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Comment by digdugdirk | Hacker News Reader

I find many of the issues brought up about public transit being unsafe revolve around the people you might encounter on public transit (drug users, homeless, mental illness, etc.) and the waiting around/walking to public transit stops (muggings, thefts, etc.)

I've never had any issues myself, but have absolutely been exposed to those issues while taking transit. I've also witnessed those issues increase during/post lockdown.

I have no solutions, just pointing out a different angle on the "unsafe" issue mentioned above. I'd love to hear if anyone has any experience or ideas to reduce this perception of a lack of safety.

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Right: public transport puts you in media res, exposing you to the other people around you. That's overwhelmingly average folks trying to go between work, home, and errands, but it's also the occasional disturbed person.

I will not deny that you'll find all kinds of antisocial behavior on public transit. What I'll say is this: that it's fundamentally a civic issue and not a public transit issue, and that even with all that behavior we still see nowhere near the amount of death and disfigurement that people experience on America's roads on a daily basis.

To make it pithy: we incorrectly prioritize the feeling of environmental safety over statistical safety. The reality is that the inebriated homeless guy on the subway is much less likely to harm you or take your life than the inebriated driver in the next lane.

IMO there's only really 2 underlying issues people have with public transit:

1. In nearly all of the US (maybe everywhere except parts of NYC?) it is a worse experience than driving (requires planning, takes longer, can't carry more than one or two bags with you).

2. It is déclassé.

I think #2 is at least partly a result of #1. Also note that #1 is true even for most cities in the US, because cities in the US are unbelievably car friendly compared to cities in e.g. western Europe. I don't see any public-transit solution that doesn't involve intentionally making the car experience worse, and that's going to be a tough sell to voters.

> I think #2 is at least partly a result of #1

And vice versa. As I said in a thread yesterday[1]: we justify our continuing neglect of public transit by claiming that "polite society" avoids it, which in turn fulfills the prophecy.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32165783

That's partly it, but the status quo in the US is of the car infrastructure being so good that driving in the US is a better experience than taking public transit in many places with excellent public transit. Therefore #1 will remain true as long as we don't downgrade (either intentionally or via neglect) the car infrastructure, and taking things away from people is always harder than just not giving it to them in the first place.

This is a great point, but I’ll also note: neglect of our automotive infrastructure is a matter of when, not if. A consistent theme among suburbs in the Strong Towns surveys is unsustainable financing of municipal and county roads. Even at the state and federal levels, our road funding doesn’t accurately reflect the biggest sources of wear (trailer and other shipping traffic).

It’s not like we’re ever going to regress into a nation without interstates. But there will be a significant reckoning over the next 50 years over the increasing burden of our overdeveloped road network.

> 2. It is déclassé.

“A developed country is not a place where the poor have cars. It’s where the rich use public transportation” – Gustavo Petro

There are plenty of crazy, dangerous people on the road too. Psychologically, you feel more separated than them, even if they may be statistically be more dangerous.

I definitely feel safer on public transit. I live in an upper class neighborhood and I'm not sure if there's much more dangerous in this world than an entitled, distracted, moderately wealthy person driving an SUV that has places to go.

I leave the actual wealthy out of this because they just pay someone else to drive.

They can't mug me or grope me or blast music on their phone 3 feet away from me though. To be fair occasionally there will be idiot drivers blasting their bass so loud it vibrates nearby cars, but that's far less common than inconsiderate assholes blasting music on their phones on public transit.

Yeah, basically every girl I have ever dated avoids public transit at all cost because of assholes/creeps.

These sorts of things can be self selected. I know plenty of women who take public transit. The dividing line tends to be whether they grew up in a city or moved from the suburbs (and of course affluence).

I was thinking something similar. It's easy for me to argue for public transportation as a 6 foot tall man with martial arts training. I still get a little uncomfortable catching a late night bart ride sometimes...

Right, it's not not necessarily about safety it's about needing to feel safe.

A big problem on this honestly is that news media focuses disproportionately on interpersonal crime compared to almost all other kinds of harm that can be done. Combined with generally decreased newsroom budgets, this has led to firmer reliance on, and less questioning of, direct police releases. We basically just let the cops tell us what to worry about, and they predictably tell us to worry about the things that get more funding for police.

We've mostly decided that, while these things aren't good per se, they are downstream of other incentives and requirements that are good, or at least inevitable. I don't agree, but I also don't think there's much value in a "what could be different" conversation without having a "why is it like this at all" conversation first.

What we really need is a holistic approach to a lot of these issues. Ending the violent prohibition of drugs, building and providing housing for the homeless, better and more accessible mental health programs, denser cities, better transit, etc. We don't have a politics in the US that fully articulates the dynamic interconnectivity of all the issues and aggressively pushes for a set of solutions.

Doesn’t San Fransisco do all of those? They spend a huge amount on it anyway. And being one the dirtiest cities possible.

No city can adequately fund these programs, and San Francisco certainly doesn't build housing for the homeless, have an enlightened drugs policy or have adequate mental health care. San Francisco and other coastal cities mainly differentiate their policies by treating the homeless populations there with malignant neglect instead of outright hostility, which leads to the phenomenon you see where 10-12 cities bear the brunt of a national homelessness crisis. Because San Francisco is one of them, you also see a bunch of entitled tech bros whining about how they have to see a homeless person sometimes on HN.

I will admit that, by American standards, SF has pretty good public transit though.

I feel like SF is one of the most permissive places to do drugs in perhaps the entire world. Even if there are laws on the books, they are not really enforced.

I am not coming from a perspective of pro-law & order, just a commentary on drug law & enforcement here.

https://www.hoover.org/research/only-san-francisco-61000-ten...

Spending for homeless is 61,000 per person

It's misallocated through an enormous network of private contractors, ineffectual nonprofits and government bureaucracies. The unaffordable expenditure (public housing or at least publicly funded housing) is completely out of that budget, while the rest of the programs are so watered down and so much have been leeched out of them that they're completely ineffectual. Rebuilding capacity for direct state action, without farming out to all of these parasitic middlemen is a key component, as is reducing or eliminating wasteful and top-heavy bureaucracies.

I'm really tired of this "SF is the dirties city" trope. Yes, there are areas that are incredibly dirty, but those areas are something like 5% of the city, and most of those areas are concentrated in a few specific neighborhoods. Most of the city is fairly clean (but to be sure, it's no Singapore) and reasonably well-maintained.

I've been in areas of Manhattan that would rival SF's dirtiest areas, but I wouldn't claim that NYC is a "dirty city".

I'm more worried about the threat of violence from mentally-unstable people on SF's streets, though that's something that's also concentrated in a relatively small number of places (unsurprisingly often coinciding with the dirtiness).

I saw about 5 between the bart station and Berkeley campus on my way to get a curry, and I wouldn't even consider that dirty relative to driving a few blocks down towards the freeway...(I know it might not technically be "SF" but you know what I mean)

> I've been in areas of Manhattan that would rival SF's dirtiest areas, but I wouldn't claim that NYC is a "dirty city".

I've lived here my entire life, and I would :-)

As much as I'm a booster for NYC (and immensely proud of our public transit), we're also a very dirty city (partially for historical planning reasons, resulting in no alleyways or trash disposal consideration).

It's also gotten worse during the pandemic, in no small part thanks to drivers: people have stopped moving their cars for street cleaning, resulting in accumulations of trash and dirt that then clog the drains, worsening our floods (and damaging the subways further).

> I wouldn't claim that NYC is a "dirty city".

NYC is a filthy city. I think most people that live here and love it would agree.

Try visiting Japan or South Korea or even central Europe.

Yes, these are clearly not universal human issues if somewhere like Japan can maintain clean, relatively safe, efficient public transportation. It should be obvious we should be looking outside of the US as to why certain societies are able to solve this issues and others are not.

Because these societies incentivize individuals to behave and conform for the better of the group, while iterating on their systems. The same way the US has iterated on their car-centric culture.

Take the money and incentives away from building roads, cars, parking lots, traffic safety etc. and stick them into systems which are safer by default, incentives for people to keep things clean and not cause a fuss.

> why certain societies are able to solve this issues and others are not.

You mean by enforcing a racially homogenous society which does not allow poor (or anyone really) people from other parts of the world?

Yeah, that's exactly how Melbourne, London, and Paris did it.

Singapore then.

“A developed country is not a place where the poor have cars. It's where the rich use public transportation” – Gustavo Petro, Mayor of Bogotá

> enforcing a racially homogenous society

Are you implying that criminality is genetic...?

I'm not sure what you're trying to point out. I've only been to Japan out of those, and public transport might be fast and clean, but it is much less comfortable and a much worse experience than driving a nice car.

Unless I'm in a hurry I rather have a comfortable private ride, than a less comfortable quick ride packed around strangers.

Yeah, this is a good point. I don't think I've ever heard anyone express fear when getting on an SF Muni bus or train that they're going to be injured or killed in a crash. The only safety-related complaints are exactly what you said: drug users and people with mental illnesses on the bus, or sketchy characters hanging around transit stops. Years ago, my partner witnessed someone walk right by her, inches away from her, stop a few feet away, and suddenly punch someone in the face, right out of the blue. I would be much more afraid of that kind of thing happening to me than anything else.

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