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This is why it's hard to get support for public transit funding. People don't want to take public transit if they will fear for their lives, or be surrounded by
by twblalock 8y ago
This is why it's hard to get support for public transit funding. People don't want to take public transit if they will fear for their lives, or be surrounded by drug addicts and mentally disturbed people yelling at and spitting on other passengers.
BART trains and stations are like this on a regular basis; Muni has the same problems but not as bad. I've seen this kind of thing happen on Caltrain late at night also, but much less often. I have never, ever seen it happen in London or anywhere in Japan.
It's easy for people in the Bay Area to believe this is what all public transit is like, unless they have experienced better systems elsewhere. Why would they want to use it, or pay for it with their tax money? It's safer to take your own car, or an Uber.
I'm a big fan of public transit, especially trains, but it's just never going to be improved in the Bay Area if people don't feel safe.
- umanwizard 8y agoI don’t have the numbers to back this up, but I strongly suspect that if the true cost of driving (both in terms of environmental destruction and massive land use and construction cost for roads and parking lots) were reflected in the price of cars or gas, people simply wouldn’t be able to afford the luxury of a private commute, and mass transit systems would be able to compete even without any public funding at all.
- closeparen 8y agoSure, but you are describing a situation in which commuters are strictly worse off. It’s unlikely they will vote for that. Remember also that existing transit links are beyond fully saturated. It’s not really possible for people to switch to transit en masse before the decades it takes us to build bus terminals and train tunnels have elapsed. No public transit system has the slack to absorb the Bay Bridge drive-alone traffic, let alone 101 or 280. People physically won’t fit into the vehicles. There are decade-scale projects to address that, and I support them, but I don’t expect to see their fruits during my working life. Anyone working now is going to be retired by the time a second Transbay Tube starts passenger service, assuming we vote to fund it right now.
- jblow 8y agoThe original Bay Bridge was built in 3 years, with 1930s technology. We used to not be a bunch of incompetent idiots when it came to building infrastructure, but now we clearly are. I understand why people don’t want to pay large amounts of tax money to pay incompetent idiots to take a long time building tiny amounts of infrastructure.
- closeparen 8y agoYep. In many ways we are simply stuck with whatever we built before we lost the ability to build things. Not because it’s the best, but because it’s no longer cost effective to improve at current efficiency levels.
- selestify 8y agoHow did we become so inefficient?
- scruple 8y agoI don't really think that it's about inefficiency or incompetence. Rather, it's about where our priorities, as a society, are today when it comes to infrastructure projects vs. what it was in the post Great Depression era. Here [0] is an article to covers parts of this exact subject. [0]: https://www.eastbaytimes.com/2013/08/09/building-the-bay-bridge-1930s-vs-today/ https://www.eastbaytimes.com/2013/08/09/building-the-bay-bri...
- masonic 8y agoThe original design for the Bay Bridge retrofit was $400 million. Instead, we got a less-safe, grandiose art piece for over $8 billion. $400 million more if you want a bike lane.
- diogenescynic 8y agoIs this corruption or incompetence? I honestly think it’s corruption. Why can’t we just outsource this to a European engineering company that is capable of accomplishing this? It just makes no sense to me.
- burfog 8y agoFor cars, the roads really are free. Road damage is proportional to the 4th power of the vehicle weight. Normal cars effectively do nothing to roads. The damage comes from buses, fire trucks, UPS trucks, FedEx trucks, bucket trucks... and more trucks. Switching all that to rail is completely unreasonable. Fire departments getting around on rail? So we need the roads anyway, and cars don't wear them out. Cars do not impose a cost. As it is, car drivers are paying money to fix roads that are being damaged by buses. What if we charged bus passengers the true cost of taking the bus? Each passenger on a bus is contributing to road damage. Each driver in a car doesn't cause damage.
- xsmasher 8y agoRoad damage is only part of the story. How many lanes would we need if there were only trucks on the road? We build massive road capacity to subsidize car use.
- burfog 8y agoThe vast majority of roads are narrow. The wide ones are extreme outliers. It may seem otherwise if you judge by the portion of time you spend on each type of road, but most roads are quiet little empty lanes. So, on average, we don't really have more lanes than the minimum.
- esotericn 8y agoIs this just an American thing? Healthcare funding, or something? I've never been to SF, but I've visited NYC, and the subway there feels like stepping in to a horror movie. During a two week visit I saw people passing out and being ignored (I was the only one attempting to help), individuals swinging around bricks in socks, and various other obvious examples of severely mentally ill individuals. In London I've never seen anything like it. It genuinely felt like stepping in to some sort of twilight zone. Compounded by the fact that other commuters seemed jaded, as if it was normal to be regularly surrounded by individuals who act more like rogue AIs than human beings.
- twblalock 8y agoI think it really boils down to American voters having lower standards and being resigned to the fact that these things happen. I don't think a single politician has lost re-election over it recently. The last time there was a significant voter backlash over crime in New York was when Giuliani was elected mayor in the 1990s, and crime was a lot worse back then. I suspect that elected officials would feel significant pressure to act if this happened in London on a regular basis.
- chaostheory 8y agoI feel that this somewhat due to the lack of mental health funding in the US. It's one issue that affects so many areas such as homelessness and crime, yet funding mental health programs is just not popular with voters and politicians in the US.
- JustSomeNobody 8y agoAnything that even resembles taking care of other people is not popular in the US. There's no "preventative" care for people in here, either. We foster and think that a percentage of the children taken from their parents didn't need to happen if the parents were able to get help before it got bad enough for the children to be removed. But, oh wow, when I tell people my thoughts on that they look at me like I'm about to steal their wallet!
- thatswrong0 8y ago
- anigbrowl 8y agoTrue, but a plaintiff's lawyer has an incentive to overstate the problem on the client's behalf. It's irresponsible journalism to just quot this and attribute it to 'lawyer' (a stereo typically responsible person) without mentioning the adversarial context in which the remark is made. 'Plaintiff alleges BART 'a free-for-all' for Criminals' would have been better. The attorney's duty is to maximize the perceived level of risk, just as it is the defense lawyer's job to dispute that. The article only mentions a single statistic showing a 28% increase in crime in the first 6 months of 2018. One hopes the complaint is more statistically rigorous.
- pteredactyl 8y agoIt's true though. Do you ride BART or live in SF or Oakland?
- anigbrowl 8y agoI don't think it is, and yes I do. I'm well aware that crimes happen on BART, someone was murdered at my local station not long ago. But I don't think that 'lawless' is a good description, although many of my journeys take me to stereotypically sketchy stations or occur late at night. It's because of this subjectivity that I said I hoped the case would turn on a more rigorous definition.
- diogenescynic 8y agoCompared to any transit system in another developed country, BART is absolutely lawless.
- cylinder 8y agoA guy was murdered at your station recently and a girl was murdered randomly at another station less than a week ago. On the same system! And you think this is normal and not an indication of lawlessness? This is not normal! If there were murders regularly on systems outside of the US they would be national events. This is a good demonstration of how we got here.
- burtonator 8y ago> This is why it's hard to get support for public transit funding My fiance and I took the BART two stops to get to civic center to the Trump protests about 2 weeks ago. We saw people selling meth/heroin/etc literally INSIDE the BART station in the public... No one cared. No police around. This happened 2-3 times. We were on for TWO stops. Seriously... BART needs to clean up their fucking act. I associate BART with homeless people, BO, trash, vomit, fights, and getting robbed.
- lamarpye 8y agoGod, this is funny. The anti-Trump local governments are making it harder for people to safely take public transportation to anti-Trump protests. Maybe the state of BART and the lack of desire to fix it, is one of reason that Trump was elected.
- francisofascii 8y agoThe American highway system isn’t any safer. Rampant speeding, tailgating, swerving in and out, distracted on phones, etc. All of which is rarely and lightly punished.
- cylinder 8y agoYou can probably look at any system in America at the federal level and find it to be vastly less regulated, particularly from a safety standpoint, than anywhere else considered "developed." The exception being commercial aviation perhaps.
- siruncledrew 8y agoIf you ever want to give a Japanese visitor a significant culture shock, ride with them on the train (whether it's SF, NY, DC). Untimely train schedules. Disorderly conduct. Blatant disregard for the rules. I took the 7 Train from Grand Central to Flushing with a visiting Japanese colleague in NY. The face of concern he gave while on the train was like he was witnessing purgatory. I remember he looked at me and said, "Is this safe?", to which I replied, "I don't know, I guess so". Retrospectively, the honesty did not ease the anxiety. The crowdedness part he had no trouble in managing, given how packed the Tokyo metro could be. What struck the most was: 1. The lack of fucks people gave on train, 2. How much of a free-for-all the US metro systems are, and 3. How on-edge people are. There's people who take naps with their phones out on Japanese trains. On the NY metro, he was wide awake and clutching his belongings for dear life the entire ride. Of the various things to appreciate about the U.S., that was certainly not a highlight.
- CaptainZapp 8y agoThat's a really American perspective about public transport. Here's a counter example: While Marcel Rohner[1] was CEO of UBS he took the train from Aarau, where he lived, to UBS' head office in Zurich. That's despite the fact that the CEO of UBS has a car and driver at his disposal. But the point is that he'd nevertheless be stuck in traffic jams like us mere mortals and taking the train is just that much more efficient. And that's the thing. People chose their mode of transportation based on efficiency and economics. You're not, by definition, a social outcast just because you use train, trams of buses and that goes for a lot of countries outside the US, provided there's investment into the public transport infrastructure. But unless people feel safe it's a non-starter if you have alternatives. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcel_Rohner_(banker) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcel_Rohner_(banker)
- nouseforaname 8y agoI do think there's some truth to the idea that our failures in mental health care have some pretty high costs on our society in other places. If we did a better job with mental health/drug addiction, maybe there would be a few less needles and piles of feces for commuters to content with.