3 ms·

This data is only thru dealerships, I believe. Anecdotally: I know no one who takes public transit in NYC anymore. They either bicycle, bought a car, left the

This data is only thru dealerships, I believe. Anecdotally: I know no one who takes public transit in NYC anymore. They either bicycle, bought a car, left the city, or stay home. Generally: Many people have fled the city to suburbs where, presumably, they will need cars.

jeffbee 6y ago
This report which is based on DMV data seems to conclude that all vehicle registrations, new and used, dealer or not, are way off (pg. 8) https://www.cncda.org/wp-content/uploads/Cal-Covering-2Q-20.pdf https://www.cncda.org/wp-content/uploads/Cal-Covering-2Q-20.... No argument that the subway is having a bad year. MTA bus ridership might be off less than you imagine, though. And citibike ridership is up 20%. I don't live in NY anymore so I don't have any anecdotes.
epistasis 6y ago
Going beyond anecdote to data shows the US transit ridership is down, but I don't think this is based on the reality of transmission possibilities. When people get scared, they retreat from that which culture tells them to fear, which includes transit for the US. However, when you look at other places that use lots of transit, like Japan and Korea, we don't see much spread on transit. So the fear is not so much reality based. In plain contrast, churches are shown to have had many super-spread events, including in South Korea, yet people seemingly can't wait to get back to church, perhaps because it is a place that they view as intrinsically safe even though the evidence shows otherwise. In short, humans are really bad at evaluating risk, especially in our current media environment which is has a very low Signal to noise ratio.
- clairity 6y ago
  > "In short, humans are really bad at evaluating risk, especially in our current media environment which is has a very low Signal to noise ratio." that needs to be printed and hung on every door in america, as a constant reminder that we're in all the messes we're in because we're individually, and sometimes even collectively, bad at assessing risk. the near-singular infatuation with covid relative to everything else that can and does kill us is rationally misguided (which is not to say ignore covid, just put it in its relative place). and news outlets like npr and nytimes that used to be considered relatively neutral are simply no longer trustworthy. self-righteous assertions of control with little concrete understanding is a dangerous road to be traveling down.
  - bregma 6y ago
    Not only that, but many Americans seem to misinterpret satire, like the Fox News entertainment network tends to broadcast, as fact or news. I think it comes down to poor education. Not being familiar with the pedagogy I am certainly not in a position to recommend improvements, but I can say that if the obvious is getting so badly misinterpreted to the point of real harm, someone has not learned the basics very well.
    - clairity 6y ago
      well, to be fair, i think most fox newsers "believe" the commentary because of identity and a desire to will things into fact, rather than a serious, considered conviction. there's no desire to critique, and folks are generally aware of this, though not always omnipresently in their minds and actions. you see the same phenomenon in church membership too, which legitimizes and reinforces this behavior in secular life. those used to be more compartmentalized, but that seems to have become unbound over the past 40-50 years, with (mostly) republican politicians intentionally blurring church and state for political gain. our education could improve, especially around rationality and critical thinking, but i don't think that will make (or would have made) a large dent in the behaviors of fox newsers. they're largely responding to both an intentional and mutually-reinforced misperception of risk of "others" all around encroaching on their otherwise pure and wholesome lives. it's a totally unfounded risk, but that's beside the point, because the intention is tribalist, not rationalist (similar to maskers who prioritize compliance over risk appropriateness). tribalism is the problem, put to very effective use by the will to power to divide and conquer. an effective contravention is to widen the tribe to include everyone, but that's hard to achieve and maintain.
- techsupporter 6y ago
  This has been my experience. We do not own a car, so my household still relies on transit for our uses, and our use of transit is way down simply because there's nowhere to go. I don't need to commute to work, we refuse to go sit in a poorly-ventilated restaurant just for grins, and virtually all of our regular needs are met by walking to them. When we do ride the bus (as there's no light rail to our neighborhood yet), it's to a park. King County Metro, the public transit agency serving Seattle, has been cleaning its buses a lot more often and requiring mask use[0] for almost the whole pandemic. On the routes we use, I've noticed near-100% mask compliance and the buses are cleaner than I've seen them in a decade. I feel safer on a Metro bus than I do in a grocery store, where store employees are (with reason) fearful of confronting people who flout the mask rules and customers are incapable of following one way signs on the floors and aisles. Yet in our mixed-use apartment complex, where residential is built above ground-floor restaurant and retail, the restaurants have been permitted by the landlord to put far more tables outside. (This is privately-owned land, so not on the public sidewalk.) This makes it impossible to walk through our complex and stay separated from diners, unmasked of course since it's hard to eat a mask on, talking and laughing. Yet we're all outside and the contact time is brief, so I've not said anything to the landlord because the risk is low and the restaurants need the income. I wish, and hope, that our transit agencies will step up their marketing and outreach efforts to tell people what they're doing and why transit is safe. Because we have neither the space nor the plant environment for more cars and more trips by car. 0 - Until recently, Metro has not been actively enforcing this requirement but, starting this month, Metro "Health Ambassadors" are at transit centers, major transfer points, and riding on buses to hand out masks and "educate and remind" people of the mask requirement in all public places, per the Governor's rule.
- throwaway0a5e 6y ago
  >In short, humans are really bad at evaluating risk, especially in our current media environment which is has a very low Signal to noise ratio. Isn't this just a nicer way of saying that the unwashed masses don't have the same priorities the experts want them to? We live in a democracy, shouldn't social consensus do the lion's share of work in defining what is and isn't good risk assessment? If the overwhelming majority of people would rather be scared of a rare disease than a car crash then doesn't that kind of define what our priorities are even if guarding against the latter looks better on the metrics?
  - michaelt 6y ago
    There are some questions that are clearly questions of fact. For example, "Which killed more Americans last year, car accidents or terrorist attacks?" There are some questions that are clearly questions of opinion. For example "Should we spend more money on reducing car accidents than we spend on anti-terror efforts?" There are also questions that straddle the border - for example "Should lives shortened by pollution count as deaths caused by cars?" While questions of opinion are the domain of social consensus and democracy, it's not particularly elitist to say the purely factual questions need a right answer rather than a popular one.
  - epistasis 6y ago
    No, elitism or "unwashed masses" has nothing at all to do with this. It's about making decisions based on gut or based on better information. We have news media that works far harder to promote emotional culture wars than promote information transfer, and we have people succumbing to tribalism, and that has nothing to do with whether one is part of some sort of "unwashed masses" or whether they are part of elite decision makers that control what sort of propaganda/news/media that hundreds of millions of people see. Information isn't some sort of perfect market where people see what they like the best, it is hugely influenced by what people create and what influential people promote.

jeffbee 6y ago

This report which is based on DMV data seems to conclude that all vehicle registrations, new and used, dealer or not, are way off (pg. 8) https://www.cncda.org/wp-content/uploads/Cal-Covering-2Q-20.pdf https://www.cncda.org/wp-content/uploads/Cal-Covering-2Q-20.... No argument that the subway is having a bad year. MTA bus ridership might be off less than you imagine, though. And citibike ridership is up 20%. I don't live in NY anymore so I don't have any anecdotes.

epistasis 6y ago

Going beyond anecdote to data shows the US transit ridership is down, but I don't think this is based on the reality of transmission possibilities. When people get scared, they retreat from that which culture tells them to fear, which includes transit for the US. However, when you look at other places that use lots of transit, like Japan and Korea, we don't see much spread on transit. So the fear is not so much reality based. In plain contrast, churches are shown to have had many super-spread events, including in South Korea, yet people seemingly can't wait to get back to church, perhaps because it is a place that they view as intrinsically safe even though the evidence shows otherwise. In short, humans are really bad at evaluating risk, especially in our current media environment which is has a very low Signal to noise ratio.

clairity 6y ago
> "In short, humans are really bad at evaluating risk, especially in our current media environment which is has a very low Signal to noise ratio." that needs to be printed and hung on every door in america, as a constant reminder that we're in all the messes we're in because we're individually, and sometimes even collectively, bad at assessing risk. the near-singular infatuation with covid relative to everything else that can and does kill us is rationally misguided (which is not to say ignore covid, just put it in its relative place). and news outlets like npr and nytimes that used to be considered relatively neutral are simply no longer trustworthy. self-righteous assertions of control with little concrete understanding is a dangerous road to be traveling down.
- bregma 6y ago
  Not only that, but many Americans seem to misinterpret satire, like the Fox News entertainment network tends to broadcast, as fact or news. I think it comes down to poor education. Not being familiar with the pedagogy I am certainly not in a position to recommend improvements, but I can say that if the obvious is getting so badly misinterpreted to the point of real harm, someone has not learned the basics very well.
  - clairity 6y ago
    well, to be fair, i think most fox newsers "believe" the commentary because of identity and a desire to will things into fact, rather than a serious, considered conviction. there's no desire to critique, and folks are generally aware of this, though not always omnipresently in their minds and actions. you see the same phenomenon in church membership too, which legitimizes and reinforces this behavior in secular life. those used to be more compartmentalized, but that seems to have become unbound over the past 40-50 years, with (mostly) republican politicians intentionally blurring church and state for political gain. our education could improve, especially around rationality and critical thinking, but i don't think that will make (or would have made) a large dent in the behaviors of fox newsers. they're largely responding to both an intentional and mutually-reinforced misperception of risk of "others" all around encroaching on their otherwise pure and wholesome lives. it's a totally unfounded risk, but that's beside the point, because the intention is tribalist, not rationalist (similar to maskers who prioritize compliance over risk appropriateness). tribalism is the problem, put to very effective use by the will to power to divide and conquer. an effective contravention is to widen the tribe to include everyone, but that's hard to achieve and maintain.
techsupporter 6y ago
This has been my experience. We do not own a car, so my household still relies on transit for our uses, and our use of transit is way down simply because there's nowhere to go. I don't need to commute to work, we refuse to go sit in a poorly-ventilated restaurant just for grins, and virtually all of our regular needs are met by walking to them. When we do ride the bus (as there's no light rail to our neighborhood yet), it's to a park. King County Metro, the public transit agency serving Seattle, has been cleaning its buses a lot more often and requiring mask use[0] for almost the whole pandemic. On the routes we use, I've noticed near-100% mask compliance and the buses are cleaner than I've seen them in a decade. I feel safer on a Metro bus than I do in a grocery store, where store employees are (with reason) fearful of confronting people who flout the mask rules and customers are incapable of following one way signs on the floors and aisles. Yet in our mixed-use apartment complex, where residential is built above ground-floor restaurant and retail, the restaurants have been permitted by the landlord to put far more tables outside. (This is privately-owned land, so not on the public sidewalk.) This makes it impossible to walk through our complex and stay separated from diners, unmasked of course since it's hard to eat a mask on, talking and laughing. Yet we're all outside and the contact time is brief, so I've not said anything to the landlord because the risk is low and the restaurants need the income. I wish, and hope, that our transit agencies will step up their marketing and outreach efforts to tell people what they're doing and why transit is safe. Because we have neither the space nor the plant environment for more cars and more trips by car. 0 - Until recently, Metro has not been actively enforcing this requirement but, starting this month, Metro "Health Ambassadors" are at transit centers, major transfer points, and riding on buses to hand out masks and "educate and remind" people of the mask requirement in all public places, per the Governor's rule.
throwaway0a5e 6y ago
>In short, humans are really bad at evaluating risk, especially in our current media environment which is has a very low Signal to noise ratio. Isn't this just a nicer way of saying that the unwashed masses don't have the same priorities the experts want them to? We live in a democracy, shouldn't social consensus do the lion's share of work in defining what is and isn't good risk assessment? If the overwhelming majority of people would rather be scared of a rare disease than a car crash then doesn't that kind of define what our priorities are even if guarding against the latter looks better on the metrics?
- michaelt 6y ago
  There are some questions that are clearly questions of fact. For example, "Which killed more Americans last year, car accidents or terrorist attacks?" There are some questions that are clearly questions of opinion. For example "Should we spend more money on reducing car accidents than we spend on anti-terror efforts?" There are also questions that straddle the border - for example "Should lives shortened by pollution count as deaths caused by cars?" While questions of opinion are the domain of social consensus and democracy, it's not particularly elitist to say the purely factual questions need a right answer rather than a popular one.
- epistasis 6y ago
  No, elitism or "unwashed masses" has nothing at all to do with this. It's about making decisions based on gut or based on better information. We have news media that works far harder to promote emotional culture wars than promote information transfer, and we have people succumbing to tribalism, and that has nothing to do with whether one is part of some sort of "unwashed masses" or whether they are part of elite decision makers that control what sort of propaganda/news/media that hundreds of millions of people see. Information isn't some sort of perfect market where people see what they like the best, it is hugely influenced by what people create and what influential people promote.