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Comment by blintz | Hacker News Reader

> Inevitably they want to use public transit as an instrument for various social policies.

Yes, "social policies" like transit that's accessible to the disabled, elderly, and poor. Would you prefer planning that tells those people to stay at home where we can pretend they don't exist?

> "minimum of screening so that they don't have to deal with people with severe mental issues"

What kind of "screening process" do you want? What's your test?

> people in city gov refuse to recognize that commuters desires are perfectly reasonable

Sure, maybe you can twist your desire for fewer people with "mental issues" to be 'reasonable', but your disgust for them doesn't make good policy. It's not impossible to build transit for everyone; for both commuters, and for the poor, disabled or elderly. As long as people like you can stand to be on the bus with people who are different than you.

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>What's your test?

Please go stand at the base of an escalator into Civic Center Station on a warm summer day when it hasn't rained for a while, and take some deep breaths.

I refuse to be ashamed of my desire to avoid inhaling other people's piss and shit on a daily basis.

This country isn't ready for public space. We have too much work to do, to care for the people who will reliably show up to public space they have access to and turn them into urine-soaked, beggar-laden wasteland, before we can reasonably be indignant at the desire to avoid spending time in public space.

Like public bathrooms, for one thing. What must SF spend on its (futile) attempts to keep stations clean? Surely that could fund one public bathroom somewhere in the city to redirect some of the mess.

San Francisco is almost unique in this. Of the entire set of cities in the world I have seen, none have a problem like this on a comparable scale. Perhaps it's more useful to ask what led to this situation in this one city, and look for constructive things to do to remedy it. It's certainly possible to have open, public transit that is clean and functional.

Walk around Berlin right now and count how many "screening" checkpoints their are in the train stations. Spoiler: there aren't even doors on all the entrances. Somehow, as if by magic, trains are clean and run on time. The strongest smell is from the food vendors in the attached mall.

Civil services are possible.

And they certainly don't require any draconian "screening" processes.

>Walk around Berlin right now

Transit policy can't create the Berlin transit system.

Germany got it by building the constellation of welfare, social services, healthcare, eduction, labor laws, and tenant protection that keeps people's lives on track (or puts them back) long before they've fallen to the point of shitting into subway escalators.

The American electorate is quite far from even wanting these things. It's going to be a long climb to get them implemented and working. We will not be preventing destitution anytime soon, and the shit on the streets of temperate, tolerant cities like SF is going to get far, far worse before it gets better.

You're effectively asking to limit the incentives for people to work on these problems.

Do you think Bay Area commuters are not liberal enough, and would become more liberal after breathing in enough piss?

The barriers to these policies do not appear to come from insufficently motivated city dwellers, but from rural areas and small towns.

And maybe from people who have such extreme wealth that they can walk to work.

I don't pretend to have a solution to your problems, i merely point a problem in your solution.

Also the fact that your society grows a divide such that basic health concerns can't be solved démocratically sounds like a root cause to your piss problem.

San Francisco is almost unique in this

So when are you flying to Austin? I'd like to, among other things take you on a trip to 7th and Red River, and provide you with an oral history of (also among other things) CapMetro, Metrorail and the numerous mass transit solutions shot down by the voters who THEMSELVES called for a referendum vote on options for mass transit.

TWICE.

Or we can go to a little town called Spartanburg South Carolina. Or I could tell you the tale of Indianapolis' almost hilariously doomed transit improvement efforts in the 90's (hilariously in the way it happened, not that it happened so much all).

My point: SF isn't unique in this regard. Not by a long shot. Their problems may be exacerbated by many other compounding factors comparatively with other cities...but I agree with the comment you've replied to: here are built in logic ladders constructed over years of subtle social conditioning and assumptions made about the cross section of mass transit and public service that make for some interesting outcomes at the municipal level.

See also: MARTA.

I concede then. It's not unique (and indeed, Austin is absent from my experiences).

I like the way you phrase this though: "logic ladders" of "years of social conditioning and assumptions". There are a lot of odd assumptions about mass transit and public service floating around.

> Walk around Berlin right now and count how many "screening" checkpoints their are in the train stations. Spoiler: there aren't even doors on all the entrances. Somehow, as if by magic, trains are clean and run on time. The strongest smell is from the food vendors in the attached mall.

Times have changed!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin_Zoologischer_Garten_rai... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christiane_F._%E2%80%93_We_Chi...

"Cinematography is bleak and dreary, depicting a dilapidated, working-class Berlin with rundown structures and dirty, blighted backdrops. Modern Berlin is very different and most of the landmarks from the movie (the station, the Bülow street stalls, the Sound discothèque) have either been demolished or completely remodeled."

"Most of the extras at the railway station and at the Sound club were actual junkies, prostitutes and low-lifes rounded up by producers just for the crowd scenes. In the scene where Christiane runs through the alleys of the station to find Babsi, the camera lingers on several terminal junkies leaning against the walls of the underpass. In a 2011 interview, Thomas Haustein, who plays Detlev and was still in school at the time, recalls how terrified he felt being surrounded by all those real-life addicts, but that he was able to successfully copy their behaviour for his character."

I was at the Zoologischer Garten station last night.

Not much to say except frankly it's far cleaner than the SF trains the GP is talking about. (I was also in SF civic center station less than two months ago, and thus feel qualified to make this statement as a first person observer.)

Berlin certainly has its own aesthetic. Berliners seem to take graffiti incredibly seriously, for example (lettering three stories high on the top floors of a 15 story building? "Sure, why not" is apparently the thinking). But hordes of junkies? Do I feel in danger? Absolutely not.

Berlin certainly has its own share of moments where things can get a bit edgy.

Sure. Most places of earth, you can say that about. But let's make sure we're anchoring things well and not moving the goalposts: the comment I was responding to claims that "most" of the people in the area are "actual junkies". To that, I say "no" and "bullocks".

Yea, Berlin was different in 1981 during the cold war where it was, for all intents and purposes, completely landlocked within East Germany and was economically stagnant.

The DB, while not my favorite train system in the world, runs extremely well.

You (quite reasonably) don't want homeless people to piss in public, and you recognize that they don't have anywhere else to piss. I'm not clear why "therefore, give them a better place to piss" isn't your first demand, instead a distant second after "therefore, illegalize homeless people." (Which you know very well is the only possible result of banning people from public spaces who don't have any access to private spaces.)

I am not suggesting that we exclude the homeless from public space, but that we allow everyone else to continue using modes that provide more separation from our broken society while society gets its house in order.

Is it going to happen though, if people are separated enough to not even notice?

It seems a runaway process. As people get more and more unequal, it becomes easier for them to put up walls in the society than trying to fix it.

You are also right though, that it doesn't make sense to put it all on the commuters. At least they are not avoiding society entirely.

So you're advocating instituting social apartheid ?

Apartheid is specifically a policy of racial segregation, which has nothing to do with this.

I do advocate a system of segregation from other people's urine, not exactly a protected class (who opposes the use of toilets?), and from each other more generally... what are apartments for, after all, if not to keep us apart? I'm proud to say that I voted in this election for as much apart-ness (i.e. as many apartments) as possible. In fact, since I consider this to be a step towards ending homelessness (by building enough housing for everyone) you could say I am even an agent of the eradication of an entire social group!

EDIT: Yeah, that's a bit flippant. But I do believe people are entitled to choose the company they keep. That applies at rest: everyone should be able to have their own apartment, a space where they decide who gets to come in and who doesn't. It also applies in transit: personal vehicles are best (though bicycles, motorcycles, and scooters are probably better than cars, at least in the Bay Area, because the climate is hospitable and space is at a premium). On public transit, we have an obligation to minimize unwanted interaction: uninvited conversation, physical contact, eye contact, and phone speaker music are all (rightly) taboo. Public transit systems should strive to provide everyone with a forward facing seat so that they are not touching or staring at anyone else.

When people do not follow these rules, and instead insert their presence loudly (i.e. by smell), I do think it's better to go around the problem by taking other forms of transportation, than to muddle through and develop resentment, or grow supportive of police violence to shove the problem away (I've been catching myself sympathizing with this). Abandoning public transit seems like the least shitty approach to the people who make it intolerable.

It is indeed, hence social apartheid, which is segregation on the basis of class or economic status. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_apartheid

Apartheid is a top-down system, where segregation is mandated. What he is suggesting is the bottom-up approach, where people can segregate themselves if they want to.

Although in practice this still produces segregation on a large scale, as in e.g. "white flight" in US. But then again, attempts to counter such things by forcing people together - like forced busing - didn't exactly work well.

Get over yourself.

SF has public bathrooms[0]. SF public places still often stink (and yes, in vicinity of those too). And by stink I mean eye-watering. And apparently the public ones share the problem[1].

[0] https://localwiki.org/sf/Restrooms

[1] http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/nevius/article/It-s-time-to-ra...

I think these links are better support for SF not having public bathrooms.

In EU, you have to pay to enter a public bathroom. But as return, the bathroom is kept clean (or at least that is the idea).

I read a story the other day how restaurants allowed free bathroom usage to tourists in Germany. This was paid by city council, and allows for a more pleasant stay of tourists. So they like to come and/or return. Word of mouth works.

The links say there are 25 of these restrooms in a city of over 850,000 people. That's about 1 per 34,000 people. They are described in the second link as being unreliable and gross, and people are suggested to avoid them in favor of private restrooms. This is not functionally different from not having public restrooms.

I believe that in California, businesses are required by law to allow people to use restrooms, but they try to avoid compliance and do whatever they can to keep homeless people away.

I don't think it's a fair calculation. SF is not uniform, neither is population, neither are locations of people that need public bathrooms. So just dividing number of citizens in the whole city to number of public bathrooms makes little sense. Center where population traffic is stronger and where there are usually more people needing those services should have more, while remote purely residential neighborhoods may not need them at all.

> I believe that in California, businesses are required by law to allow people to use restrooms,

They do, and I myself used them many times, but for a person who is looking, as said in parallel thread, "sketchy" and may have some trouble expressing themselves, it may be a different story. The reluctance of the establishments is also understandable - if the person makes a mess there, somebody will have to clean up, and odds are nobody but the person behind the counter getting minimum wage is there to do it. So, their reluctance to allow somebody who, in their opinion, is likely to make a mess to use their facilities is not hard to understand, IMHO.

> like transit that's accessible to the disabled, elderly, and poor.

Very much this!

I don't like public transport, I don't like having to deal with other people when I travel, but I like Uber and private transport even less.

If you leave people alone to decide of their own "best", they will certainly destroy community as a whole.

What's my solution?

I walk when I can, I use car sharing/pooling when I can't walk, I use public transport when the first two solutions are unavailable.

I also dislike private car pooling companies, I think they should be public because the goal has to be to give people choices, without harming the community, not making some startup take over our transport infrastructure.

We have here a bunch of people complaining who have been pushed down the social strata. Instead of not being able to afford their own car or request a luxury class taxi, they now have to exist in the lowest tier. They don't like that, and, they now want, effectively, to elevate themselves above the people who have to piss in a subway station by banning them.

At a Christmas party that I went to with several people who have way more money than almost any of you, a wife of a Boeing executive referred to you complainers as "transit trash". She looks at you as you are looking at these problem people.

When assigning blame, if you aren't looking upwards to those exerting vast amounts of power, then you are probably the problem.

I made sure to call out this woman's trash talk and embarrass her. If you have power you are supposed to be kind to those below you. Without that graciousness you expose yourself as being afraid that you'll be assigned to a lower social strata. (And I take the wholesale disappearance of that graciousness in American politics as a harbinger of American decline.)

I haven't been to SF so don't know if the subway has toilets in it. It's said that you can judge the civilisation of a city by how available toilets are.

In Taipei the metro stations all have toilets in them. In London very few stations rarely have toilets. Of course, this is comparing an new to an old system. If the SF system has no toilets then maybe this would explain things ?

> Yes, "social policies" like transit that's accessible to the disabled, elderly, and poor. Would you prefer planning that tells those people to stay at home where we can pretend they don't exist?

This is one of the reasons why there's 1st and 2nd class train wagons. If you don't want to sit with "the plebs", get a more expensive ticket and go 1st class together with the other travellers in suit.

This does not exist for busses AFAIK. Although one could walk, rent a bus, rent a car, carpool, or grab a taxi (renting a train(wagon) is actually also possible in some countries/regions).

I don't want to ride public transport with crazy people or people that want to beg me for money or even just people that have bad hygiene or talk loudly or listen to music without headphones. Why is that unreasonable? Oh and I'd also not be waiting in the hot sun or the freezing cold for a bus that may or may not arrive on time. Then, I get to take a tour of the city while the bus stops every two minutes rather than going directly to where I need to go.

Ever been from Newark Airport to midtown Manhattan? You have to take a shuttle "train" to the PATH or NY Transit, then ride that into the City, then walk a dozen blocks or wait on a crosstown bus and then another bus.

Public transit has its use, but I generally hate it except in rare situations like Zurich or Berlin.

As far as the disabled and elderly, interesting you mention that! How many subway stations in NYC are wheelchair accessible -- how many of those actually have functioning elevators? Of those, how many of those elevators don't smell like a homeless urinal? Very, very few stations in NYC are accessible and all of them are dirty.

Public transport would be great if I didn't have to share it with the public.

Have you spent much time in Tokyo, Seoul, Hong Kong, Singapore, Shanghai, or Taipei? In all of these cities, public transit doesn't just "have its uses," its the primary way of getting around the city for the vast majority of residents. This isn't about social policy. These cities span the entire range of social policies.

All it takes is a government dedicated to building a comprehensive, functional, and intelligently designed transit system. There are still crazy people on the subway in Shanghai. But because its the best way to get around the city, everyone takes the subway. So maybe you see a beggar or a homeless person every couple of days, much like you would when you're out walking around.

The problem we get in most American cities is that the transit systems are terrible, so anyone who can afford to drive takes their car, and transit systems end up existing only for people who don't have any other options.

So you decide to take the bus one day, and everyone else on the bus is either homeless or crazy, and the bus has to take some ridiculous route to pick up enough people to justify its continued existence. So you never take the bus again, because it was unpleasant and wasted your time. Now we've gotten into a vicious cycle where the awfulness of the system ensures that it will continue to get ever worse.

This was a long rant, but what I'm trying to say is that public transit isn't inevitably broken, as many of the world's most successful cities demonstrate. It just can't be half-assed, and it feels like we've half-assed it in most of the US.

Thank you for saying what so many people keep to themselves.

I'm kind of punk so I'm into all that dirty stuff.

No one forces you to take public transit. You are free to stay home and avoid the public entirely if you want.

Unfortunately this kind of ableism/privilege isn't uncommon in silicon valley:

> 'In only the latest cultural altercation between San Francisco’s tech workers and the city’s impoverished population, one tech worker has declared the homeless are “riff raff” whose “pain, struggle and despair” shouldn’t have to be endured by “wealthy” people commuting to work.' (https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/feb/17/san-franc...)

It's the same reason it's often illegal for homeless people to sleep on benches. The elite would rather have the problem swept under the rug.

> "In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread." - Anatole France

This line of thinking of "efficiency trumps social issues" and that "regulation is always bad" is very harmful for both the workers and customers these kinds of systems are supposed to protect. The parent might find this map (http://projects.newyorker.com/story/subway/) showing inequality along NYC's subway interesting. The subway connects people from widely different economic backgrounds; the social darwinist might not like this but it's essential for giving those less well off opportunities and decreases the insularness of wealthy areas. Sometimes social focus is only ever a bad thing for those who benefit from the lack of it.

I realize and appreciate the very unfortunate situation that many poor and mentally ill [0] people are in. I want them to have access to health care, public transit, job opportunities, etc. I don't like when people cavalierly express the desire to be spared the sight of these people.

But the thing is, (living and working in downtown San Francisco) I see a lot of what I can only describe as harassment or assault committed by apparently mentally disturbed/ill [0] people. I genuinely don't know how to solve this problem, but I do think that people have a reasonable expectation to not encounter these situations in well-traveled public places.

[0] "mentally disturbed" and "mentally ill" are probably not the most precise or appropriate terms to use here. I do not know the correct terms but I appreciate any corrections.

As a European living in a country where people of all walks of life regularly use public transportation systems the attitudes present in this thread are a bit shocking.

A decent system of psychiatric hospitals and available housing for the mentally-ill would solve the problem.

The problem is some of those people won't want to stay in the hospital, and sometimes their habits are such that for regular hospital it'd be very bad match. And involuntary commitment is a very problematic proposition, it's a very dangerous tool esp. when used against people who can't explain themselves well, have no other people who can help them, and no knowledge or ability to help themselves.

To be more specific, US used to be more lax about involuntary commitment. And then it was discovered that all too often, people were committed for no good reason - sometimes due to negligence or pseudoscientific BS, sometimes deliberately.

Furthermore, once people were in the system, they were often abused themselves, and it was very difficult to get out, even if you were actually perfectly sane.

So committing someone involuntarily became much more difficult as a result.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deinstitutionalization_in_the_...

In this case efficiency really does Trump social issues. If you cannot say that your bus/rail/subway will arrive so regularly as to not get a worker fired it is a no go for adoption.

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