10 ms·

I sympathize with this sentiment, but it's not tenable without major investments in public transit. I live in Chicago, the third largest US city, and getting ar

I sympathize with this sentiment, but it's not tenable without major investments in public transit. I live in Chicago, the third largest US city, and getting around by car is about twice as fast as taking public transit even when "public transit" means taking the L with no connections during rush hour (worst case scenario for car commuting). Mind you, (contrary to recent remarks by our mayor) Chicago isn't even a "car city"--we have only ~3ish arteries through the city and everything else is slow-moving side streets. Meanwhile, most trains are pretty unpleasant--many cars wreak of piss, smoke, etc, people free-style rapping, trying to start fights (especially people of questionable sanity), etc. Buses can be better, but they're also a lot slower. If you have a family, own a dog, or have a disability, then it quickly becomes more practical to own a car, and even if we clean up public transit, police it properly, and expand it I'm not sure it would change the calculus--you would still likely be better off owning a car than relying solely on public transit and rideshare and so on. Of course, I want Chicago to make those improvements to its public transit system if only to pull more people off the road more often, but I think there will always be a core group of people who need to own cars. I think if this is true for Chicago it will also be true for smaller US cities.

mrguyorama 4y ago
>Meanwhile, most trains are pretty unpleasant--many cars wreak of piss, smoke, etc, people free-style rapping, trying to start fights Important note, these kind of "only the bums use public transit" problems will go away if and only if non-bums start using public transit.
- xyzzyz 4y ago
  Bums will not leave public transit just because non-bums start using it more often. Only practical mechanism here to achieve the effect you predict is that non-bums are angry about terrible conditions in public transit they are dependent on using, and force the government to kick the bums out. If this is viable, why won’t the government, you know, kick out the bums now? That it does not do so, I take as evidence that it won’t do it in future either.
  - orangepurple 4y ago
    I increasingly get the feeling that the only winning move is to not play. I have no idea how we got to this point either.
  - pclmulqdq 4y ago
    NYC kicked the bums out of Manhattan in the 80s and kept them out through the early 00s. It worked really well. Wealthy people used public transit to get to their wall street jobs, and many people walked home alone at night. Fast forward to today, and it's not progressive to go after the bums any more. Now the subway is extremely dangerous and smelly, and nobody but the desperate takes it. The streets are a lot less safe than they used to be. You can take the bums off the street (and put them in shelters) and your city will get a lot better. It's just very unpopular with progressives, who happen to be the voting base in big cities. Eventually, things will get bad enough that the progressives leave, and then the streets can get cleaned up again.
    - xyzzyz 4y ago
      I agree with you, but I only have one lifetime, and by the time it plays out in its entirety, I’ll be long retired. Point is, government needs to first clean things up, and then the civil society will move back in, not the other way around.
    - codyb 4y ago
      Extremely dangerous might be a bit much. I ride the subway a fair amount. And there's been an uptick in crime (all over the US), but I wouldn't really call the subway dangerous. NYC houses something like 95% of its homeless as well, which is why we have a lot less people on the streets than in places like LA or SF. But shelter conditions are pretty miserable as I understand it so you can sort of understand the hold outs. And we may just not have enough space. But yea, NYC's a big city, there's definitely some homeless, but I'm not sure my lived experience here is as dire as you make it sound. That being said, some areas are certainly worse than others, and there's definitely some aggressive mentally ill people you'll see here and there.
- throwaway894345 4y ago
  Chicago definitely doesn't have an "only the bums use public transit" problem.
- orangepurple 4y ago
  I stopped using buses and trams in the US out of fear for my personal safety. I'm not going to wear a bulletproof vest and carrying a handgun concealed just to get around town. Now I drive between safer areas to do things and meet people and don't have to put myself in danger by exposing myself in the in-between areas. A metal box goes a long way to prevent an assault. The whole situation is just pathetic.
  - siquick 4y ago
    Where do you live? As an outsider it’s crazy that anyone in the US can think like this.
    - orangepurple 4y ago
      Have lived in multiple top 10 US cities by population. It's the same story everywhere. Watch the interviews by charliebo313 to learn the story.
  - throwaway894345 4y ago
    I'm not a hardcore anti-car person, but realistically you're safer taking buses and trains and so on in the US than you are driving on the highway. Of course, if you're just taking trips across town a car might be safer? Ideally though major cities would police public transit better, but we really reversed course on policing in this country beginning circa 2014 and crime has risen commensurately.
    - orangepurple 4y ago
      After witnessing how 911 and the police treat my reports I am convinced that crime stats in all major US metro areas are cooked and rife with under-reporting and lies. The crime rate is much higher than the stats show. Imagine my horror when I was put on put on hold for 5 minutes with 911 in the nation's capital after being attacked while jogging and the dispatcher was annoyed at me for bothering her.
      - 4y ago
- bombcar 4y ago
  Which could be pretty easily done in some locations by making more expensive copies of the same transit (think "express" busses that are double the cost vs the once an hour bus that is cheap or free). Then the people who care about it (read: not poor) will pay to ride the bum-free version, and then more people will use it, and it will begin to improve. Of course, that cannot be done because then it's called "making the poor version crappy" and so everyone is forced to use the crappy version and it remains crappy forever.
  - pandaman 4y ago
    Where do you live if you believe bums pay fare? It's definitely not the case in LA, SF and NYC. Make it 10x expensive and they still pay 10x0 i.e. 0.
    - kelnos 4y ago
      Hell, a few weeks ago I was on a train in SF, and saw a family of five get on the train (definitely on their way to see a basketball game), and they didn't pay. If people who can afford 5 tickets to a Warriors game during the playoffs/finals/whatever it was won't spend $12.50 to get their family to the stadium (after they probably spent $75 to park their car), how can we expect homeless people to pay? Enforcement is also nearly nonexistent, and I expect it's even more nonexistent since COVID started. In 12 years of riding transit in SF, I've only once witnessed a group of transit employees board a bus to check that everyone had paid. Anyone who rides transit frequently (and doesn't pay) is likely saving money even if they have to pay the vanishingly rare fine if they're caught.
      - bombcar 4y ago
        Which indicates it's an enforcement problem, which can be solved by more thorough checking, gates that read/charge, or just giving up and declaring that everyone "living in the city" gets a pass. I've often suspected that metro fares are basically an excuse for the cops to kick bums/undesirables off the train.
  - bluGill 4y ago
- asdff 4y ago
  The problems do not go away, they just become more present for more people. I commute in the mornings and evenings on the redline subway in LA, and I've seen just about every substance you can smoke smoked on the platforms or in the traincars. It doesn't let up when the traincars are full of people commuting to work either (which despite the car centric image, many people actually do use the trains in LA to get to work), it just gets more sweaty and hot inside and more noisy as more portable speakers compete with eachother. These are societal problems. More people using transport doesn't make people with issues simply poof into thin air or suddenly en masse take up private transport to go places to free up public transport for the sane. More asylums would certainly improve the situation getting unwell people into care and safety, along with better drug treatment programs for the addicted, but these aren't transit department problems to solve. Even if security got harsh on the train platforms and meth users were readily kicked out of the train, it would just amount to kicking the can down the road without having a mechanism to institutionalize more people or force people who don't want to change their lifestyle into care.
  - bogomipz 4y ago
    >"I commute in the mornings and evenings on the redline subway in LA, and I've seen just about every substance you can smoke smoked on the platforms or in the traincars." People actually smoke in the train cars? I'm curious is this a common occurrence then?
    - throwaway894345 4y ago
      People smoke weed and cigarettes on the train in Chicago too.
    - asdff 4y ago
      Yeah some people will smoke weed, cigarettes, or meth or crack too but those are usually done underneath a blanket or a sheet thankfully. A lot of smoking happens on the platforms as well which at least get the pneumatic subway pushing air through it every now and then for ventillation, but air is pretty stale otherwise and smoke can linger in the underground stations. Here's a video clip of this happening on the bus: https://old.reddit.com/r/LosAngeles/comments/uu6gki/metro_in_los_angeles/ https://old.reddit.com/r/LosAngeles/comments/uu6gki/metro_in...
seoaeu 4y ago
The problem is that some folks insist that “we can’t inconvenience automobile users until public transit is perfect” and others say “we can’t justify investing in transit unless way more people start using it”.
- throwaway894345 4y ago
  I'm pretty adamantly of the opinion that the only politically viable way to increase public transit usage is positive incentives. If you just try to punish drivers (as many in the anti-car crowd are want to do, even if it means punishing bus riders too), you will end up creating a bunch of political opposition. I think you really need to convince people that investment in transit will beget more ridership, and if you can't make that case then more public transit may not be appropriate.
  - seoaeu 4y ago
    The problem is that drivers consider practically any changes to the status quo to be “punishment”. Replace several street parking spaces (in a neighborhood with hundreds of spots) to put in a bike lane? Punishment. Cut ten minutes off bus travel time by installing a dedicated bus lane, at the expense of a minute or two extra for car traffic? Punishment. Make drivers pay money to store their cars on public streets? Punishment
    - throwaway894345 4y ago
      I guess what I had in mind was stuff like "removing one of three highway arteries in the third largest US city thereby pushing tons of traffic onto side streets (where pedestrians and cyclists are) and removing all of the bus routes that depend on said artery just to spite drivers". > Replace several street parking spaces (in a neighborhood with hundreds of spots) to put in a bike lane? Punishment. Drivers in general aren't going to object to a particular bike lane, although obviously drivers who park on that block probably will (and understandably so). Also, "with hundreds of spots" isn't significant if there are hundreds more drivers than spots in that neighborhood. > Cut ten minutes off bus travel time by installing a dedicated bus lane, at the expense of a minute or two extra for car traffic? I don't know. I would be open minded if you could convince me that the bus lane is actually going to move more people (yes, the capacity is greater, but that doesn't guarantee that the throughput will be greater, for example if there aren't enough buses running to saturate capacity or if the buses aren't full or etc). > Make drivers pay money to store their cars on public streets? Punishment Well, they are public streets, which suggests that everyone pays for them. But at least in my major city, we do pay to park our cars on public streets, once in the form of a city sticker, once through taxes, and (in many cases) again through meters. We could talk about drivers paying more for parking, which will of course be unpopular among drivers, but it's not like cyclists are going to line up to finance bike lanes nor are public transit users likely to support a rate increase to finance improvements to buses and trains. Everyone wants the public to pay for the infrastructure they use, but public financing of infrastructure they don't use is less popular.
mschuster91 4y ago
> Meanwhile, most trains are pretty unpleasant--many cars wreak of piss, smoke, etc, people free-style rapping, trying to start fights (especially people of questionable sanity), etc. The problem is not public transport, the problem is not homeless people, the problem is not mentally unwell people. The problem is poverty and there is a solution: housing first policies and healthcare for everyone.
SuperQue 4y ago
I hadn't been to Chicago in a while, but I ended up taking a taxi from the airport due to how slow the trains were I've been living in Germany for quite a while. It's about the same distance from my home to the airport as O'Hare is to downtown Chicago. About 25km. The top speed of the L is 55mph/90kph. Plus all the dwell time on the route, it takes 41 min and 17 stops to get to downtown. For me, there is a regional train that gets me pretty close to home (10min walk) in 17 minutes and 0 stops. From there if I have lots of luggage there's a bus and a tram that get me right to my block. Chicago needs to vastly speed up their trains, and provide express trains between major destinations. 20 minutes from airport to downtown is completely feasible with basic commuter trains that can reach 160kph like the Stadler KISS trains that Caltrain will be using.

mrguyorama 4y ago

>Meanwhile, most trains are pretty unpleasant--many cars wreak of piss, smoke, etc, people free-style rapping, trying to start fights Important note, these kind of "only the bums use public transit" problems will go away if and only if non-bums start using public transit.

xyzzyz 4y ago
Bums will not leave public transit just because non-bums start using it more often. Only practical mechanism here to achieve the effect you predict is that non-bums are angry about terrible conditions in public transit they are dependent on using, and force the government to kick the bums out. If this is viable, why won’t the government, you know, kick out the bums now? That it does not do so, I take as evidence that it won’t do it in future either.
- orangepurple 4y ago
  I increasingly get the feeling that the only winning move is to not play. I have no idea how we got to this point either.
- pclmulqdq 4y ago
  NYC kicked the bums out of Manhattan in the 80s and kept them out through the early 00s. It worked really well. Wealthy people used public transit to get to their wall street jobs, and many people walked home alone at night. Fast forward to today, and it's not progressive to go after the bums any more. Now the subway is extremely dangerous and smelly, and nobody but the desperate takes it. The streets are a lot less safe than they used to be. You can take the bums off the street (and put them in shelters) and your city will get a lot better. It's just very unpopular with progressives, who happen to be the voting base in big cities. Eventually, things will get bad enough that the progressives leave, and then the streets can get cleaned up again.
  - xyzzyz 4y ago
    I agree with you, but I only have one lifetime, and by the time it plays out in its entirety, I’ll be long retired. Point is, government needs to first clean things up, and then the civil society will move back in, not the other way around.
  - codyb 4y ago
    Extremely dangerous might be a bit much. I ride the subway a fair amount. And there's been an uptick in crime (all over the US), but I wouldn't really call the subway dangerous. NYC houses something like 95% of its homeless as well, which is why we have a lot less people on the streets than in places like LA or SF. But shelter conditions are pretty miserable as I understand it so you can sort of understand the hold outs. And we may just not have enough space. But yea, NYC's a big city, there's definitely some homeless, but I'm not sure my lived experience here is as dire as you make it sound. That being said, some areas are certainly worse than others, and there's definitely some aggressive mentally ill people you'll see here and there.
throwaway894345 4y ago
Chicago definitely doesn't have an "only the bums use public transit" problem.
orangepurple 4y ago
I stopped using buses and trams in the US out of fear for my personal safety. I'm not going to wear a bulletproof vest and carrying a handgun concealed just to get around town. Now I drive between safer areas to do things and meet people and don't have to put myself in danger by exposing myself in the in-between areas. A metal box goes a long way to prevent an assault. The whole situation is just pathetic.
- siquick 4y ago
  Where do you live? As an outsider it’s crazy that anyone in the US can think like this.
  - orangepurple 4y ago
    Have lived in multiple top 10 US cities by population. It's the same story everywhere. Watch the interviews by charliebo313 to learn the story.
- throwaway894345 4y ago
  I'm not a hardcore anti-car person, but realistically you're safer taking buses and trains and so on in the US than you are driving on the highway. Of course, if you're just taking trips across town a car might be safer? Ideally though major cities would police public transit better, but we really reversed course on policing in this country beginning circa 2014 and crime has risen commensurately.
  - orangepurple 4y ago
    After witnessing how 911 and the police treat my reports I am convinced that crime stats in all major US metro areas are cooked and rife with under-reporting and lies. The crime rate is much higher than the stats show. Imagine my horror when I was put on put on hold for 5 minutes with 911 in the nation's capital after being attacked while jogging and the dispatcher was annoyed at me for bothering her.
    - 4y ago
bombcar 4y ago
Which could be pretty easily done in some locations by making more expensive copies of the same transit (think "express" busses that are double the cost vs the once an hour bus that is cheap or free). Then the people who care about it (read: not poor) will pay to ride the bum-free version, and then more people will use it, and it will begin to improve. Of course, that cannot be done because then it's called "making the poor version crappy" and so everyone is forced to use the crappy version and it remains crappy forever.
- pandaman 4y ago
  Where do you live if you believe bums pay fare? It's definitely not the case in LA, SF and NYC. Make it 10x expensive and they still pay 10x0 i.e. 0.
  - kelnos 4y ago
    Hell, a few weeks ago I was on a train in SF, and saw a family of five get on the train (definitely on their way to see a basketball game), and they didn't pay. If people who can afford 5 tickets to a Warriors game during the playoffs/finals/whatever it was won't spend $12.50 to get their family to the stadium (after they probably spent $75 to park their car), how can we expect homeless people to pay? Enforcement is also nearly nonexistent, and I expect it's even more nonexistent since COVID started. In 12 years of riding transit in SF, I've only once witnessed a group of transit employees board a bus to check that everyone had paid. Anyone who rides transit frequently (and doesn't pay) is likely saving money even if they have to pay the vanishingly rare fine if they're caught.
    - bombcar 4y ago
      Which indicates it's an enforcement problem, which can be solved by more thorough checking, gates that read/charge, or just giving up and declaring that everyone "living in the city" gets a pass. I've often suspected that metro fares are basically an excuse for the cops to kick bums/undesirables off the train.
- bluGill 4y ago
asdff 4y ago
The problems do not go away, they just become more present for more people. I commute in the mornings and evenings on the redline subway in LA, and I've seen just about every substance you can smoke smoked on the platforms or in the traincars. It doesn't let up when the traincars are full of people commuting to work either (which despite the car centric image, many people actually do use the trains in LA to get to work), it just gets more sweaty and hot inside and more noisy as more portable speakers compete with eachother. These are societal problems. More people using transport doesn't make people with issues simply poof into thin air or suddenly en masse take up private transport to go places to free up public transport for the sane. More asylums would certainly improve the situation getting unwell people into care and safety, along with better drug treatment programs for the addicted, but these aren't transit department problems to solve. Even if security got harsh on the train platforms and meth users were readily kicked out of the train, it would just amount to kicking the can down the road without having a mechanism to institutionalize more people or force people who don't want to change their lifestyle into care.
- bogomipz 4y ago
  >"I commute in the mornings and evenings on the redline subway in LA, and I've seen just about every substance you can smoke smoked on the platforms or in the traincars." People actually smoke in the train cars? I'm curious is this a common occurrence then?
  - throwaway894345 4y ago
    People smoke weed and cigarettes on the train in Chicago too.
  - asdff 4y ago
    Yeah some people will smoke weed, cigarettes, or meth or crack too but those are usually done underneath a blanket or a sheet thankfully. A lot of smoking happens on the platforms as well which at least get the pneumatic subway pushing air through it every now and then for ventillation, but air is pretty stale otherwise and smoke can linger in the underground stations. Here's a video clip of this happening on the bus: https://old.reddit.com/r/LosAngeles/comments/uu6gki/metro_in_los_angeles/ https://old.reddit.com/r/LosAngeles/comments/uu6gki/metro_in...

seoaeu 4y ago

The problem is that some folks insist that “we can’t inconvenience automobile users until public transit is perfect” and others say “we can’t justify investing in transit unless way more people start using it”.

throwaway894345 4y ago
I'm pretty adamantly of the opinion that the only politically viable way to increase public transit usage is positive incentives. If you just try to punish drivers (as many in the anti-car crowd are want to do, even if it means punishing bus riders too), you will end up creating a bunch of political opposition. I think you really need to convince people that investment in transit will beget more ridership, and if you can't make that case then more public transit may not be appropriate.
- seoaeu 4y ago
  The problem is that drivers consider practically any changes to the status quo to be “punishment”. Replace several street parking spaces (in a neighborhood with hundreds of spots) to put in a bike lane? Punishment. Cut ten minutes off bus travel time by installing a dedicated bus lane, at the expense of a minute or two extra for car traffic? Punishment. Make drivers pay money to store their cars on public streets? Punishment
  - throwaway894345 4y ago
    I guess what I had in mind was stuff like "removing one of three highway arteries in the third largest US city thereby pushing tons of traffic onto side streets (where pedestrians and cyclists are) and removing all of the bus routes that depend on said artery just to spite drivers". > Replace several street parking spaces (in a neighborhood with hundreds of spots) to put in a bike lane? Punishment. Drivers in general aren't going to object to a particular bike lane, although obviously drivers who park on that block probably will (and understandably so). Also, "with hundreds of spots" isn't significant if there are hundreds more drivers than spots in that neighborhood. > Cut ten minutes off bus travel time by installing a dedicated bus lane, at the expense of a minute or two extra for car traffic? I don't know. I would be open minded if you could convince me that the bus lane is actually going to move more people (yes, the capacity is greater, but that doesn't guarantee that the throughput will be greater, for example if there aren't enough buses running to saturate capacity or if the buses aren't full or etc). > Make drivers pay money to store their cars on public streets? Punishment Well, they are public streets, which suggests that everyone pays for them. But at least in my major city, we do pay to park our cars on public streets, once in the form of a city sticker, once through taxes, and (in many cases) again through meters. We could talk about drivers paying more for parking, which will of course be unpopular among drivers, but it's not like cyclists are going to line up to finance bike lanes nor are public transit users likely to support a rate increase to finance improvements to buses and trains. Everyone wants the public to pay for the infrastructure they use, but public financing of infrastructure they don't use is less popular.

mschuster91 4y ago

> Meanwhile, most trains are pretty unpleasant--many cars wreak of piss, smoke, etc, people free-style rapping, trying to start fights (especially people of questionable sanity), etc. The problem is not public transport, the problem is not homeless people, the problem is not mentally unwell people. The problem is poverty and there is a solution: housing first policies and healthcare for everyone.

SuperQue 4y ago

I hadn't been to Chicago in a while, but I ended up taking a taxi from the airport due to how slow the trains were I've been living in Germany for quite a while. It's about the same distance from my home to the airport as O'Hare is to downtown Chicago. About 25km. The top speed of the L is 55mph/90kph. Plus all the dwell time on the route, it takes 41 min and 17 stops to get to downtown. For me, there is a regional train that gets me pretty close to home (10min walk) in 17 minutes and 0 stops. From there if I have lots of luggage there's a bus and a tram that get me right to my block. Chicago needs to vastly speed up their trains, and provide express trains between major destinations. 20 minutes from airport to downtown is completely feasible with basic commuter trains that can reach 160kph like the Stadler KISS trains that Caltrain will be using.