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Comment by magduf | Hacker News Reader

>This is such a biased representation of what the real problem is and you conveniently ignore things like violent thugs on public transport (I've experienced this several times in the UK), rowdy teenagers, drunks and the mentally ill.

Except these problems don't seem to exist at all on Japanese or German trains.

Maybe there's just something seriously wrong with your country.

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> Except these problems don't seem to exist at all on Japanese or German trains.

Lets see if that is true:

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/07/18/german-train-axe...

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/06/10/knife-attack-jap...

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jul/25/tokyo-knife-at...

https://www.scotsman.com/news/world/big-increase-in-sex-assa...

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-01-07/women-subjected-to-da...

Doesn't seem that much better to me.

So you cherry-pick a few examples (one of which wasn't on public transit at all), and you think that's better than a place where 30,000 people per year are killed in auto crashes? Your likelihood of dying on a train in Japan are almost nil, whereas your likelihood of dying in your car on American roads are actually pretty significant, and it's one of the biggest causes of death of non-elderly people.

I did not cherry-pick, I took some examples off of duck duck go to prove a point that everywhere has their problems and you probably shouldn't be criticising my country (which is quite rude) while completely ignoring the point I was making about public transport being quite unpleasant experience in general and why people quite rightly want to avoid it.

The Government wherever that is will have to sort out those problems rather than just try guilty people into not using their cars.

> you probably shouldn't be criticising my country (which is quite rude)

You're the one criticizing your country, not me. You're the one who said public transit there sucks, not me. I've never been there, so I can't comment on the Underground, but I've been to Germany and Japan and the public transit there is absolutely fantastic. It's not even that bad here in DC, though the reliability isn't that great.

>ignoring the point I was making about public transport being quite unpleasant experience in general and why people quite rightly want to avoid it.

No, I'm not ignoring your point at all, I'm calling it out as ignorant, which it is, because there's plenty of other places in the world with excellent public transit.

If you have to quote a three year old article to demonstrate that people do get (occasionally) assaulted on a Japanese train, then yes, it does seem much better to me.

I didn't quote mine. I literally put in "Japanese Train Attack" and pulled some links off the first page to prove that it isn't quite as perfect as it was claimed. I don't like the fact that the UK is demonised constantly because despite a lot of the problems over here we still do a lot of things right.

Also it doesn't address the very valid point I was making is that until public transport is pleasant and reliable (neither is true in the UK, I dunno about anywhere else and don't claim to) people will not use it if they have an alternative.

No amount of guilting such as the comment I was originally replying to will change that.

Obviously you've never been outside your country if you've never seen pleasant and reliable public transit. Even as an American, I've seen plenty of pleasant and reliable public transit, though it's usually outside my country.

Stop claiming that other countries suck when it's only yours that has seems to have a big problem.

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