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All public transport should be like $1. You need to charge something to keep the crackheads out, but it should not be enough that people think 'oh I better walk
by matt-p 11mo ago
All public transport should be like $1. You need to charge something to keep the crackheads out, but it should not be enough that people think 'oh I better walk/cycle/drive instead to save money'
- jfengel 11mo agoOr maybe you could take serious steps for the homeless as well.
- matt-p 11mo agoThat would be amazing and is worth serious effort and resources. However I wonder if you could find one country that's managed to do this successfully (eradication not reduction)? It's often not really about housing and healthcare, it's about addiction, mental health, childhood trauma..
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- bdangubic 11mo agoevery developed country on earth has solved this problem except us addiction, mental health, childhood drama… only in america would that lead to sleeping on the streets
- mitthrowaway2 11mo agoSorry from Canada, we haven't solved it either.
- jeffbee 11mo ago[flagged]
- ImJamal 11mo agoThe UK and France have hundreds of thousands of homeless.
- vidarh 11mo ago"Homeless" in that sense, however, are not rough sleepers (people who actually sleep outside), which would seem to be what is meant in this context. It's by no means zero, but in autum 2024, rough sleepers were estimated at less than 4700 in the UK. That might well represent and undercount, but it is certainly nowhere remotely near the people counted as homeless, who would include anyone without a permanent address, such a people e.g. sleeping at friends places on a non-permnanet basis.
- trollbridge 11mo agoAre you saying Australia isn't developed?
- UtopiaPunk 11mo agoJapan is remarkably close. Cuba, also, but their economic priorities are very different.
- whatsupdog 11mo agoDubai (actually all of UAE). Never seen 1 homeless, beggar, panhandler, crackhead or a fent zombie here.
- SoftTalker 11mo agoI’d presume because they aren’t tolerated but correct me if I’m wrong.
- readthenotes1 11mo agoBeen to their graveyards?
- nothrabannosir 11mo agoIn public transport? Or are you changing the subject?
- tehjoker 11mo agowhy not go in the other direction and get them housing and healthcare so they can be treated like people and will also not disrupt your ride people from outside the US often think it’s a land of fabulously rich ppl and are aghast at how we treat our citizens
- matt-p 11mo agoI'm pro paying for them to get whatever housing and healthcare they need via taxes, just like everyone else. It's not like it's that simple though. Giving someone a house and a doctor will not get them off heroin on its own and may not even help them very much at all honestly.
- naikrovek 11mo ago> Giving someone a house and a doctor will not get them off heroin on its own and may not even help them very much at all honestly. Giving someone a house and health care will, though. Every addict I have ever known (I’ve known many) consume drugs in order to escape something. Addressing this while also treating the user will indeed help them. Mental health care + physical health care = “health care” in my opening sentence. I don’t know what it is about people in the US, but almost all of us completely reject the idea that someone can be held down entirely by their own mind. Large amounts of people are, and those that don’t seem to understand that this is possible are often people whose own mind holds them down, but not so much that they’re homeless. People in other countries get this. We do not. I don’t understand it.
- undeveloper 11mo agoit's actually highly effective for a majority of people. [1] Otherwise, what do you propose? 1: https://nlihc.org/resource/new-study-finds-providing-people-experiencing-homelessness-housing-has-positive-impacts https://nlihc.org/resource/new-study-finds-providing-people-...
- vidarh 11mo agoMost heroin addicts can be remarkably close to a normal functioning healthy person if they don't live in precarious conditions without access to a clean supply. The proportion of heroin addicts who would still be wrecks with healthcare that extends to prescribing what they need is miniscule. So the first problem is thinking you need to get them off heroin to be able to start dramatically helping.
- rogerrogerr 11mo agoWhat would happen if you had to tap a card/phone to get in to the subway system (and this was enforced, no jumping turnstiles), and then have to tap it to get out too. Then if someone is habitually in the system for a significantly longer time than it reasonably takes to travel from point A to B, deactivate their access.
- o11c 11mo agoEdge case: what if your phone does while in transit, and you can't charge it?
- edent 11mo agoIn the UK, the newer trains and tube carriages all have USB ports for charging. But, it is kind of a non issue. You are responsible for your ticket. Having a dead battery is no different to losing your paper ticket.
- rogerrogerr 11mo agoiPhone NFC will work for a while even when “dead”, not sure about the android world. But in the edge case of the edge case, security can let you out. If it becomes a pattern, they’ll note it somehow. Seems like the most important thing to do is _anything_. The current approach of doing nothing and shaming people who suggest public transport is a poor option because it’s full of druggies doesn’t seem to work.
- nobody9999 11mo ago>Seems like the most important thing to do is _anything_. The current approach of doing nothing and shaming people who suggest public transport is a poor option because it’s full of druggies doesn’t seem to work. I don't know, I think it's much worse, in the wealthiest nation that ever existed, to shame those who have no place to live by singling them out for abusive treatment for not leaving the transit system in a (arbitrary) timely fashion. I'd much rather shame those claiming public transport is a poor option, and even more so those advocating for evicting passengers -- presumably violently -- because they spend "too much" time on public transportation. Ugh!
- o11c 11mo agoFrom experience, $1 is not enough to keep out the people who spend the whole trip talking about where they want to go to jail for the winter. And $1 is already expensive enough that if the destination is within 5-10 miles, driving is cheaper if you already have a car and parking, so you are keeping that class of people out. Though really I find the main reason people don't take the bus is that there aren't enough buses (in time or space) for where/when people really want to go. This is an `m×n` problem.
- PlunderBunny 11mo agoHow are you calculating driving any distance as being cheaper than $1? Surely if you factor in wear-and-tear on the car, you couldn't even get out of the driveway without eating that $1.
- o11c 11mo agoLet's say a gallon of gas costs $4 and your car gets 40 MPG. So $1 gets you 10 miles if you only consider gas (which very many people do, even if you think they shouldn't - much maintenance is imagined as time-based, and this is not entirely wrong - cars do decay even if you don't drive them, and insurance only rarely considers your odometer and only coarsely if so). Wear and tear is generally assumed to be roughly equal to gas costs on well-maintained roads, depending on a lot of varying assumptions of what to include. So, 5 miles.
- piva00 11mo agoAdding depreciation, recurring costs such as insurance, parking, perhaps even opportunity cost from capital allocated in a depreciating asset. It starts to not look that cheap.
- HPsquared 11mo agoIf you already have access to a car, the marginal cost of driving an extra mile is low.
- 11mo ago
- tim333 11mo agoIn Portland they make the busses free in the central area but charge a bit outside that, partly to stop homeless sleeping in the busses.
- geophph 11mo agoThis went away years ago
- trollbridge 11mo agoAnd one reason it went away was because "fareless square" became a synonym for rather extreme levels of drug abuse.
- drob518 11mo agoWhy do we want to prevent people from walking?
- jaredklewis 11mo agoThis would happen naturally except that most US cities have made it illegal to build anything without gobs of parking attached, so car drivers like myself get a government handout. In Tokyo, parking is managed by the market, so it’s incredibly expensive. So it’s always cheaper to take public transit without artificially low public transit prices.
- toast0 11mo agoDowntown any big city is accessible by car, but parking fees keep most people away. At least, I won't willingly drive to destinations inside downtown of a big city, unless it's something special that can't be managed otherwise.
- trollbridge 11mo agoWhich means suburban style businesses have an advantage, and eventually downtown merchants form an association and start pushing for free parking so they can get customers to show up.
- toast0 11mo agoDowntown Seattle doesn't seem to have much free parking. Even downtown San Jose doesn't have a lot of free parking.
- jaredklewis 11mo agoWell in the big city I live in, downtown is often very crowded so I don’t think everyone is like you. And I live in a car centric city. But literally millions of people ride trains in Tokyo everyday, and because of that they have clean air, nice walkable streets, and far few deaths.
- josephcsible 11mo ago> most US cities have made it illegal to build anything without gobs of parking attached No they haven't. Places with "gobs of parking" are suburban Walmarts. Pretty much every city is super short on parking.
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]