7 ms·

Lesson #1 seems deliberate to me. Post war, many urban centers in the US experienced white flight, it seems rational to assume that since these folks moved awa

Lesson #1 seems deliberate to me. Post war, many urban centers in the US experienced white flight, it seems rational to assume that since these folks moved away from the cities to get away from minorities they would be against infrastructure that would allow minorities to "follow them" to the burbs. But these workers needed a way to get to the city for work, leisure, etc. What better way to circle that square by building massive infrastructure which requires a middle class income (which allows you to buy a car) to use? Even now we see lots of resistance by suburban communities to public transportation. In the Portland, OR metro area there is a upper middle class community called Lake Oswego, the residents have continuously lobbied against any form of public transportation in the town, lots of folks complaining about the "crime train". The metro transit authority which designs new lines has succumbed to the pressure and the newly proposed line while in the vicinity of Lake Oswego avoids the town completely.

ip26 8y ago
It's a shame to see people campaigning against new regional transit lines, but I have to be at least a little sympathetic. BNSF runs through my town, and it does bring transients, plenty of whom do bring drugs, needles, & crime. No matter how you feel about train hoppers, that is a matter of fact in our town. To the downvotes I face, I'd be curious what you feel is incorrect in what I've said.
- astrodust 8y ago
  This is exactly the mentality that makes getting public transit built a problem. Trains don't cause crime. The crime was already there because of a whole heap of deeply embedded issues in America that, for various reasons, Americans on the whole prefer to completely ignore. The problem is that trains make these problems visible. If you rip out the trains you're just sweeping it back under the carpet which is how America tends to deal with these things. If the best economic opportunity afforded by the trains for someone is crime that's saying something about your society, not the trains.
  - 40acres 8y ago
    Bingo. To add more information to my previous point, a lot of the Lake Oswego residents lobbied against the train because they were afraid of homeless folks being in their neighborhood. The light rail in the Portland, OR area does not have turnstiles and fare enforcement is pretty lax, so its not uncommon to see a homeless person on the train. The train however hasn't caused the homeless issue, that's a completely different story. The train just allows this issue to become more of a metropolitan area issue instead of a city center issue.
  - ip26 8y ago
    To be more accurate, in this case the crime was somewhere else, and it rode in on the freight rail. At a muni level, which is where a lot of public transit is done, you are hardly empowered to fix social problems a thousand miles away, so your options are limited. You try to turn away transients, or you don't. SF is in the latter camp, of course. You describe me as espousing the mentality that blocks public transit. But really, I'm just observing, it is a matter of fact that interstate rail is a source of crime in our town. You can show a crime map of our town, and there is literally a hotspot around the rail line. But I'm still pro-transit, pro-rail, the whole shebang. If anything, I feel like trying to wave arms, point fingers, & distract from this indisputable fact is sweeping things under the rug. Better we acknowledge it, and include what we're going to do about it in our pitch & plan.
    - Bahamut 8y ago
      It shouldn't be in the transit planning - it should be addressed at its root cause, instead of trying to paper over the issue by focusing so much on the incidental nature of public transit bringing a shift in location. Unfortunately, oftentimes people have a very NIMBY attitude about these sort of issues in the US in general, and end up perpetuating the problem through intentional ignorance.
    - mixmastamyk 8y ago
      Ok, so station a police officer or two in the vicinity of the stations. No need to block transportation for everyone for a few bad apples.
- kevin_thibedeau 8y ago
  Commuter rail doesn't bring a crime wave. It brings lots of eyeballs and foot traffic that unsavory types would rather avoid.
  - ip26 8y ago
    Yes, it is definitely true, commuter rail is a different story from interstate freight.
    - osdiab 8y ago
      ^^ key point, I'm glad to see it came from you actually! I'd add that it's rare to see well-used transit systems where stations end up being hotbeds of crime; it's mostly the poorly designed and barely utilized ones where that becomes the case. For example, where I grew up, Cleveland, the stations definitely have a pretty grungy vibe, but I'd attribute that largely to the fact that RTA is super slow and infrequent, there are so few lines for such a large geographical mass that you can't do most trips with RTA, and many of the stations dump you in pretty unwalkable, economically dead neighborhoods. Even if you rode it somewhere, there's a very high probability you'd continue a journey on a bus for a crazy long amount of time or need a car to get you to your destination somehow. Even in the well-positioned spots like Ohio City, the station design dumps you next to a bridge on the opposite side of a crazy intersection with no crosswalk that takes like 5 minutes of walking through parking lots and past the garbage-smelling loading dock of the West Side Market to get to any of the businesses there. What a joke lol.
- themacguffinman 8y ago
  The general assertion that mass transit brings crime is very common but isn't supported by evidence [0]. Not to mention the prejudicial undertones it carries... [0] https://www.citylab.com/equity/2014/12/the-myth-that-mass-transit-attracts-crime-persists-in-atlanta/383609/ https://www.citylab.com/equity/2014/12/the-myth-that-mass-tr...
  - ip26 8y ago
    Thanks for the link. Perhaps my core mistake here is speaking from a context of rail freight, when this is really about mass transit.
  - 80386 8y ago
    I live in Boston. The Orange Line mostly runs through neighborhoods you wouldn't want to go to at night (or even in broad daylight), but recently they put in a new stop with a lot of development aimed at the upper middle class. Assembly is within walking distance from Sullivan, but somehow the crime doesn't bleed over. I did live for a few years in an... exurban, if not quite rural, Southern county that had been successfully resisting commuter rail for a long time, but I think that was about keeping the yuppies out as much as anything else. And it's hard to object to that. I was there for college, and a lot of both the professors and the students came in from the Northeast and hated the townies. (I went the opposite direction - grew up around there and then figured I'm in the same country as the Yanks and may as well go see what they're about.)
- moate 8y ago
  Hi, NJ native chiming in here. We have a vast majority of our state served by regional and light rail services, as well as a bus system that supplements it to areas where it would be difficult to get added rail lines. Anecdotally, you can find drugs, needles or crime just about anywhere if you want. There are amazingly safe suburbs with train stations as well as less safe suburbs with train stations and city stops on both side of the spectrum. These people aren't riding the rails to get to some juicy soft targets out in the wealthy burbs. Crime is a law enforcement problem, not a transportation problem. Your whole post is NIMBY nonsense. I promise you, there's plenty of poor drug addicts and criminals in areas that aren't served by any sort of mass transit. Your thesis that they'll come ruin a perfectly good thing is just as flawed as my thesis that they'll magically all stop behaving that way if we gave them mass transit which allowed them greater access to different job opportunities (there's elements of truth in both, but they're both more complex then just a quick summary) TL;dr- What's incorrect about your statement is basically everything in your statement, or at least your perception of cause and effect.
  - osdiab 8y ago
    An addendum: crime isn't just a law enforcement problem, it's reflective of broader societal ills like wealth inequality, poor education, and lack of access to opportunity. In my opinion, law enforcement is a bandaid for those symptoms, but does not strike at the underlying issues, and defining crime and poverty as that domain is also probably counterproductive to reducing them long term. My experience in most of East Asia is that the police are extremely unintimidating [1] when you see them but generally invisible otherwise, perhaps indicating that strong law enforcement is not a requirement for managing crime rates. [1] Tokyo: https://imgur.com/a/FGstZJ3 https://imgur.com/a/FGstZJ3
    - moate 8y ago
      I'll concede that describing it as a "law enforcement" problem is a bit of a broad stroke (what is the purpose of these laws? who made them? are they just and fair? etc.) My point was that trying to blame trains for importing criminals is a weak, unsubstantiated argument lacking true causation. OP later posted that "if you look at a crime map, you'll see a hot spot around the train stations". This is an objective fact, but the conclusion is only one of many possibilities (criminals are more likely to attack people in transit because they carry more valuables, people are more irritable after travel and likely to engage in crime, train stations have higher concentrations of people than other sectors and therefor see a higher number of criminals, there's more enforcement, etc). I was mostly attempting to address that point. Crime is, ultimately and simplistically, a law enforcement problem. Preventing criminals from turning to crime is a social services/educational problem. What things constitute crimes is a societal/cultural issue. Poverty is a whole OTHER ball of wax, although many behaviors of the most impoverished are criminalized. FWIW, Japan has plenty of problems when it comes to policing and crime due to their culture of expected police success rates.
- jermaustin1 8y ago
  How many stowaways still travel via freight trains in the US? I also don't see any real comparison of freight and public transit via rail other than they are both trains...
- dx87 8y ago
  We've had similar problems in the areas around Baltimore. A nearby mall used to be a nice place to go until they added bus stops that go back and forth between the mall and the city. Afterwards, they're starting being a problem with drugs, assaults, and 1-2 murders in the parking lot before they had to put up guard towers throughout the parking lot. There's also a nearby train stop that the county is trying to get closed because people ride the train in, steal stuff from the houses and stores in the surrounding area, then hop back on the train to get away.
  - cwal37 8y ago
    The Anne Arundel county stuff is BS, same old fear and segregation, crime remains low, and there's basically no evidence the rail is bringing people in to do more crime[1]. This isn't even the first time this has come up over the years. Similar things happened in the ATL 'burbs back in the day, before MARTA was built out, and they successfully stymied its expansion. [1] https://ggwash.org/view/68549/some-anne-arundel-county-wants-to-shut-down-their-light-rail-again https://ggwash.org/view/68549/some-anne-arundel-county-wants...
- vkou 8y ago
  > BNSF runs through my town, and it does bring transients, plenty of whom do bring drugs, needles, & crime. That's the equivalent of asking the cops to kick all the homeless people out of your neighborhood, into the one next door. You haven't fixed the problem, you just used your political power to make it someone else's problem.
- wowzap 8y ago
  People who downvote have never had this sort of behavior anywhere near where they live. It's easy to complain about NIMBY's hating public transit when you have no idea what it's like. Tell me their public transit and food kitchen access is more important than my wife being able to walk to the supermarket without getting hollered at by some bum. Give me a break, people who oppose these aren't heartless, they're facing a reality the keyboard warriors here don't have to face, and a reality that would flip any of these downvoters to the other side in a heartbeat.
  - SolaceQuantum 8y ago
    The wife being hollered at isn't a problem with homelessness; I would consider it a problem with the way women are viewed in society. I don't see the correlation between homelessness and the harassment of women in public spaces. I also have lived by public transport and far from public transport and haven't really noticed a difference in terms of the population of crime or homelessness. The vast majority of the homeless people I met were polite, sitting away from pedestrian traffic with a cup or a cardboard sign, or just verbally begging for money going from train to train. The harassment of women can and does occur anywhere and from any class of people. That is to say, I don't actually understand what is trying to be correlated here, and I feel the dismissive attitudes of people who are pro-transport as to simply not have experienced transport, as if transport itself is so terrible that the only people who would support it are the people who never lived with it, to be disingenuous and not conducive to a productive conversation on the subject. Is it really so unbelievable that I can live in a place with mass transit and actually enjoy the experience?
  - bendoernberg 8y ago
    Their public transit and food kitchen access is more important than your wife being able to walk to the supermarket without getting hollered at.
    - wowzap 8y ago
      I'm happy you feel that way, let them pollute the sidewalk of your neighborhood instead.
- overlords 8y ago
  There seems a like a simple fix to that. Charge more money for people to get off at certain places. Make it 10 dollars to stop off at a high income area to avoid undesirables from taking transit there. Use that extra money to subsidize even further for where you want the undesirables to transit to.
  - Broken_Hippo 8y ago
    So, if all the grocery stores are in "high income" or even "mid-income" areas... folks are taxed a bit extra to do their shopping? It also seems a bit counter-intuitive. The point of public transit - a good system, anyway - is to encourage folks to ride it. Having a high fee for certain areas would actively discourage folks from using such a system and might actually reinforce a stereotype that mass transit is for poor folks.
- abdullahkhalids 8y ago
  The problem with your viewpoint is that its only looking at transit in isolation. Transit is just one piece of creating a safe, livable cities. The city/state/province/country needs to and should invest in crime prevention, poverty alleviation, job creation etc at the same time to create great cities.
- wahern 8y ago
  You can't equivocate transients with working class people or even the anti-social people that hide in working class neighborhoods. And in any event there are ways to keep undesirables at bay that focus on anti-social behaviors and conditions, not income status. Transit also cuts both ways in that it allows low-wage workers to commute into an area without necessarily having to live there. For both these reasons you won't find many homeless in the Pacific Heights or Marina neighborhoods of San Francisco, despite their proximity to the Tenderloin and Western Addition.
- qwerty456127 8y ago
  > BNSF runs through my town, and it does bring transients, plenty of whom do bring drugs, needles, & crime. Why does this not happen in the EU? Almost all the pictures of the US public transport I've seen show dirty interiors filled with people looking poor and/or dangerous while in the EU (not in every EU country or city perhaps but what I've seen so far) trains and stations look and feel almost like planes and airports, cost very cheap (about a dollar to travel within a city), all the normal people use trains, trams and buses actively and people you'd prefer to avoid are rare.
bendotero 8y ago
This seemed like the #1 obvious reason to me. Race should've played a much larger part of that explanation. It has dictated so much of American civil life, especially the organization of neighborhoods, that it seems like the most obvious reason we have different transportation options than European cities.
udfalkso 8y ago
https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2017/07/how-low-did-he-go/533019/ https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2017/07/how-low-did-h... "This summer, as New Yorkers head out to Long Island’s beach towns and parks on the Southern State Parkway, they’ll pass beneath a series of overpass bridges made infamous in Robert A. Caro’s monumental 1974 biography of Robert Moses, The Power Broker. In one of the book's most memorable passages, Caro reveals that Moses ordered his engineers to build the bridges low over the parkway to keep buses from the city away from Jones Beach—buses presumably filled with the poor blacks and Puerto Ricans Moses despised. The story was told to Caro by Sidney M. Shapiro, a close Moses associate and former chief engineer and general manager of the Long Island State Park Commission." This article says that the story is not necessarily that straightforward, but this does speak directly to your comment.
jedberg 8y ago
Marin County is the same way. Main reason BART doesn’t go there is because they don’t want “those people” to be able to get there.
mikeash 8y ago
I live near a DC Metro station that opened just a few years ago. Any time some minor crime is reported on Nextdoor (and it’s usually a minor theft of items from an unlocked car, the blockheads), people come out of the woodwork to say how everything has been awful since Metro came and it brought all this crime. It’s especially funny since I’ve never seen anyone who remotely looks like an unsavory character at that station (whether by bigot standards or otherwise) and it’s a typical suburban station with not a whole lot around it, so it would be a dumb destination for criminals looking for new territory to exploit.

ip26 8y ago

It's a shame to see people campaigning against new regional transit lines, but I have to be at least a little sympathetic. BNSF runs through my town, and it does bring transients, plenty of whom do bring drugs, needles, & crime. No matter how you feel about train hoppers, that is a matter of fact in our town. To the downvotes I face, I'd be curious what you feel is incorrect in what I've said.

astrodust 8y ago
This is exactly the mentality that makes getting public transit built a problem. Trains don't cause crime. The crime was already there because of a whole heap of deeply embedded issues in America that, for various reasons, Americans on the whole prefer to completely ignore. The problem is that trains make these problems visible. If you rip out the trains you're just sweeping it back under the carpet which is how America tends to deal with these things. If the best economic opportunity afforded by the trains for someone is crime that's saying something about your society, not the trains.
- 40acres 8y ago
  Bingo. To add more information to my previous point, a lot of the Lake Oswego residents lobbied against the train because they were afraid of homeless folks being in their neighborhood. The light rail in the Portland, OR area does not have turnstiles and fare enforcement is pretty lax, so its not uncommon to see a homeless person on the train. The train however hasn't caused the homeless issue, that's a completely different story. The train just allows this issue to become more of a metropolitan area issue instead of a city center issue.
- ip26 8y ago
  To be more accurate, in this case the crime was somewhere else, and it rode in on the freight rail. At a muni level, which is where a lot of public transit is done, you are hardly empowered to fix social problems a thousand miles away, so your options are limited. You try to turn away transients, or you don't. SF is in the latter camp, of course. You describe me as espousing the mentality that blocks public transit. But really, I'm just observing, it is a matter of fact that interstate rail is a source of crime in our town. You can show a crime map of our town, and there is literally a hotspot around the rail line. But I'm still pro-transit, pro-rail, the whole shebang. If anything, I feel like trying to wave arms, point fingers, & distract from this indisputable fact is sweeping things under the rug. Better we acknowledge it, and include what we're going to do about it in our pitch & plan.
  - Bahamut 8y ago
    It shouldn't be in the transit planning - it should be addressed at its root cause, instead of trying to paper over the issue by focusing so much on the incidental nature of public transit bringing a shift in location. Unfortunately, oftentimes people have a very NIMBY attitude about these sort of issues in the US in general, and end up perpetuating the problem through intentional ignorance.
  - mixmastamyk 8y ago
    Ok, so station a police officer or two in the vicinity of the stations. No need to block transportation for everyone for a few bad apples.
kevin_thibedeau 8y ago
Commuter rail doesn't bring a crime wave. It brings lots of eyeballs and foot traffic that unsavory types would rather avoid.
- ip26 8y ago
  Yes, it is definitely true, commuter rail is a different story from interstate freight.
  - osdiab 8y ago
    ^^ key point, I'm glad to see it came from you actually! I'd add that it's rare to see well-used transit systems where stations end up being hotbeds of crime; it's mostly the poorly designed and barely utilized ones where that becomes the case. For example, where I grew up, Cleveland, the stations definitely have a pretty grungy vibe, but I'd attribute that largely to the fact that RTA is super slow and infrequent, there are so few lines for such a large geographical mass that you can't do most trips with RTA, and many of the stations dump you in pretty unwalkable, economically dead neighborhoods. Even if you rode it somewhere, there's a very high probability you'd continue a journey on a bus for a crazy long amount of time or need a car to get you to your destination somehow. Even in the well-positioned spots like Ohio City, the station design dumps you next to a bridge on the opposite side of a crazy intersection with no crosswalk that takes like 5 minutes of walking through parking lots and past the garbage-smelling loading dock of the West Side Market to get to any of the businesses there. What a joke lol.
themacguffinman 8y ago
The general assertion that mass transit brings crime is very common but isn't supported by evidence [0]. Not to mention the prejudicial undertones it carries... [0] https://www.citylab.com/equity/2014/12/the-myth-that-mass-transit-attracts-crime-persists-in-atlanta/383609/ https://www.citylab.com/equity/2014/12/the-myth-that-mass-tr...
- ip26 8y ago
  Thanks for the link. Perhaps my core mistake here is speaking from a context of rail freight, when this is really about mass transit.
- 80386 8y ago
  I live in Boston. The Orange Line mostly runs through neighborhoods you wouldn't want to go to at night (or even in broad daylight), but recently they put in a new stop with a lot of development aimed at the upper middle class. Assembly is within walking distance from Sullivan, but somehow the crime doesn't bleed over. I did live for a few years in an... exurban, if not quite rural, Southern county that had been successfully resisting commuter rail for a long time, but I think that was about keeping the yuppies out as much as anything else. And it's hard to object to that. I was there for college, and a lot of both the professors and the students came in from the Northeast and hated the townies. (I went the opposite direction - grew up around there and then figured I'm in the same country as the Yanks and may as well go see what they're about.)
moate 8y ago
Hi, NJ native chiming in here. We have a vast majority of our state served by regional and light rail services, as well as a bus system that supplements it to areas where it would be difficult to get added rail lines. Anecdotally, you can find drugs, needles or crime just about anywhere if you want. There are amazingly safe suburbs with train stations as well as less safe suburbs with train stations and city stops on both side of the spectrum. These people aren't riding the rails to get to some juicy soft targets out in the wealthy burbs. Crime is a law enforcement problem, not a transportation problem. Your whole post is NIMBY nonsense. I promise you, there's plenty of poor drug addicts and criminals in areas that aren't served by any sort of mass transit. Your thesis that they'll come ruin a perfectly good thing is just as flawed as my thesis that they'll magically all stop behaving that way if we gave them mass transit which allowed them greater access to different job opportunities (there's elements of truth in both, but they're both more complex then just a quick summary) TL;dr- What's incorrect about your statement is basically everything in your statement, or at least your perception of cause and effect.
- osdiab 8y ago
  An addendum: crime isn't just a law enforcement problem, it's reflective of broader societal ills like wealth inequality, poor education, and lack of access to opportunity. In my opinion, law enforcement is a bandaid for those symptoms, but does not strike at the underlying issues, and defining crime and poverty as that domain is also probably counterproductive to reducing them long term. My experience in most of East Asia is that the police are extremely unintimidating [1] when you see them but generally invisible otherwise, perhaps indicating that strong law enforcement is not a requirement for managing crime rates. [1] Tokyo: https://imgur.com/a/FGstZJ3 https://imgur.com/a/FGstZJ3
  - moate 8y ago
    I'll concede that describing it as a "law enforcement" problem is a bit of a broad stroke (what is the purpose of these laws? who made them? are they just and fair? etc.) My point was that trying to blame trains for importing criminals is a weak, unsubstantiated argument lacking true causation. OP later posted that "if you look at a crime map, you'll see a hot spot around the train stations". This is an objective fact, but the conclusion is only one of many possibilities (criminals are more likely to attack people in transit because they carry more valuables, people are more irritable after travel and likely to engage in crime, train stations have higher concentrations of people than other sectors and therefor see a higher number of criminals, there's more enforcement, etc). I was mostly attempting to address that point. Crime is, ultimately and simplistically, a law enforcement problem. Preventing criminals from turning to crime is a social services/educational problem. What things constitute crimes is a societal/cultural issue. Poverty is a whole OTHER ball of wax, although many behaviors of the most impoverished are criminalized. FWIW, Japan has plenty of problems when it comes to policing and crime due to their culture of expected police success rates.
jermaustin1 8y ago
How many stowaways still travel via freight trains in the US? I also don't see any real comparison of freight and public transit via rail other than they are both trains...
dx87 8y ago
We've had similar problems in the areas around Baltimore. A nearby mall used to be a nice place to go until they added bus stops that go back and forth between the mall and the city. Afterwards, they're starting being a problem with drugs, assaults, and 1-2 murders in the parking lot before they had to put up guard towers throughout the parking lot. There's also a nearby train stop that the county is trying to get closed because people ride the train in, steal stuff from the houses and stores in the surrounding area, then hop back on the train to get away.
- cwal37 8y ago
  The Anne Arundel county stuff is BS, same old fear and segregation, crime remains low, and there's basically no evidence the rail is bringing people in to do more crime[1]. This isn't even the first time this has come up over the years. Similar things happened in the ATL 'burbs back in the day, before MARTA was built out, and they successfully stymied its expansion. [1] https://ggwash.org/view/68549/some-anne-arundel-county-wants-to-shut-down-their-light-rail-again https://ggwash.org/view/68549/some-anne-arundel-county-wants...
vkou 8y ago
> BNSF runs through my town, and it does bring transients, plenty of whom do bring drugs, needles, & crime. That's the equivalent of asking the cops to kick all the homeless people out of your neighborhood, into the one next door. You haven't fixed the problem, you just used your political power to make it someone else's problem.
wowzap 8y ago
People who downvote have never had this sort of behavior anywhere near where they live. It's easy to complain about NIMBY's hating public transit when you have no idea what it's like. Tell me their public transit and food kitchen access is more important than my wife being able to walk to the supermarket without getting hollered at by some bum. Give me a break, people who oppose these aren't heartless, they're facing a reality the keyboard warriors here don't have to face, and a reality that would flip any of these downvoters to the other side in a heartbeat.
- SolaceQuantum 8y ago
  The wife being hollered at isn't a problem with homelessness; I would consider it a problem with the way women are viewed in society. I don't see the correlation between homelessness and the harassment of women in public spaces. I also have lived by public transport and far from public transport and haven't really noticed a difference in terms of the population of crime or homelessness. The vast majority of the homeless people I met were polite, sitting away from pedestrian traffic with a cup or a cardboard sign, or just verbally begging for money going from train to train. The harassment of women can and does occur anywhere and from any class of people. That is to say, I don't actually understand what is trying to be correlated here, and I feel the dismissive attitudes of people who are pro-transport as to simply not have experienced transport, as if transport itself is so terrible that the only people who would support it are the people who never lived with it, to be disingenuous and not conducive to a productive conversation on the subject. Is it really so unbelievable that I can live in a place with mass transit and actually enjoy the experience?
- bendoernberg 8y ago
  Their public transit and food kitchen access is more important than your wife being able to walk to the supermarket without getting hollered at.
  - wowzap 8y ago
    I'm happy you feel that way, let them pollute the sidewalk of your neighborhood instead.
overlords 8y ago
There seems a like a simple fix to that. Charge more money for people to get off at certain places. Make it 10 dollars to stop off at a high income area to avoid undesirables from taking transit there. Use that extra money to subsidize even further for where you want the undesirables to transit to.
- Broken_Hippo 8y ago
  So, if all the grocery stores are in "high income" or even "mid-income" areas... folks are taxed a bit extra to do their shopping? It also seems a bit counter-intuitive. The point of public transit - a good system, anyway - is to encourage folks to ride it. Having a high fee for certain areas would actively discourage folks from using such a system and might actually reinforce a stereotype that mass transit is for poor folks.
abdullahkhalids 8y ago
The problem with your viewpoint is that its only looking at transit in isolation. Transit is just one piece of creating a safe, livable cities. The city/state/province/country needs to and should invest in crime prevention, poverty alleviation, job creation etc at the same time to create great cities.
wahern 8y ago
You can't equivocate transients with working class people or even the anti-social people that hide in working class neighborhoods. And in any event there are ways to keep undesirables at bay that focus on anti-social behaviors and conditions, not income status. Transit also cuts both ways in that it allows low-wage workers to commute into an area without necessarily having to live there. For both these reasons you won't find many homeless in the Pacific Heights or Marina neighborhoods of San Francisco, despite their proximity to the Tenderloin and Western Addition.
qwerty456127 8y ago
> BNSF runs through my town, and it does bring transients, plenty of whom do bring drugs, needles, & crime. Why does this not happen in the EU? Almost all the pictures of the US public transport I've seen show dirty interiors filled with people looking poor and/or dangerous while in the EU (not in every EU country or city perhaps but what I've seen so far) trains and stations look and feel almost like planes and airports, cost very cheap (about a dollar to travel within a city), all the normal people use trains, trams and buses actively and people you'd prefer to avoid are rare.

bendotero 8y ago

This seemed like the #1 obvious reason to me. Race should've played a much larger part of that explanation. It has dictated so much of American civil life, especially the organization of neighborhoods, that it seems like the most obvious reason we have different transportation options than European cities.

udfalkso 8y ago

https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2017/07/how-low-did-he-go/533019/ https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2017/07/how-low-did-h... "This summer, as New Yorkers head out to Long Island’s beach towns and parks on the Southern State Parkway, they’ll pass beneath a series of overpass bridges made infamous in Robert A. Caro’s monumental 1974 biography of Robert Moses, The Power Broker. In one of the book's most memorable passages, Caro reveals that Moses ordered his engineers to build the bridges low over the parkway to keep buses from the city away from Jones Beach—buses presumably filled with the poor blacks and Puerto Ricans Moses despised. The story was told to Caro by Sidney M. Shapiro, a close Moses associate and former chief engineer and general manager of the Long Island State Park Commission." This article says that the story is not necessarily that straightforward, but this does speak directly to your comment.

jedberg 8y ago

Marin County is the same way. Main reason BART doesn’t go there is because they don’t want “those people” to be able to get there.

mikeash 8y ago

I live near a DC Metro station that opened just a few years ago. Any time some minor crime is reported on Nextdoor (and it’s usually a minor theft of items from an unlocked car, the blockheads), people come out of the woodwork to say how everything has been awful since Metro came and it brought all this crime. It’s especially funny since I’ve never seen anyone who remotely looks like an unsavory character at that station (whether by bigot standards or otherwise) and it’s a typical suburban station with not a whole lot around it, so it would be a dumb destination for criminals looking for new territory to exploit.