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"de facto homeless shelters"? wtf? Is that genuinely a concern in some places?

Cars have an edge on transit because orders of magnitude more money is spent on the road system and on the vehicles than is spent on PT. Despite that, PT tends to be faster in cities, where it's simply not possible to jam more cars in (it turns out only carrying one person per car is a truly massive capacity constraint.

Cars will probably always be better in low density areas, as it's not reasonable to serve all areas with reasonable quality of service, but in any kind of reasonable high density environment properly separated PT (ie. not lumped in with car traffic) will have huge capacity and speed advantages.

Yes - it's a genuine concern in the US.

In fact, looking at many of these public transit vs. car threads on HN, on the topic of safety, I feel transit advocates are not understanding the issue properly.

Most people that dislike using public transit in the US are not afraid that the train or bus will derail or get into an accident. The odds of that happening are definitely tiny.

What they're afraid of is some psycho on the train/bus committing anything from nuisance harassment to outright murder.

It doesn't help that many of the people that most advocate public transit are the ones most resistant to making transit free from being terrorized by such potentially dangerous individuals.

Even outside of that psycho scenario, you also encounter a lot of benign, but otherwise annoying or otherwise less-than-desirable-to-be-around people whether it's someone with horrific body odor or someone blasting loud music or someone coughing their lungs up.

I never felt afraid, anxious, or even annoyed in any way getting on the subway in Seoul, Tokyo, or Hong Kong.

I always feel at least some degree anxiety and annoyance, and sometimes outright fear, getting on the subway in NYC.

Every other country in the world can embrace efficient clean public transport, and then America can be a theocratic car filled wasteland filled with dangerously unstable individuals, and completely decayed social structure.

This is a US problem, not a train problem.

US problems have an unfortunate tendency to become world problems...

> The only place where I have lived where this wasn't a problem was New Zealand, and that was 18 years ago, so I don't know if that's still the case. I always give up on public transit after seeing enough acts of human degradation and fights breaking out. Let's not forget the smell.

You were supposed to describe public transit, not a rest stop on an Interstate Highway in the United States :-)

But seriously: the things you're describing are civic issues, not issues with public transportation. The only reason you see them less in your car is because the activation energy for them affecting you is much higher (specifically, instances of road rage, DWI, etc. culminating in someone colliding with you). But that doesn't actually make them less frequent; it just converts the drunk guy shouting on the subway bench into the drunk guy who's about to T-bone you.

The drunk guy about to T-bone you is more difficult to encounter in the first place than the drunk guy about to stab you on the subway.

I agree these are civic issues, not issues with public transportation. However I always get the impression that many ardent public transit advocates are the ones who are also resistant to cleaning up public transit so that it is more attractive.

Yes, let's definitely work towards providing mental health solutions, but let's also not let the psycho claim an entire subway car because "he has every right to be there" or "it's inhumane to forcibly remove him" and still expect the general public to delight in giving up their cars and take the subway instead.

> The drunk guy about to T-bone you is more difficult to encounter in the first place than the drunk guy about to stab you on the subway.

Statistically, he isn't. If drunks stabbed people on subways at the rate that drunks killed people with their cars, around 46 people would be stabbed on the US's subways each day. And that's killed with cars, not "permanently disabled or disfigured"; that rate is even higher.

The problem with the "psycho" example is that it just isn't that common. It's chiefly a perception, a statistically misaligned one, that's been ruthlessly propagated to support economic structures that benefit from as many Americans driving as much as possible. That isn't to say that it doesn't happen, but to use the drunk driving example again: we tolerate orders of magnitude more antisocial behavior on our roads than we do in our public transit systems.

Could you explain your statistics a bit? The first link I've found[1] shows 50,930 fatalities in 2019 with estimated 19% involving drunk drivers. So 9676 fatalities per year. Let's assume drunk drivers always kill somebody and survive themselves i.e. no drunk driver ever died in a single car accident. This makes 27 fatalities caused by drunk drivers every day.

Did you mean that approximately twice as many people ride subway than drive in the US? I could not find numbers on subway ridership but considering only few cities have a subway at all it's very hard to believe but I am open to the data.

1. https://www.forbes.com/advisor/car-insurance/drunk-driving-s...

I got 47 deaths per day from the roughly 17,000 fatalities that are directly attributed to drunk driving each year[1]. Even if we arbitrarily halve that to account for at-fault deaths at drivers' own hands, that leaves ~23 people dying, each day, because of drunks on our roads.

In contrast, around 300 people died in total on public transportation in 2020[2]. In 2019, 34 million people commuted daily by public transportation[3].

By contrast, around 76% of American commuters drive to work[4]. Assuming that "commutes to work" is the same as "employed," that means 76% of 158 million[5], or around 120 million driving commuters.

In other words: 4 times as many people commute by car than by public transport, but at least 20 times as many die each day just via the canonical example of unsafety on public transport. And the actual ratio is likely far higher, since the best number I could find for public transport fatalities (under 1/day) is not filtered by accident, suicide, crime, natural causes, &c. Thus the claim: the things that people claim to fear about public transport are far more real as dangers when commuting by car.

[1]: https://troopers.ny.gov/impaired-driving

[2]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1295843/number-fatalitie...

[3]: https://www.apta.com/news-publications/public-transportation...

[4]: https://www.statista.com/chart/18208/means-of-transportation...

[5]: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t01.htm

NY troopers contradict NHSTA (https://www.nhtsa.gov/risky-driving/drunk-driving) by a lot. I wonder how do they gather their statistics?

But your math does not make sense even with the data you have: you said if the drunks were killing in subway at the same rate as they do on the road then 47 people were killed in subway every day yet you took the 47 number from much larger pool of drivers. Should not it be a quarter of that, 12 people?

Your 300 fatalities in public transit could be interpreted as the fatalities caused by the public transit, are you sure they count people stabbed and/or shot waiting for a bus? The page does not show the source and what counts as the death in public transit (it requires some kind of payment for that). If somebody is stabbed while waiting for a bus, does it count?

The biggest difference is, atleast for me personally, I know how to make sure I don't die on the highway... I don't drink, I don't drive recklessly, I keep my car maintained, and I pay attention to my surroundings. So I feel my odds of not being a statistic are pretty good.

I have almost no real way not to end up a BART statistic.

When I lived in a worker's paradise with public transit for everyone, criminals camped outside subway stations as they provided a good and stable stream of prospective mugging victims. I wonder how many muggings happen to transit users compared to motorists in the US?

One in 20 violent crimes overall happen in either gas stations or convenience stores[1], so there would have to be a lot of public transport muggings to compensate for that!

[1]: https://cspdailynews.com/company-news/c-stores-are-4th-most-...

Great thing is that you are free to not visit gas station's convenience store, can you use transit without visiting stations?

This is not a sensible response: it’s not a matter of whether you can avoid visiting the convenience store, because millions of people do. There’s a clear demand for it, and accompanying crime.

(Besides, in most bus networks you actually can use the buses without using the stations — most allow riders to be dropped off anywhere along the route. But that’s entirely besides the point, as you haven’t presented a lick of evidence that statistically significant crime is happening in public transit stations.)

I can see how it can be confusing: you argue that transit is safe insisting that any crime happening around the transit use is irrelevant. You get mugged walking out of the station because that's where criminals expect solid foot traffic? Not transit fault, even though there is no way to avoid this situation while using transit. On the other hand, convenience stores on gas stations, where most crime is happening against clerks, are making driving dangerous for everyone even though you don't need to visit these stores while driving. I suspect you are emotionally invested in propagating the idea of transit safety and there is no point in further argument, which I only entered out of curiosity about your math.

That's up to you. I've laid out the numbers; statistically speaking, public transit is safer on both axes of accidents and crime. Including adjacent areas of society makes no sense unless we do the same for alternate modes of transportation, at which point the trend continues.

It's not about pure safety numbers. It's about my control of the situation. Once I step onto a train, I'm locked in (literally).

In my car I have a lot of control. Heck, I don't get into drive through fast food lines in sketchy areas because I don't like the idea of not being able to go forwards or backwards if a criminal type walks up to my car.

I ride motorcycles. Very dangerous. But I feel safe because I ride with my eyes open. In 20 years, I've had maybe 1 close call. While most riders I know have a crash in their first year.

In other words: you feel safe. And that's fine; I'm glad you do. But I like feeling safe because the statistics bear it out.

And that's how you end up being an unlucky victim. "hope is not a strategy"

And on public transit, basically all you have is hope.

Hope, and numbers! A good combination, in my book.

Great writing and breakdowns in this back and forth. Numbers don’t lie.

Once again this is a bit misleading. Sure there are crimes at gas stations. I don't stop at those sketchy looking inner city gas stations. Also, most crimes are against the employees of the stations. And finally, there are a lot of crimes at gas stations, but there are probably 50+ million people visiting the stations daily. Per interaction, they're pretty safe especially if you stick to safe looking ones.

It falls back to exactly what I said. I know how not to get killed on the roads, and I know how not to get attacked at a gas stations.

But when I get on a locked train, there's almost nothing I can do to avoid being a victim at that point beyond fighting harder than my attacker.

And so you see, it's only the dangerous gas stations where the danger is. Ho hum!

"Inner city gas stations" are where people are, because they're in cities, where the people are. Nobody is claiming that they aren't safe on a per interaction basis: the observation is that, if we're including arbitrary areas around all public transportation, then we ought to be doing the same for automobiles.

> It falls back to exactly what I said. I know how not to get killed on the roads, and I know how not to get attacked at a gas stations.

No: you think you know how not to get killed. You might be a great driver, but the drunk guy next to you doesn't care. The guy who runs through a light because it's worked every other time for the last 20 years on his commute doesn't care. The guy who's checking his text messages in the car behind you doesn't care. The sheer number of deaths on America's roads do not substantiate the claim that you can excel your way into safety.

If you look elsewhere in this discussion, you'll see that fewer than 300 people die in total each year on US public transport. That's all modes of death, not just crime or negligence. Nobody likes being locked on a train with someone in a mental health crisis, but the statistics simply do not bear out a disproportionate risk to your life or safety.

As a motorcycle rider, I actually do take care to not have either of your examples happen to me, even when Im in a car.

Beyond that, there is nothing you can say to me to get me to take BART to save $2. Even if Bart was free, I still wouldn't take it.

I have no idea how they gather their statistics, that’s just the first source I found! Let’s use NHTSA instead and assume their numbers are better; even so, over an order of magnitude more people die from drunk drivers than do whatsoever on a daily basis on public transport, even after you adjust for ridership.

> Should not it be a quarter of that, 12 people?

I adjusted the 300 public transit deaths up by a factor of 4, which is the same as adjusting the 17,000 or 12,000 drunk driving deaths down by a factor of 4.

> Your 300 fatalities in public transit could be interpreted as the fatalities caused by the public transit, are you sure they count people stabbed and/or shot waiting for a bus?

Why should it? Drunk driving statistics don’t count the number of deaths that happen when people are arbitrarily murdered at gas stations or convenience stores, even when the perpetrator happens to be drunk. They also don’t include other forms of influenced driving, road rage, or anything else that would further bring the number up.

Unless you have a specific reason to believe that there’s a silent epidemic of bus station shootings, this reads as special pleading.

It’s surprisingly difficult to find breakdowns by cause for deaths on public transit. But here’s one: from 1990 to 2003, there were 668 deaths in the subway system. The majority were suicides, the largest minority were accidents, and 1.5% were homicides[1]. In other words, even during a 13 year period when NYC (a city that’s routinely characterized as dangerous) was much more dangerous than it is currently, less than one person was murdered per year in a transit system that carries millions of commuters daily.

[1]: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/23639439_Epidemiolo...

>I adjusted the 300 public transit deaths up by a factor of 4, which is the same as adjusting the 17,000 or 12,000 drunk driving deaths down by a factor of 4.

You adjusted 300 fatalities per year by a factor of 4 that you got from the number of transit commuters and the number of the motorists and got 47 people per day? I am still not following.

>Why should it?

Because you don't need to wait for bus when you drive?

>Unless you have a specific reason to believe that there’s a silent epidemic of bus station shootings, this reads as special pleading.

I don't believe it's silent. I have reasons to believe a lot of people get assaulted on the bus stations and in subway stations.

> and 1.5% were homicides[1]

10 people killed in NYC subway over 13 years? I find this number a bit on the lower side TBQH. Perhaps they count "pushed under the train in such a way it could not have been written off as suicide or negligence on the victim's part"?

> You adjusted 300 fatalities per year by a factor of 4 that you got from the number of transit commuters and the number of the motorists and got 47 people per day? I am still not following.

47 people per day is just the ratio from the NY troopers' site's statistics. If we use the NHTSA instead, it's 32. If you then adjust that downwards by 4, you get 8, which is an order of magnitude higher than the daily deaths on public transit by all causes.

> Because you don't need to wait for bus when you drive?

Sure. Instead you wait at gas stations, rest stations, wander through underground parking lots, and so forth. This is not a compelling justification for introducing a category error to the comparison, and I suspect that it isn't one that will ultimately favor your position (given that 5% of all violent crime happens in the first two categories).

> I don't believe it's silent. I have reasons to believe a lot of people get assaulted on the bus stations and in subway stations.

Sources that substantiate this would be fantastic. Absent those, it's an unsubstantiated feeling.

> Perhaps they count "pushed under the train in such a way it could not have been written off as suicide or negligence on the victim's part"?

The NYPD does not miss an opportunity to characterize events as homicides or other violent crimes. Again: unless you have a sourced reason to believe that the NYPD lied about homicide numbers in the subway system between 1990 and 2003, this is baseless.

Unfortunately, you're not going to convince people by laying out statistics, otherwise you'd (you as in transit advocates, not you specifically) would have succeeded already.

What you need to do is address how people feel, and transit advocates have been doing a poor job at that in the US.

People feel safe in their cars. People feel unsafe on transit. I don't know why this perception deviates from reality, but it does. Maybe it's because in a car you have tons of steel surrounding you from the drunk driver, while in transit you have at best your clothes protecting you from the psycho.

Address this, and you will win over many people to transit. But again - I feel like most transit advocates are highly resistant to doing what needs to be done.

I have nothing against well run transit. I love taking the subways in Seoul, Tokyo, Hong Kong, and other cities where subways are ultraclean and nearly devoid of potentially dangerous individuals. I hate taking the NYC subways because almost every other day I encounter someone I feel wary being in the same car or station with.

You're simply not going to win over hearts and minds by stating the homeless guy in the subway car raving about some lunacy is completely harmless and you should just ignore him and let him be. Even if he is actually harmless beyond just stinking up the air and causing a nuisance.

> I love taking the subways in Seoul, Tokyo, Hong Kong, and other cities where subways are ultraclean and nearly devoid of potentially dangerous individuals.

Most Asian cities have horrendous track records on dealing with mentally ill and homeless, that's why. They're frequently driven out, dumped into homeless ghettos, incarcerated, or dumped into the countryside. Western society has higher expectations of their marginalized, for better or for worse. This is why US planners look to Europe for models to emulate instead of Asia.

> Address this, and you will win over many people to transit. But again - I feel like most transit advocates are highly resistant to doing what needs to be done.

Most advantages surrounding driving cars in the US are based around culture and perception. The mythos of the car in the US is huge and many parts of car culture is based around the mythos. Transit advocates by nature of not buying into the mythos are going to be types that are hard to sway through feelings and perception. I agree that transit has a perception problem that needs to be fixed in US big cities. The reason why this disconnect exists is because transit fans are by nature more driven by data and less driven by mythos or narrative. That doesn't mean this isn't a problem.

> But seriously: the things you're describing are civic issues, not issues with public transportation

They both are and they aren't. It is a civic issue that is inherently worse for public transportation, especially those that have nearly no supervision like subways. I totally agree that the issue is a civic one that should be solved, but if we're not going to solve it, then it's a problem that will prevent public transportation from reaching its potential. Would you rather encounter a crazy person out in the open or be trapped in a steel box with them? That's essentially the decision people are making when they board public transit in a major American metro. If a person is smelly out in the open, at least there's a breeze that can blow the odor away, but on a bus or train you are trapped in the recirculating smell cloud. Out in the open, one might have to pass by such things, but being on public transit can mean experiencing them for hours.

> But that doesn't actually make them less frequent; it just converts the drunk guy shouting on the subway bench into the drunk guy who's about to T-bone you.

That's a bit of a false equivalence. While there's indeed some mathematical soundness to what you're saying, I'd argue the vast majority of trouble makers (for lack of a better term) on public transit aren't there out of commuting necessity. They hang out on public transit because it's out of the elements and they are unlikely to be harassed themselves. It's somewhere for them to go. If all public transit closed, they'd just be out on the curb or in front of a gas station.

There is an incentive for city officials to ignore the problem as much as they can get away with. They know that the vast majority of their constituents aren't taking public transit, so what better place to allow the unwanted to be off the streets?

That's why it is a public transit issue. It's a much greater challenge to solve civic problems at a higher level, but cities could actually hire security to be on their trains and actually enforce tickets. No matter what, it's an inferior daily experience to being in one's own car. You can never get rid of smells and the low-level bad behavior. Not without society changing itself.

Buses do not impede traffic. Cars impede bus traffic.