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Comment by NoMoreNicksLeft | Hacker News Reader

I have no desire to be "inspired". Others may wander around hoping to have epiphanies about how everyone else should live, but I don't care how others live as long as they leave me alone. I don't want them to make themselves miserable making it better for me...

It's enough that they don't make things worse for me specifically and spitefully. I do wonder why that wouldn't be good enough for you.

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I think HN is generally a community that celebrates learning and changing-our-minds rather than resist any suggestions in those directions.

You don't live in isolation as is, your car and roads and the rest of your context didn't come to be through others leaving you alone.

Some changes would make your life better. The naive way most English speakers do transit is worse, but that doesn't mean transit itself would make your life worse if done in a different way.

It may be the case that on average everyone's life would be better. But this seems to be some fundamental misunderstanding of how averages work. Someone's quality of life increases, someone else's goes down. And maybe theirs doesn't go down as much as someone eles's goes up... so the average is up.

But if you're the one poor schmuck whose quality of life goes down. Then it sucks to be you.

I can already see that I am in that group. No thanks.

In the US, public transit will always be an awful, reeking experience unless the cost of that transit rules out those who vandalize, defecate, and litter. It may be different in Japan or Belgium or some place like that... but engineering solutions don't fix sociological problems.

The same status quo that has lousy public transit is the status quo that gets us a lot of "those who vandalize, defecate, and litter". There's no reason we are stuck with that stuff being rampant. There's a strong case that the inequities in our economic system set us up to get those results even.

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