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Comment by jacobolus | Hacker News Reader

Riding the train, subway, trolley, or bus and walking a couple blocks at each end is a heck of a lot “better” than sitting in traffic or driving 20 times around the block hunting for a parking space.

Even moderately dense urban areas are inherently poor places for personal automobiles, whose infrastructure wastes tremendous amounts of space. The more neighborhoods are optimized for human-scale activity and pedestrians/bikes/transit (at the expense of personal cars), the nicer they become to spend time in as a human.

Life in a place where all or nearly all trips can be made without needing to drive a car is very pleasant, especially for anyone who isn’t an able-bodied high-income adult. If neighborhoods have been designed so that that is impossible, then what needs fixing is the neighborhood design.

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> Life in a place where all or nearly all trips can be made without needing to drive a car is very pleasant, especially for anyone who isn’t an able-bodied high-income adult.

I've found the exact opposite to be true. Cars are great because they mean you'll never come in contact with crazy vagrants.

For a few years I tried taking public transportation in the bay area, but I gave up because I had too many encounters with insane homeless people. I've had crazy people scream at me and call me things like "faggot" or "peckerwood". I've had people threaten to rob me after I asked them to turn their music down on the bus. They're never caught by the police. The last time I was on BART, a guy smoked meth and threatened to kick the shit out of me if I called the cops. He got off at the next station and the cops never caught him.

Now I avoid public transportation and either drive or take Uber or Lyft.

In practice, cars are dramatically more dangerous (both for their occupants and for bystanders) than transit.

But the widespread use of transit by the poor which you note here is great evidence for my claim that cars are not an effective means of transportation for low-income people.

If people are screaming at you or smoking meth on the bus, that’s indicative of broader social problems which aren’t really solved by changing the transportation system. American society does a really terrible job at providing housing, drug treatment, and other social support for people with mental health problems.

For what it’s worth, I ride buses, trams, the subway, etc. all around San Francisco on a daily basis with my 2-year-old, and haven’t ever felt threatened. My general impression is that many yuppies feel unreasonable amounts of fear / disgust when they come into brief social contact with the homeless or mentally ill. YMMV.

> If people are screaming at you or smoking meth on the bus, that’s indicative of broader social problems which aren’t really solved by changing the transportation system.

Knowing the proximate cause doesn't help me avoid crazy people on public transportation. The problem of crazy people in the bay area won't be fixed any time soon, so it's still in my best interests to avoid public transportation. Also, it's not clear to me that many of these people can be fixed. The bay area spends enormous amounts of money on mental health and homelessness, but the problem is far worse here than it is in Boston.

> For what it’s worth, I ride buses, trams, the subway, etc. all around San Francisco on a daily basis with my 2-year-old, and haven’t ever felt threatened.

There's no nice way to say this but... I don't believe you. Every single one of my coworkers has a horror story about public transportation in the bay area. Robbery, theft, stalking, threats, harassment, catcalling, etcetera. There is only one woman at my work who commutes via BART, and she's only been doing it for 3 weeks. The rest drive or take Uber/Lyft because they've been robbed or threatened in the past. I think it's much more likely that my friends & coworkers are telling the truth than that you are. Either that or your threshold for feeling unsafe is incredibly high.

If you regularly take public transportation in the bay area, you will encounter mentally ill people, and some of them will engage in violent behavior without provocation.

> I don't believe you

You don’t believe that I travel by bus/subway/etc. and don’t feel unsafe?

There are people of all ages, ethnic groups, social classes, occupations, etc. riding transit throughout the Bay Area every day: foreign tourists; nannies with strollers; pensioners buying groceries; businesspeople commuting; high school students; sports fans; families taking luggage to the airport; .....

There are certainly occasional violent incidents on transit. Out of the 400k BART trips every day, I wouldn’t be surprised if there were a dozen pick-pocketed wallets/phones every day, and the occasional mugging. If I were a small 12 year old girl, there are some BART stations I probably wouldn’t want to be alone in at midnight.

But crime on transit is not common (in general mugging and other violent crime in cities are down dramatically from the peak a few decades ago), and I have never personally felt threatened.

My wife commutes to work in SF by bike, and that is unfortunately far more dangerous (especially with all of the crazy Uber/Lyft drivers these days) than riding the bus.

> Every single one of my coworkers has a horror story

How many of your co-workers grew up in a not-rich family in a city?

  and the occasional mugging

There were three BART homicides in five days last July.

Yes there are very rare rapes and even stabbings in transit stations, and that is terrible. Just like the same crimes are terrible on the street, at stores, in public parks, at offices, or at homes.

There are also 400 traffic deaths and 2000 traffic injuries per year in the Bay Area.

Statistically, the BART is a very safe way to travel.

Part of the reason there are "crazy vagrants" is the government has systematically shifted access and policy in society towards the already wealthy, while the poor and disadvantaged have no alternatives and end up in bad circumstances.

I sympathize with your experience, but if I had to count the number of times I've had bad encounters with bad drivers vs. the times with bad commuters on public transit, it doesn't come close. I submit it's very possible that you're underestimating the negativity with cars because you've normalized it. For example, the statistics bare out that cars are amongst the most deadly thing in America but people ignore it as a problem compared to say gun violence which is a political hot topic.

40,000 people a year die in the US, because you are scared of a vagrant? Wow.

> Riding the train, subway, trolley, or bus and walking a couple blocks at each end is a heck of a lot “better” than sitting in traffic or driving 20 times around the block hunting for a parking space.

Then what do you need congestion pricing for? You don't need to suppress something that's worse than the alternative because if that were true nobody should have any desire to do it to begin with.

> Even moderately dense urban areas are inherently poor places for personal automobiles, whose infrastructure wastes tremendous amounts of space.

Congestion pricing doesn't change the amount of space allocated to those things. That's completely independent. You can build over roads or eliminate minimum parking requirements without congestion pricing. That also suppresses driving, but in that case it's a trade off which people are actually getting something out of, instead of just a regressive money grab that helps nobody but the corrupt politicians who will waste the money on pork. And then keep all the wide roads and parking spaces in the city because it's the only way to continue generating the congestion pricing revenue.

I said “Getting rid of most of the cars and putting people on trains does wonders for peak throughput.” That is clearly an entirely different proposal than “congestion pricing”.

The context was another comment criticizing congestion pricing as more or less a band-aid and advocating for increasing transportation throughput instead of trying to shift demand. I was agreeing with that comment and proposing radical changes to the transportation system as a way to increase throughput.

Your nonsensical response was that replacing roads by trains wouldn’t actually increase throughput because people like car trips better. While it went without saying that this claim is wrong on its face (throughput of the transportation system is a property largely unrelated to passenger preferences), I furthermore disputed your claim that car trips are inherently better.

Your follow-up here is a non sequitur. It is obvious that congestion pricing doesn’t get rid of most of the cars and switch them to trains, and that cities could remove cars from roads without anything to do with congestion pricing.

> I said “Getting rid of most of the cars and putting people on trains does wonders for peak throughput.” That is clearly an entirely different proposal than “congestion pricing”.

That is not clearly an entirely different proposal than "congestion pricing". "Getting rid of most of the cars and putting people on trains" is exactly what congestion pricing proponents argue that it does. But doing it that way can't increase throughput because there is at most at one to one relationship between people deterred from driving and people who take the train.

And in the context of a response to a comment criticizing congestion pricing, yours sounds like a comment defending it.

> Your nonsensical response was that replacing roads by trains wouldn’t actually increase throughput because people like car trips better.

My actual response was this:

Getting people on trains by forcing them out of cars can't actually do that. If you make it more expensive/inconvenient/impossible to drive, at most the same number of people will take the train. In practice fewer will, because some of them will find jobs somewhere else or do their shopping somewhere else etc. So the combined throughput inherently goes down.

The only way to get it to go up is to make something better instead of making something worse.

All of which is still entirely true. If you want to increase throughput, don't make driving worse, make alternatives to driving better.

  > Life in a place where all or nearly all trips can be made without needing to drive a car
  > is very pleasant, especially for anyone who isn’t an able-bodied high-income adult.

But also if you are an able-bodied adult. I live in Amsterdam and try to get work at bicycle-distance. (I currently travel by train because winter and I've fallen out of the habit due to the longer commute for a previous project, but I intend to pick up cycling again when weather gets better.)

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