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It's basically that America has a caste system, and public transit is a lower-caste thing that any respectable member of society should ideally avoid. It's a pi

It's basically that America has a caste system, and public transit is a lower-caste thing that any respectable member of society should ideally avoid. It's a pity because public transit done well is amazing - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bNTg9EX7MLw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bNTg9EX7MLw [NotJustBikes]

conductr 1y ago
We'd have to have an example of public transit done well to break the caste stigma you referenced. I don't think anywhere in the US is anywhere close to Amsterdam (discussed in video you linked)
- siliconwrath 1y ago
  NYC generally doesn’t have this stigma as bad as the rest of the USA. Wealthy people and celebrities ride the MTA. https://www.eonline.com/photos/6722/stars-on-the-subway https://www.eonline.com/photos/6722/stars-on-the-subway
  - cguess 1y ago
    NYC really doesn't have this stigma at all. The narrative is more or less pushed by groups with anti-liberal agendas who want to convince people whom have never even visited NYC that it's just as bad as where they're from, when in fact the violent crime rate per capita in NYC is much lower than most medium sized midwestern and southern cities. Celebrities, politicians, billionaires all ride the subway all the time. New Yorkers know to keep to themselves out of politeness not safety and honestly are more likely to step up and defend someone famous being harassed than join in. We're all just trying to get to where we're going and the subway is almost always the fastest and most convenient way (not to mention cheapest) to do that.
  - culi 1y ago
    Most of these photos are taken for their social medias. Which further proves that them taking the subway is exceptional enough to be worth posting. Not the norm; not a 9-5 commute like regular people
    - jryle70 1y ago
      > Which further proves that them taking the subway is exceptional enough to be worth posting. Not the norm; not a 9-5 commute like regular people. According to you? Riding subway in NYC and you'd see plenty of rich people. Go to any station near the financial district, or Park Ave.
  - conductr 1y ago
    NYC is an outlier of US cities though. The long narrow island of Manhattan makes everything more efficient in terms of the subway, etc. Most other large US cities sprawl endlessly in all directions.
gosub100 1y ago
Refusing direct contact with homeless people's excrement is not based on class/self-respect.
- ceejayoz 1y ago
  A society that causes and/or permits homeless people pooping in the subway is, though. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toilets_in_New_York_City https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toilets_in_New_York_City > Compared to other big cities, public bathrooms in New York City are rare, as the 1,100 public restrooms result in a rate of 16 per 100,000 residents. Most public restrooms are located in parks; comparatively few other public spaces, including New York City Subway stations, have public restrooms. > As of 2022, the New York City Subway has 472 stations, 69 of which have public bathrooms. Several homeless people sued the New York City government and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) in 1990, claiming that the city and MTA created a "public nuisance" by failing to provide public toilets. A report by the Legal Action Center for the Homeless, who represented the plaintiffs, noted that of 526 public comfort stations surveyed in parks, almost three-quarters were "either closed, filthy, foul-smelling or without toilet paper and soap." In 2010, there were 133 open restrooms in 81 of the system's 468 stations. There's a great quote on this: "A developed country is not a place where the poor have cars. It's where the rich use public transportation."
  - aerostable_slug 1y ago
    'Society' doesn't make people shoot up, turn tricks, or attempt to set up permanent shop in public toilets inside train stations. Also, they're great places to put bombs (in theory at least). I admit I don't have an answer for this. San Francisco's experiments with nifty self-cleaning public toilets have been expensive failures for the most part. I'm not sure where we go from here, given that the problem seems to be cultural/user-based.
    - ceejayoz 1y ago
      Society absolutely does do that. Housing, healthcare, mental health, public transit, unemployment, lead abatement, education - all of these policy levers impact the prevalence of the behaviors you describe.
ch4s3 1y ago
Wealthy people use the subway in NYC, it's often the fastest way to get somewhere.
anthomtb 1y ago
In my lived experience, public transit is not actively avoided by so-called upper castes (I am not convinced you know what a caste is). Rather, it is so straightforward to take ones own automobile that you don't even consider public transit options. Obviously there's a significant negative feedback loop here.
taeric 1y ago
I'm torn on this. It is a very appealing way to blame people in discussing why it goes this way. It doesn't contend with the fact that having a car is ridiculously useful. It is intensely amusing when I see people in other nations comment on how useful getting a car has been in their daily life. And I don't think people realize just how many cars Americans have. That is, there may be a caste system, but as this congestion pricing shows, the catch is that we have a ton of cars. And people use them because they are convenient as hell.
- trgn 1y ago
  They're only convenient in cities built for cars.
  - some_random 1y ago
    That's just not true, cars are extremely useful in every single city and people only choose to forgo them when the city makes them too expensive or difficult to keep and use. If you have a pros vs cons list, it's not a lack of pros that causes people to stop using cars it's an overabundance of cons in every single case I know of.
    - const_cast 1y ago
      I don't think this is true, cars truly only make sense in places where every single detail is built to accommodate cars. In an absolute sense, public transit is wildly more efficient. The reason we don't really see this is that in the US 99% of cities are built exclusively for cars. Of those that have transit, those are very obviously an afterthought. For NYC, it's not that having a car sucks. It's that the city isn't built for them. So you're going to be stuck in traffic. Prior to congestion pricing, a lot of people were driving because they're, well, stupid. Often it's faster to literally walk alongside the cars than be in them, because that's how severe the traffic was/is in lower Manhattan. But they didn't want to take the train for whatever reason, so they drove instead. And wasted time and money. At the end of the day, cars take up way more space, and they're wildly expensive. Many of the cost of cars are actually subsidized, not the other way around. Consider free parking - that parking spot actually costs thousands of dollars a year. But drivers aren't paying it. In regards to congestion, that costs money. It's not free to have thousands of cars essentially idling for hours of the day. But that's a cost everyone pays - even though most people commute by subway. That's a problem. That's going to break a lot of incentives.
rafram 1y ago
Not Just Bikes is such a terminal pessimist. I enjoy his videos but I think he really has trouble acknowledging the counterpoints to his doom-and-gloom rhetoric. What he says in that video just barely applies to NYC at all.
- lurk2 1y ago
  Mid-40s amateur urban planner YouTube is the worst social media trend to have come out of this decade bar none. They all look, sound, and think the same. Their worldview is fundamentally conspiratorial in that they believe there is a utopian world that only they and their fellow flannel-enjoyers understand, that somehow actual urban planners, economists, and consumers have missed. Not Just Bikes is like the Joe Rogan of these people in that whenever I see one of his videos recommended on YouTube, I know I’ll be hearing about it from people trying to pass the ideas off as common knowledge within two weeks.
  - hotmeals 1y ago
    >They all look, sound, and think the same. Their worldview is fundamentally conspiratorial in that they believe there is a utopian world that only they and their fellow flannel-enjoyers understand, that somehow actual urban planners, economists, and consumers have missed. I think you are mad because they are right, and your only refuge is to recycle hipster memes of the 2010s. Just personally visiting cities and suburbs from (still car loving!) Germans v/s most US cities validates the fuckcars camp. The example my Chilean city should follow is certainly not Dallas, no matter how cringe NJB might be.
    - lurk2 1y ago
      > I think you are mad because they are right, and your only refuge is to recycle hipster memes of the 2010s. They are a particular variety of policy wonk that conflates positive claims with normative beliefs. Normative beliefs are a matter of preference. Consider urban sprawl; the desire to live in a larger home farther from the city center doesn’t go away with trains, the throughput is just more efficient. The question then becomes whether the denizens of a city would prefer to travel by car or by train. Given that car-centric urban sprawl is still ongoing, Americans appear to prefer the car.
some_random 1y ago
First off, comparing classes in the US to a caste system is genuinely delusional. The US doesn't have a caste system (except where it has been imported by immigration) and if you think it does either you don't know what a caste system is or you are completely out of touch with American culture. More importantly, no C-Suite executive, Banker, Socialite, or whatever "upper caste" stand in you want to select gives a shit about sitting next to a Janitor on the train. Hell, they don't give a shit about sitting next to a normal sane person who is homeless. The reason so many people who have a choice don't chose to use public transit is because of low quality service (as always), crime, and a very small number of very visible mentally ill people having daily breakdowns in public. This is a good thing! NotJustBikes is a huge doomer loser, don't listen to him, there's a really straightforward route to making things better.
p_dubz 1y ago
I created an account because of how terrible this comment is. A caste system? are you kidding me. CASTE. Like the system where a group of people were called untouchables??? These kinds of extreme comparisons are so utterly unhelpful to literally everyone. Frankly just on the face of it your claim is completely out of touch with the US cities with decent public transit options (New York, Washington DC, Boston, Chicago). Everyone that lives in NYC that can take the subway takes the subway. I know plenty of hedge funders and traders and big tech workers in NYC who take the subway every day, and plenty of big law partners who take the DC metro to the office. Obviously there are really big problems with how transit is implemented and treated in most cities in the USA, but you are completely incorrect. In American cities where there is good transit everyone takes it
- bdangubic 1y ago
  EVERYTHING you wrote was going GREAT until In American cities where there is good transit everyone takes it - this cannot be further from the truth. some take it, not enough to make a dent in traffic congestion madness in any City (especially those you specifically listed, I live in one of them…)

conductr 1y ago

We'd have to have an example of public transit done well to break the caste stigma you referenced. I don't think anywhere in the US is anywhere close to Amsterdam (discussed in video you linked)

siliconwrath 1y ago
NYC generally doesn’t have this stigma as bad as the rest of the USA. Wealthy people and celebrities ride the MTA. https://www.eonline.com/photos/6722/stars-on-the-subway https://www.eonline.com/photos/6722/stars-on-the-subway
- cguess 1y ago
  NYC really doesn't have this stigma at all. The narrative is more or less pushed by groups with anti-liberal agendas who want to convince people whom have never even visited NYC that it's just as bad as where they're from, when in fact the violent crime rate per capita in NYC is much lower than most medium sized midwestern and southern cities. Celebrities, politicians, billionaires all ride the subway all the time. New Yorkers know to keep to themselves out of politeness not safety and honestly are more likely to step up and defend someone famous being harassed than join in. We're all just trying to get to where we're going and the subway is almost always the fastest and most convenient way (not to mention cheapest) to do that.
- culi 1y ago
  Most of these photos are taken for their social medias. Which further proves that them taking the subway is exceptional enough to be worth posting. Not the norm; not a 9-5 commute like regular people
  - jryle70 1y ago
    > Which further proves that them taking the subway is exceptional enough to be worth posting. Not the norm; not a 9-5 commute like regular people. According to you? Riding subway in NYC and you'd see plenty of rich people. Go to any station near the financial district, or Park Ave.
- conductr 1y ago
  NYC is an outlier of US cities though. The long narrow island of Manhattan makes everything more efficient in terms of the subway, etc. Most other large US cities sprawl endlessly in all directions.

gosub100 1y ago

Refusing direct contact with homeless people's excrement is not based on class/self-respect.

ceejayoz 1y ago
A society that causes and/or permits homeless people pooping in the subway is, though. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toilets_in_New_York_City https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toilets_in_New_York_City > Compared to other big cities, public bathrooms in New York City are rare, as the 1,100 public restrooms result in a rate of 16 per 100,000 residents. Most public restrooms are located in parks; comparatively few other public spaces, including New York City Subway stations, have public restrooms. > As of 2022, the New York City Subway has 472 stations, 69 of which have public bathrooms. Several homeless people sued the New York City government and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) in 1990, claiming that the city and MTA created a "public nuisance" by failing to provide public toilets. A report by the Legal Action Center for the Homeless, who represented the plaintiffs, noted that of 526 public comfort stations surveyed in parks, almost three-quarters were "either closed, filthy, foul-smelling or without toilet paper and soap." In 2010, there were 133 open restrooms in 81 of the system's 468 stations. There's a great quote on this: "A developed country is not a place where the poor have cars. It's where the rich use public transportation."
- aerostable_slug 1y ago
  'Society' doesn't make people shoot up, turn tricks, or attempt to set up permanent shop in public toilets inside train stations. Also, they're great places to put bombs (in theory at least). I admit I don't have an answer for this. San Francisco's experiments with nifty self-cleaning public toilets have been expensive failures for the most part. I'm not sure where we go from here, given that the problem seems to be cultural/user-based.
  - ceejayoz 1y ago
    Society absolutely does do that. Housing, healthcare, mental health, public transit, unemployment, lead abatement, education - all of these policy levers impact the prevalence of the behaviors you describe.

ch4s3 1y ago

Wealthy people use the subway in NYC, it's often the fastest way to get somewhere.

anthomtb 1y ago

In my lived experience, public transit is not actively avoided by so-called upper castes (I am not convinced you know what a caste is). Rather, it is so straightforward to take ones own automobile that you don't even consider public transit options. Obviously there's a significant negative feedback loop here.

taeric 1y ago

I'm torn on this. It is a very appealing way to blame people in discussing why it goes this way. It doesn't contend with the fact that having a car is ridiculously useful. It is intensely amusing when I see people in other nations comment on how useful getting a car has been in their daily life. And I don't think people realize just how many cars Americans have. That is, there may be a caste system, but as this congestion pricing shows, the catch is that we have a ton of cars. And people use them because they are convenient as hell.

trgn 1y ago
They're only convenient in cities built for cars.
- some_random 1y ago
  That's just not true, cars are extremely useful in every single city and people only choose to forgo them when the city makes them too expensive or difficult to keep and use. If you have a pros vs cons list, it's not a lack of pros that causes people to stop using cars it's an overabundance of cons in every single case I know of.
  - const_cast 1y ago
    I don't think this is true, cars truly only make sense in places where every single detail is built to accommodate cars. In an absolute sense, public transit is wildly more efficient. The reason we don't really see this is that in the US 99% of cities are built exclusively for cars. Of those that have transit, those are very obviously an afterthought. For NYC, it's not that having a car sucks. It's that the city isn't built for them. So you're going to be stuck in traffic. Prior to congestion pricing, a lot of people were driving because they're, well, stupid. Often it's faster to literally walk alongside the cars than be in them, because that's how severe the traffic was/is in lower Manhattan. But they didn't want to take the train for whatever reason, so they drove instead. And wasted time and money. At the end of the day, cars take up way more space, and they're wildly expensive. Many of the cost of cars are actually subsidized, not the other way around. Consider free parking - that parking spot actually costs thousands of dollars a year. But drivers aren't paying it. In regards to congestion, that costs money. It's not free to have thousands of cars essentially idling for hours of the day. But that's a cost everyone pays - even though most people commute by subway. That's a problem. That's going to break a lot of incentives.

rafram 1y ago

Not Just Bikes is such a terminal pessimist. I enjoy his videos but I think he really has trouble acknowledging the counterpoints to his doom-and-gloom rhetoric. What he says in that video just barely applies to NYC at all.

lurk2 1y ago
Mid-40s amateur urban planner YouTube is the worst social media trend to have come out of this decade bar none. They all look, sound, and think the same. Their worldview is fundamentally conspiratorial in that they believe there is a utopian world that only they and their fellow flannel-enjoyers understand, that somehow actual urban planners, economists, and consumers have missed. Not Just Bikes is like the Joe Rogan of these people in that whenever I see one of his videos recommended on YouTube, I know I’ll be hearing about it from people trying to pass the ideas off as common knowledge within two weeks.
- hotmeals 1y ago
  >They all look, sound, and think the same. Their worldview is fundamentally conspiratorial in that they believe there is a utopian world that only they and their fellow flannel-enjoyers understand, that somehow actual urban planners, economists, and consumers have missed. I think you are mad because they are right, and your only refuge is to recycle hipster memes of the 2010s. Just personally visiting cities and suburbs from (still car loving!) Germans v/s most US cities validates the fuckcars camp. The example my Chilean city should follow is certainly not Dallas, no matter how cringe NJB might be.
  - lurk2 1y ago
    > I think you are mad because they are right, and your only refuge is to recycle hipster memes of the 2010s. They are a particular variety of policy wonk that conflates positive claims with normative beliefs. Normative beliefs are a matter of preference. Consider urban sprawl; the desire to live in a larger home farther from the city center doesn’t go away with trains, the throughput is just more efficient. The question then becomes whether the denizens of a city would prefer to travel by car or by train. Given that car-centric urban sprawl is still ongoing, Americans appear to prefer the car.

some_random 1y ago

First off, comparing classes in the US to a caste system is genuinely delusional. The US doesn't have a caste system (except where it has been imported by immigration) and if you think it does either you don't know what a caste system is or you are completely out of touch with American culture. More importantly, no C-Suite executive, Banker, Socialite, or whatever "upper caste" stand in you want to select gives a shit about sitting next to a Janitor on the train. Hell, they don't give a shit about sitting next to a normal sane person who is homeless. The reason so many people who have a choice don't chose to use public transit is because of low quality service (as always), crime, and a very small number of very visible mentally ill people having daily breakdowns in public. This is a good thing! NotJustBikes is a huge doomer loser, don't listen to him, there's a really straightforward route to making things better.

p_dubz 1y ago

I created an account because of how terrible this comment is. A caste system? are you kidding me. CASTE. Like the system where a group of people were called untouchables??? These kinds of extreme comparisons are so utterly unhelpful to literally everyone. Frankly just on the face of it your claim is completely out of touch with the US cities with decent public transit options (New York, Washington DC, Boston, Chicago). Everyone that lives in NYC that can take the subway takes the subway. I know plenty of hedge funders and traders and big tech workers in NYC who take the subway every day, and plenty of big law partners who take the DC metro to the office. Obviously there are really big problems with how transit is implemented and treated in most cities in the USA, but you are completely incorrect. In American cities where there is good transit everyone takes it

bdangubic 1y ago
EVERYTHING you wrote was going GREAT until In American cities where there is good transit everyone takes it - this cannot be further from the truth. some take it, not enough to make a dent in traffic congestion madness in any City (especially those you specifically listed, I live in one of them…)