime#2010 http://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/compare/Netherlands... Whether irrational or not, any public transit paradigm has to take the realities of crime and the citizens' perceptions of crime into account if it's going to be successful. And if the crime rate was as low as it is in Europe, it might be easier to get European levels of support for public transit. This implies the need for better policing, earlier social interventions, etc.

RobertoG 10y ago
It seems to me that it's all the same problem. If you have strong public spending you have more educated and less desperate people and better public transport.
- yummyfajitas 10y ago
  To get the same transit in the US, we'd need to spend 5-10x what Europeans/Asians/anyone else in the world spends. https://pedestrianobservations.wordpress.com/2013/06/03/comparative-subway-construction-costs-revised/ https://pedestrianobservations.wordpress.com/2013/06/03/comp... In the US, public spending is generally a way to funnel money to cronies of the inner party (e.g. transit worker unions, construction unions, politically connected consultants). Various other interest groups - mainly NIMBY homeowners - will also demand their pound of flesh. We need to fix our social technology ( http://thefutureprimaeval.net/social-technology-and-anarcho-tyranny/ http://thefutureprimaeval.net/social-technology-and-anarcho-... ) before we can build such things. Luckily we have people like Kalanick taking baby steps in that direction.
  - dannypgh 10y ago
    Wealth is getting increasingly concentrated in this country, and not into the hands of union workers. I think your description of the role of public spending is misleading at best. I could say, equally (if not more) fairly, that all spending (public and private) is generally a way to funnel money to cronies of the capitalist system (e.g. CEOs, shareholders). Maybe a more useful thing to discuss is what the money does in the process. Transit workers do provide labor that makes today's transit systems possible, after all.
    - yummyfajitas 10y ago
      True; wealth is primarily getting concentrated in the hands of middle class (who become upperclass) homeowners in NIMBY cities. See the work of Matthew Rognlie on this. (Growth in home values is the entire source of increased r in Piketty's r > g.) If you want to claim that the US government spending $2-4B somehow funnels money to the capitalists, it's tangential to my point. Wherever the money gets lost, the point is that the US is simply not capable of building transit the way the rest of the world does.
dannypgh 10y ago
Rape and murder are both crimes where the odds are good you know your assailant. I don't believe the overall rate has much to do with transit. Of course, you admit it may not be rational- but in theory education can ease irrational thoughts, and this is likely simpler than solving the problem of crime. http://nypost.com/2014/01/05/odds-that-youll-be-killed-by-a-stranger-in-nyc-on-the-decline/ http://nypost.com/2014/01/05/odds-that-youll-be-killed-by-a-... http://www.911rape.org/facts-quotes/statistics http://www.911rape.org/facts-quotes/statistics
- M_Grey 10y ago
  >Rape and murder are both crimes where the odds are good you know your assailant... ...Or are engaged in a criminal enterprise (for murder, not rape).

wcummings 10y ago

>"Yes, but poor people use public transportation to come from bad neighborhoods to good neighborhoods to rob us! We must ban all expansion of public transportation!" This is why the (Boston) red line doesn't extend to Arlington.

subpixel 10y ago
Replace "poor" with "black" and you have the reason public transportation has been suppressed in large parts of the US. When I lived in Atlanta a suburban city official explained that "we all know the sort of people who hang around bus stops" while killing plans to expand bus service.
- Karunamon 10y ago
  I'm sorry but that official's statement does not even kinda imply race. Like it or not, bus stops and train stations accessible by everyone are hotbeds of panhandling, pickpockets, and sometimes worse. An area where people just pass through on their way to somewhere else far away, distracted and in a hurry, is a great place for criminal behavior.
  - tzakrajs 10y ago
    It's a dog whistle for racists. Please don't apologize for racists.
    - Karunamon 10y ago
      Your proof that the statement is some kind of coded language is what, exactly? Parent's assertion? Please don't assume racism where none has been proven to exist. I absolutely refuse to cease challenging unsubstantiated statements because of this conceptual boogeyman, and so should you.
      - dsr_ 10y ago
        You are arguing about whether a non-attributed quote which was explicitly intended to show racism via coded language actually shows racism via coded language. If this were an attributed quote, you could go look up the source and argue context. It isn't.

andruby 10y ago

Is that quote a real statement or an exaggeration? I can't phantom how people could blame mass transportation for increasing robberies.

URSpider94 10y ago
It's real (though flawed) logic that's been used repeatedly to stop the expansion of public transport from inner cities into more wealthy suburbs. For a long time in the USA, the prevailing wisdom was that only poor people and criminals ride the bus/subway. That's changing now that more and more people, young and old, are gravitating to car-free city life.
logfromblammo 10y ago
You can't fathom it. A fathom is the distance between fingertips. "To fathom" in a literal sense is either wrap your arms around an object to measure its size, or to drop a weighted rope to the seafloor, and haul it up, counting one fathom for each double-arm-length of rope hauled in. "To fathom" in a figurative sense is to acquire more than superficial knowledge of a topic--to attain a full depth of understanding. To be unable to fathom something is literally being unable to wrap your arms around it, and figuratively unable to wrap your mind around it. A phantom is an intangible apparition like a ghost or specter. It is not usually used as a verb, but if it were, the meaning would probably be similar to "to ghost", which is either to work invisibly or to vanish suddenly, without warning or explanation. As an adjective, it means that the modified word does not truly exist. People in the US are still very class-aware, even if they are not obviously racist. Anecdotally, at a pool party in her suburban McMansion subdivision, I overheard a black grandmother express dismay at the possibility that someone might build a high-density apartment building in the neighboring cattle pasture, because they attract (literal quote) "that kind of people." Nobody wants poor people in their neighborhood, because it is presumed that even if they don't steal anything they can pick up, they will crash all the property values in the surrounding area. As someone not particularly fond of driving a car, I would love to be able to get around on public transportation, like I did in Chicago. But that requires density to be cost-effective, and for too many people, density equates to too many poor people living near their stuff. So it's more of a two-part process. The mass transit and the housing density go hand in hand, and the NIMBYs are afraid of both.