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Comment by closeparen | Hacker News Reader

This lens is underutilized in the discourse, but people feel it acutely. Even a lot of the anti-cycling stance comes down to, “What am I, poor?” When you are using transportation infrastructure that’s designed with contempt for you, you know, and you don’t want to be there. See also: rail slow zones, buses that shimmy and rattle violently on imperfect pavement, how Muni trains close their doors and pull one foot out of the station just to wait at a red light. If you’ve never seen good, dignified implementation of walking and transit then a lot of this seems inherent & car culture seems synonymous with dignity. Short of tickets to Amsterdam for everyone, I don’t know how to fix it.

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> Even a lot of the anti-cycling stance comes down to, “What am I, poor?” When you are using transportation infrastructure that’s designed with contempt for you, you know, and you don’t want to be there.

I grew up in close contact with a large urban poor population and I think the view of bikes was the exact opposite of this. Biking in the city is considered the purview of affluent white people

In some way it makes sense. The poor are driven by high property prices to live far away. The more affluent can choose to buy property in the heart of the city and use bikes in the city.

I think a lot of people are overgeneralizing the dynamics of urban poverty from what they have observed in the last decade of home ownership trends, but affluent white flight from cities only really ended in the mid-00s-2010s (for some cities) and there are plenty of significant poor populations near urban cores able to remain because it's either where section 8 housing was built or by rent control.

They just take public transit or walk. Not biking.

You know how long the waitlist is for section 8 is, in say, New York? All poor people don’t just go out and ask for section 8 or rent stabilized apartments and instantly get them.

I think I likely know more about urban poverty than you do. It is incredibly hard to get a section 8 apartment, especially if you aren't a family, and it is becoming increasingly difficult to do that in urban cores as section 8 contracts are being shifted towards outlying areas.

Nonetheless, there are lots of people in urban areas living in section 8 housing and it is a substantial part of the story around urban poverty and how people still afford to live in urban cores.

in my local facebook bike-to-work group i often comment about Schrödinger's cyclist: "too poor to have a car" according to some haters, and at the same time "too rich to be in a hurry" (because motorists have a real job they're driving to) according to others

Ye I am really getting whiplash from these contradictions

Out in the (poorer) suburbs, the only adults who bike are those who can't afford a car, or have had their license revoked.

Perhaps. I think suburbs with high density of poor people used to be less common in the past so I am less familiar with the dynamics there.

Moving the poor to the suburbs was one of the intended consequences of cleaning up the cities where now only affluent white people own bikes.

I'm not joking. Cities tore down their tenement housing "projects" because of the rampant amounts of crime, and the residents went to the suburbs to live in Section 8 private housing. It's one of the reasons (there were many) that violent crime decreased so sharply beginning in the 1990s: the criminals were more spread out, diffusing much of the network effect.

I grew up in a low income, immigrant suburb and the poor rode bikes. They didn't wear bike kit and they had crappy mountain bikes with franken parts, not an 11 speed electronic shift bike. Often they either couldn't afford a car or the family only had enough money for 1 car, which in patriarchal immigrant households went to mom and the kids she drove around while dad biked to his back of house or construction job.

Thank you! OP's view is a naive outsider's view. Anyone who actually lives in the US knows you need to be rich enough to not be car dependent.

https://grist.org/cities/black-chicago-biking-disparities-in...

In reality, only rich (and white) folks can afford to live in areas that are not car-dependent.

https://granfondodailynews.com/2020/01/17/is-north-american-... > From 2001 to 2017 the number of people cycling increased the fastest among high income, highly educated, employed, white men between the ages 25 and 44.

This isn't an immutable law of the universe. It just demonstrates that there is ridiculous demand for walkable, pedestrian-friendly cities, and, predictably and demonstrably if you've ever been to any city council meeting ever, not nearly enough supply. Everyone always says "not in MY back yard!" and then complains that downtowns are expensive. You cannot have it both ways.

You are wrong. The poorest decile of people are the most likely to bike because they cannot afford a car.

https://lede-admin.usa.streetsblog.org/wp-content/uploads/si...

I ride my carbon fiber road bike down the bike trail in the morning; when I drive home after a night of entertainment, I see laborers riding their bikes in the busy street to get home after a long day of work. I feel the irony deeply.

    We should improve society somewhat. 
    Yet you participate in society.

I think it depends; biking because you need to and biking for fun look very different. IME of Phoenix you could have the cyclist doing training routes in their kit and the crackhead strapped with bags of their stuff pass by on the same street.

It can look very different.

Burdens can be nonobvious.

I don’t think anyone with financial burdens is spending $500 on a bike and $150 on a kit. And if they are that’s more of a mental issue than a financial one

Not very relevant but I just thought it was funny how it's obvious that you don't do cycling when those are the prices you came up with as an example :)

It's considerably more expensive than that.

$500 is unfortunately now the floor price for mountain bikes, even a Walmart entry level brand.

I've had multiple professional-managerial friends tell me they personally won't bike because that's something they left behind in their childhood or broke-student days. It's beneath them now. But you're right, people also complain about bike infrastructure projects taking space from working-class drivers to benefit white yuppies.

We see this often with urbanist topics. New multifamily construction is gentrification and colonization if you lean left, full of crime and a threat to our schools if you lean right. The only widespread agreement is that it represents the Other. The stranglehold of postwar suburban car culture on the American psyche is self-reinforcing at this point.

Leftwing radicals and rightwing septuagenarians both joining hands to oppose new development was absolutely not on my bingo card for this decade.

Why? It's the basis of WW2. Their raison d'etre are the other side, both enflaming each other, giving a scapegoat and a simplistic good/evil worldview.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horseshoe_theory

The lowest income group of people is the demographic most likely to bike.

https://lede-admin.usa.streetsblog.org/wp-content/uploads/si...

The chart of income vs percent who commute by bike is u-shaped but with a higher left side. Rich people bike more than middle class people but poor people bike more than either the rich or middle class. People who are on the right half of the distribution think biking is affluent-coded because they only see the right tail where it curves up and they don't know anyone on the left side of the distribution where the gradient goes the other way.

Walk behind restaurants in many US cities and you'll see the cheap mountain bikes that the lower-paid kitchen staff (mostly immigrants) rode to work. This is particularly common in the SF Bay Area.

(I am in favor of improving cycling infrastructure for everyone regardless of income level.)

> Even a lot of the anti-cycling stance comes down to, “What am I, poor?”

Or this tired bit of "wit": "Oh, you're biking? Let me guess, DUI?"

I have a pretty strong anti-cycling stance, because I watched my New York neighborhood that was a pedestrian paradise significantly degraded by bike lanes. The balance of walking, subways, busses, taxis and delivery trucks had worked pretty well. Bicyclists introduced the concept of failing to yield, then acting indignant and entitled.

Failing to yield to pedestrians where?

e: Actually, not going to get into it but c'mon - cars kill pedestrians in a way that bikes rarely do and removing the cars from your NY neighborhood would have an obviously better impact on pedestrians compared to the bikes.

As a New Yorker, with cars on the road I have a reasonable expectation of where they might be coming from or what direction they're headed (ie, they're following traffic laws). With bikes, they can (and do!) come from any direction, on the sidewalk, riding the wrong way on the road, wrong way in the bike lanes, etc. These bikes could be considered as motorcycles (ebike designation is a legal one), they often go 20mph or faster by delivery drivers with little consideration of pedestrian safety, and you really don't know where or how you might encounter one so your head needs to be on swivel as pedestrian in NYC.

That said, I'm still pro-bike and acknowledge that cars are much more dangerous for pedestrians, just I'd like to see the delivery bike / ebike problems fixed.

I think with e-bikes we've entered a new equilibrium that will take some time to shake out. It used to be that the fastest bikers on the road were usually the most experienced, this is no longer the case and as a street biker I have noticed it causing more danger.

Where I live e-bikes haven't caught up yet. I need to be mindful of that people get scared of me biking fast close to them on the sidewalk, even though I'm experienced and know that there's no danger. A bike without motors is enough steerable that it doesn't pose any real danger for anyone imho.

Cyclists in NYC are positive menace. They don’t need to be but they choose go the wrong way down one way streets, routinely ignore all traffic signals, ride on busy sidewalks and eschew bike lanes to weave in and out of heavy traffic. Well under 50% wear helmets.

As a pedestrian in NYC I feel far more endangered by bikes than I do by automobiles. There is room for cyclists, but there has got to be some compliance with rules.

>As a pedestrian in NYC I feel far more endangered by bikes than I do by automobiles.

This is why legislating by "feelings" is a bad idea. Automobiles are a far larger and more lethal risk.

And that risk is mitigated by traffic rules, separation of pedestrian v. vehicular traffic, etc. That goes out the window when you have a category of vehicles that routinely ignores those mitigations.

Even with those mitigations, they're still more deadly.

That isn't why it's a bad idea at all; people don't walk and instead drive because walking "feels" unsafe. Legislate changes to make walking "feel" safer and people will walk instead of drive, and then will be safer because the changes will be things like separated walkways from cars, more guarded pedestrian crossings, road design which slows traffic, and more people walking will mean fewer cars on the road.

But bikers are not a large reason people aren't pedestrians.

I agree that a certain level of abstraction 'feel' is important, but we shouldn't legislate by 'feel' about how people 'feel' about bikes, that is one level of 'feel' too many.

> But bikers are not a large reason people aren't pedestrians.

They are a significant piece of the reason in NYC, although car-centric road design is a larger piece.

You and several other commenters continue to ignore people pointing out seriously problems that are localized in NYC by quoting stats that are for the entire country.

I don’t see too many cars mounting sidewalks as I do bikes and scooters do (daily occurrence, not to mention 220+ pound guys who ride around on cheap underpowered scooters in the street), but yeah anecdotal data.

Safety is not the only consideration. If we don't consider comfort then people might stop walking because it is an unpleasant experience.

This is the exact opposite of what the article is saying. When somebody is deciding whether to walk or drive to their destination, they don't pull up a scientific journal and consult the latest studies, they think about whether it feels safe and dignified. If you ignore the perceived threat of cyclists whizzing every which way while ignoring all traffic laws, you'll find fewer people choosing to walk and have no idea why.

> Automobiles are a far larger and more lethal risk.

even when normalized by passenger miles?

In general cars are quite lethal in aggregate but not once normalized for usage-- we drive an awful lot.

> Well under 50% wear helmets.

> As a pedestrian in NYC I feel far more endangered by bikes than I do by automobiles.

how do you make those two follow?

They don’t immediately.

One is not a consequence of the other. However, the first is an observation in support of the idea that in general many cyclists eschew rules including those that exist for their own safety.

I don’t think helmets make you any safer on a bike. At least now to a relevant degree.

I remember reading that it actively makes you less safe because people wearing a helmet trust it to protect them, when in reality, basically any collision with a car will crush them.

> basically any collision with a car will crush the Orrery, bicycle helmet only protects you from hitting the ground /a tree at normal cycling speeds. It does not help you if you hit a car at speed.

> Well under 50% wear helmets

Helmets don’t help - cycle helmet is rated to save you from a fall or from hitting a tree. It’s basically useless when hitting a vehicle, and that’s 95% of cyclist deaths. You’d have to wear a full motorcycle helmet.

> weave in and out of heavy traffic

I’ve seen that too. But I’ve never seen it happen in an area with segregated cycle way.

Your feelings are wrong.

There were 2000 pedestrians killed by cars in NYC from 2018 to 2021 and only 12 killed by bicycles.

https://www.nyc.gov/html/dot/downloads/pdf/nycdot-pedestrian...

1) I certainly don’t want to die. I also simply don’t want to get hit.

2) Bicycle/pedestrian are under reported.

3) I am specifically referring to my experience in Manhattan. In large portions of Queens, Brooklyn and the Bronx I think my attitude would be different.

(Also thanks for the link - poking around the DOT site they have some great information. Surprised to see how many pedestrian fatalities involved alcohol — on the part of the pedestrian!)

Are you saying bicycle/pedestrian deaths are under-reported? I find that very hard to believe.

NYC bike messengers. And rollerbladers. Not sure how it is now, but in the late 90's they were exactly as the other poster described. Fail to yield, swerving in front of buses and flipping off the drivers if they honked. Utter contempt for everyone else. I was in far more danger of getting injured by them than any vehicle, and this was Manhattan traffic.

Plenty of stories of grandmas getting knocked down by rollers and bikers in Central Park back then too.

> I was in far more danger of getting injured by them than any vehicle, and this was Manhattan traffic.

Sorry but the stats just don't bear this out.

I've lived in dense cities my entire life. Stories, anecdotes, etc. do not reflect the reality of what is more likely to cause you harm.

The stats dont record whose at fault in NYC, nor do they record when car drivers and pedestrians have to avoid dangerous situations caused by bikers and people on scooters.

Statistics are not a good indicator either because most events never get recorded. Nobody keeps statistics on how often cyclists whiz within inches of pedestrians on the sidewalk, scrape by people, or knock people over but they get right back up again with a few bruises. It doesn't get recorded unless the police get involved or somebody goes to the hospital, both of which are pretty rare. Believing you understand what's going on just by looking at statistics is terribly naive.

> both of which are pretty rare

so what you're saying is that people don't really get injured by bikes, they just get a bit rattled.

Being rattled frequently is surely enough to instill feelings of fear, right?

> flipping off the drivers if they honked

Honking within urban areas is forbidden unless used to prevent immediate danger (well, in France anyway).

Honking for "educational purpose", ie to yell at someone, is a major nuisance. Every honk annoys dozens of people around the driver, wakes up babies and so on.

Friends, don't let friends honk inconsiderately.

It's cultural. In India and other places in Asia, honking is just to say "hey, I'm here, did you see me?" and prevent an accident, but it happens so frequently that sitting in traffic is a cacaphony of honking at all times. In (my part of) the US, honking is to express displeasure at whatever it is the other driver did, and is infrequent. In other places, they might as well not install a horn, because it never gets used.

It's used much the same in NYC and some other than areas. A quick tap to say "hey I'm here and I'm doing something" like changing lanes or pulling out of traffic

Aside: I really wish cars had two different horns. A nice little boop horn, to say "hey I'm here" or "lights green buddy" and then the big honking thing that says "you nearly hit me by rolling through that stop sign, pay better attention"

They're 12V contained electronics with a wire, e.g. adding a boat horn to your car is an hour install at most.

I've done it. I've got a little loud speaker that plays a soft awooga sound when I press a button, but it would be nice to have a factory option, or even a standard

> I really wish cars had two different horn

I really wish cars didn't have horns. Or that horns would be louder inside than outside for drivers to "feel" it accordingly.

99% of the honks I hear are useless to prevent any incoming danger (too late, honking to say "hi", honking to express displeasure...)

I've used the horn once in the last 10 years, and I shouldn't have.

If you want to expand your mind, travel to south east Asia or India for a bit and see a different way of how billions of people live and drive every day.

Yep. I cannot speak for India but I lived in China for a few years. Honking is useless there as well.

It is used a lot, but without actual benefit IMHO.

Edit: perhaps less useless since drivers tend not to look before changing lane. That's another issue.

This is not true in the US, at least in Washington state for example. Honking = speech

https://law.justia.com/cases/washington/supreme-court/2011/8...

> The woman at the center of that case, Helen D. Immelt, had been raising chickens in Snohomish County, Wash., apparently in violation of her local homeowners association covenants. A neighbor complained, and Ms. Immelt, according to court documents, drove over at 6 a.m. and applied some free-speech payback.

The Pacific Northwest has always had a libertarian streak, I doubt this would be ruled permissible in other states.

Are late night home parties with loud music also considered free speech or is it an illegal nuisance?

I don't think you've been to NYC in the last 5 years or so if you think that bikers aren't routinely failing to yield to pedestrians. The worst and most dangerous culprits are the people whizzing around on e-bikes with a complete disregard for pedestrian safety or traffic laws.

The drivers in NYC are comparatively safe. They drive relatively slowly (compared to other parts of the country), pay attention to pedestrians, and obey traffic lights and signs.

Even per capita of bike riding vs. car riding, the deaths from drivers are disproportionate.

> bikers aren't routinely failing to yield to pedestrians

I didn't say that, I think it is true. That said, I also think pedestrians sometimes have an expectation that a biker would yield in a place where they wouldn't even try with a car (ie. crossing the road between two vehicles into the bike lane).

> Failing to yield to pedestrians where?

This is what you said, and what I am responding to.

Also, I would suggest that deaths from drivers are probably only higher because the probability of a collision being fatal is a lot higher when one party in the collision is 2 tons, and that the fatality rate is not a good proxy for the rate of total accidents (even the rate of total accidents where someone ends up in a hospital). I have not seen a credible measurement for that, but I would expect from what I have seen in my 6 years living in Manhattan that the accident rate with bikes is a lot higher than it is with cars, and that so is the rate of injuries. As a pedestrian, my chance of getting killed in a traffic accident are so astronomically low that I actually care a lot more about my probability of being injured than my probability of being killed.

> my chance of getting killed in a traffic accident are so astronomically low

Are they really? You have a higher chance of being killed by a car while you are inside a building, than you are of being killed by a cyclist.

Yes, they are. A city of 8 million had ~200 fatalities last year.

Also, I'm not concerned about getting killed by a cyclist. I'm concerned about getting hit by one. Those are not the same thing.

NYC averages less than 1 pedestrian killed by bikes every year.

https://www.nyc.gov/html/dot/downloads/pdf/nycdot-pedestrian...

There are ~300 pedestrian injuries caused by bikes every year vs 10,000 caused by cars.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/27/nyregion/elderly-pedestri...

Your feelings about bikes are in direct contradiction with the data.

One more time: The number of people killed by each does not matter to me.

What matters is the chance of getting hit at all. I still have not seen a credible study about causes of accidents involving an injured pedestrian.

Did you read the comment you replied to? I will say it again: there were 300 pedestrian injuries caused by bikes and 10,000 caused by cars in NYC in 2017. Click on the link.

I did read it. To spell it out for you: Looking at the official records (which the NYT did - I did read the thing you cited) will severely underreport bike-pedestrian collisions and the resulting injuries because almost all of them are not handled through official accident reporting channels, so they don't get counted.

Like I said again, I have yet to see a credible study counting non-fatal injuries from bikes in the city. Someone could do this, for example, by randomly sampling ER patients to see how many were involved in bicycle-pedestrian crashes, but nobody has.

Also, that NYT article is almost a pro-bike op-ed in its tone, and I would suggest finding sources that at least sound a little more neutral on your issues of choice.

I expect people to yield when I have the right of way. Regardless of their mode of transport.

You aren't anti-cycling, you are anti-uneducated assholes.

> I have a pretty strong anti-cycling stance, because I watched my New York neighborhood that was a pedestrian paradise significantly degraded by bike lanes.

A car driver, a cyclist and a pedestrian walk into a café and order ten cream cakes. When the waitress places them on their table the car driver grabs nine of them and scoffs them in his face, then he leans over to the pedestrian and whispers: “don’t let the cyclist take your one”.

I've been all but shoved aside by cyclists on sidewalks. Don't try that crap with me.

If that was a car you'd have been dead. 20 people in the US died today because of that.

https://www.npr.org/2023/06/26/1184034017/us-pedestrian-deat...

"Be glad you weren't killed, you ungrateful swine" isn't the tone cyclists should be taking in a thread about dignity.

I perceive your tone as purely hostile and frankly pretty ignorant, so maybe don’t talk about tone.

Aside from that, hating a form of mobility is weird. People that are assholes in cars will be assholes on bikes and vice versa.

Cars kill children not just on sidewalks, but inside buildings.

https://www.standard.co.uk/news/london/wimbledon-school-tea-...

The problem here is not the cyclist -- though that's for sure a dick move -- but the lack of proper space for cyclists to exist. There'll be seventy-two lanes for cars, and maybe one cycle lane which'll end up occupied by parked cars anyways.

I get it, but affluent Bikeys are often insufferable and have a chip on their shoulder. To pedestrians and other bicyclists as well.

And this ableist anti-pedestrian shit is still here. Wonderful.

Louis Rossmann talked about cyclists not respecting pedestrians yesterday [0].

[0] NYC's toxic ebike culture almost killed 4 people; let's talk about it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nrtLWilSoNI

Meanwhile hundreds of people per year are being killed by NYC's toxic car culture. It would be interesting to see a per-mile comparison, but ebikes are looking a helluva lot safer by comparison.

I'm impressed that being indignant and entitled wasn't a part of your neighborhood before the cyclists came in. Really does sound like paradise!

> Bicyclists … indignant and entitled

I will tell you who is entitled, driver of a 20 ton construction truck that drove over pedestrian area, where children play, to beat traffic. This was on pavement, few meters from the front door of my house.

It's amazing how you post this and a bunch of cyclists come out, elbowing each other aside to be the first to act out their most obnoxious stereotypes. "Yeah, we bomb down the sidewalks at 30 and categorically refuse to yield to pedestrians while shouting 'Share the road!' at anyone using an engine, and you should be grateful we didn't get in an SUV and plow through a daycare center!"

What’s amazing is that you have formed an absurd hostile image of bicyclists in your head and actually post as if that was normal.

When confronted, you immediately suspect a concerted action against you by a group of bicyclists. Sounds very paranoid to me.

No, I'm just sick of cyclists who think they can ride on the sidewalk.

You're the one imputing all this crap to others.

"Muni trains close their doors and pull one foot out of the station just to wait at a red light"

What is the reason for this? I see it all the time in metro areas, and it always blows my mind that traffic lights aren't synced with the tram schedules.

I answered upthread.

Sometimes I suspect that there is signaling going on that helps the traffic signals to favor the light rail train here. Then, sometimes, I suspect that there is not.

> how Muni trains close their doors and pull one foot out of the station just to wait at a red light

There are safety and scheduling reasons for this. They are not merely trying to snub riders. For example, the light rail trains here have a standard for how long they open their doors at each station. It's something like 14 seconds. A vehicle with open doors will also allow passengers to disembark; it's a two-way passage. So should they sit in the station with closed doors, or push off a few yards down to the intersection? Now, other motorists see a train stopped at a station and they think one thing. They see a train stopped and waiting for a red light and they know that it will proceed through on green. It seems weird to imagine a train that lingers at the station as if it's boarding but it's not, it's really waiting for the light to change, and then it will pounce on the opportunity. That's less than predictable behavior, as far as other motorists are concerned.

Our transit authority reminds riders to arrive at the stop 5 minutes early. We're also reminded that if we miss this one, another one is on the way. Passengers need not inherit that toxic road rage.

That's exactly what I'm talking about. The space is for drivers. The rules governing the space are tuned for the predictability and convenience of drivers. The light rail is just a slower, less maneuverable, very timidly driven car that we're all sharing.

It wasn't like that in The Netherlands. Urban spaces where the LRVs operate have few cars and fewer traffic lights. The train moves like it means business and anything in its way scatters. As a passenger, it feels like you & your journey matter. On Muni it's like you're in a DMV waiting room.

Well, I suppose if you want to seize on one reason out of several, then I suppose you win. I could've easily have said that pedestrians also expect the same sort of behavior at a red/green light.

> Our transit authority reminds riders to arrive at the stop 5 minutes early.

For reference, In the Netherlands you only strictly need to be at the stop 30 seconds before departure, as that is when the doors close in preparation for departure.

> Now, other motorists see a train stopped at a station and they think one thing. They see a train stopped and waiting for a red light and they know that it will proceed through on green.

Why in the hell would drivers need to know that? Leave the train with the doors open at the station to allow any late comers to board. When the track clears start the traffic light cycle to stop car traffic, close the train doors and depart. The drivers see a red light and hopefully know to stop, whether or not they can see a train waiting.

That's nothing compared to Tokyo and Osaka. The train arrives within 20 seconds of its scheduled time, the doors open for about 10 seconds, and 3 seconds after the doors close the train starts moving again.

> Short of tickets to Amsterdam for everyone, I don’t know how to fix it.

I just got back to the US from Amsterdam. I'll never look at these awful streets the same again.

This was my experience as well. I went in fall of last year for four days to attend Blender (the 3D modeling software) Conference, and it was simply delightful. I walked to and from the conference center every day, took the metro a few times, got to ride the high-speed rail from the station that's literally integrated right into Schipol airport, and witnessed more bikers than I've ever seen in one place. All of this while the city and its infrastructure was clean, quiet, safe, and beautiful.

Then I came back to Los Angeles. For reference, one time while taking the metro I had to evacuate because one of the cars caught on fire and had smoke billowing out the windows. I wound up trapped near the Walk of Fame in Hollywood at roughly 11PM, because when I tried to catch a bus out of there, a bunch of idiots were parked directly in front of the bus stop and the bus driver was forced to just drive right past me because they couldn't pull over and stop. So then I hailed an Uber and had to wait nearly half an hour for it to arrive and pick me up because of how utterly packed the streets were with bumper-to-bumper cars.

I used to semi-jokingly tell my friends and family I wanted to move to Europe. Then I went to Amsterdam. Now I am dead serious when I tell my friends and family I want to move to Europe. Although, I'll probably go somewhere with slightly warmer weather than the Netherlands — Portugal and Spain are both high on my list of candidates currently.

I'm seriously thinking about this as well because I look at my future in America and see very few options but car-dependent atomized misery and I'm terrified of it. I just can't go back to the crushing boredom that characterized my childhood. But I'm afraid to make a move because everything I see says tech salaries are a joke in Europe unless you make it to, like, Google in Switzerland or something.

The improvement to my mood of being somewhere nice, safe, and walkable is truly ridiculous. It feels like someone slipped some drugs into my coffee. How sad it is that we in America starve like this for a human way of life. Living here feels like a misery for money tradeoff and I don't know what to do.

I've got a similar discontent growing. For me it's this feeling that I'm working for the machine when I should be working against it. The anti-human tendencies of that machine aren't so directly unlivable for me, they're just evidence that I'm on the wrong side.

I have a slow transition plan for getting to something more meaningful:

1. Take classes part time (doing this)

2. Pay off house, switch to fill time focus on skillet transition, part time work

3. Go be a novice who codes well in a separate field

Maybe you should have a similar slow transition plan. For me just having the plan feels better.

For instance, there are remote positions that hire from all over the globe. With a job like that you could relocate anywhere without a salary change. Perhaps something like that should be your goal.

Thanks for the suggestion! I've started looking a little into the global remote thing and it sounds amazing. Would probably take me a while to get into such a position because I'm very junior still but it's something to aim for.

My current position is like that. We have this app, "donut" which is sort of like blind dating for work, it will pair people up at random and look at their calendars and schedule them with 30 minutes for chitchat.

Sounds cheesy, and it kind of is, but you get to know your coworkers. Last week's donut was with someone from Kenya, currently in Malta for the month. She works during the week and travels during the weekends.

Myself, I haven't really taken advantage of the location flexibility. But I'm just saying the positions are out there. If you're competing on the global scale you probably want to specialize a bit more than you otherwise would. X years of experience might not be enough.

I worked for a startup whose product was a workflow orchestrator. They failed, so I emailed their biggest competitor (who clearly wasn't making the same mistakes), and said: "If you can't beat 'em, join em?" And now I'm working on a different workflow orchestrator. I picked workflow orchestrators because I like working with graph structures, and I think that familiarity with them might be relevant to future topics I want to work on.

I'm not trying to pitch workflow orchestrators to you, I'm just saying it's handy to have a thing that you're into which makes you stand out when applying for positions that are adjacent to that thing.

It's worth thinking about early on because you might be able to slant your work towards more exposure to that thing.

It's so strange because it isn't that people are flooding into cities and bringing their car fixation with them. As a rural/suburban person, nobody I know from here drives when they're traveling in a city because the driving experience is so miserably bad compared to driving in the country. It's the city people who think moving five feet every thirty seconds and bathing in an ocean of car horn noises is somehow compatible with human life.

> It's the city people who think moving five feet every thirty seconds and bathing in an ocean of car horn noises is somehow compatible with human life.

Some even manage to enjoy it. I did not believe anyone actually wanted, let alone enjoyed the misery of modernity until I experienced one such person firsthand. It blowed my mind, I was in shock for a straight day. The guy genuinely "liked" the new Transformers movie (which was beyond awful), "enjoyed" fast food, and "liked" the big car-honk-filled city center and CO2-infested loud mall. I'm yet to see a more oversocialized person. When I think of words 'deranged' and 'insane', no criminal but this guy appears in my mind's eye.

Respectfully, who made you the arbiter of taste? Are people not allowed to like movies and foods and environments that you don't? Isn't it great that the world has something for everyone?

This argument becomes recursive almost immediately. He criticizes their opinion; you criticize his opinion of their opinion; he criticizes your opinion of his opinion of their opinion, and so forth.

You're right, my comment reads like I was stating merely my taste from your perspective and mine. My mistake. To clarify, I don't buy subjectivism and believe that there's an universal one moral truth independent of human minds. I believe this truth says humans ought not live in a technological world, for that they're not designed for it, and that one who have successfully (!) adapted to technological life as to not feel any distress and even enjoy it must be one with a malformed psyche, one far from his original nature and thus morally bad.

Indeed from your perspective this is still merely my "taste", my point is that this is truth independent of my existence from mine and apparently many agree.

A great post. My only nitpick is that Amsterdam isn’t a particularly good example of active travel in NL.

Why not? I’ve lived there for years, and although it’s not perfect, I think it’s very easy to get around both walking and cycling.

Maastricht, to give one example, is considerably nicer for walking and cycling. Remember GP isn't saying it's absolutely bad for walking and cycling, just that Amsterdam isn't great by NL standards. And it's not.

Amsterdam may not be the best existing public transit (+cycling friendly), but it is the most visited city in the NL - and it is good enough at it - that it is understandable how it becomes the standard for how a (large) city can be decent to non-drivers

I myself have never been to any other places in the NL and use Amsterdam as an anecdotal example of how things can be good

(Also of how bikes with peda- instead of handgrip-breakes designed for tall people are tricky for us shorter folk)

I imagine more people who've traveled, and are not from the Netherlands, are likely to have been to Amsterdam than to Maastricht, meaning it's easier to index on how Amsterdam functions than Maastricht for discussion.

From an American perspective it could be. Amsterdam is the largest city in our country and it still pulls together walking, cycling and public transport in a way that doesn’t suck. Of course smaller towns have it easier in some ways because of the way Dutch towns are historically configured. What makes the large cities interesting is that they are somewhat metropolitan and still have the Dutch vibe.

Driving in Amsterdam sucks, parking costs you your leg per five minutes, bikes are very agressive, pedestrians fill the roads because there is more tourism than the city was designed for.

Its one of the worst places in NL I've been, from a driving perspective.

Good. The fewer cars for frivolous purposes, the better

I don’t like it either but it’s very easy to get around if you aren’t in a car. So a good example.

That's the point. Maintaining car infra is expensive, so owning a car should be expensive and discouraged. That's why there using a car to get to a destination usually is much slower compared to a bike. Cars are still allowed for the people that either really need them or don't need them but are willing to pay extra But I agree that Utrecht is a better city bc of less tourists and even more bike infra

Of course, and I admire that, but its therefore not a good example of a city where cars, pedestrians and bikes coexist (because its not meant to be one)

Why? All of them coexist and most efficient ones get preferential treatment, for example priority on intersections/semaphores, more direct/shorter paths for mass transit and bikes What's not that good is the train quality/frequency/price, for this Switzerland is much better (pricey but good quality and frequent), but NL is still ahead of many countries even in this regard

> Even a lot of the anti-cycling stance comes down to, “What am I, poor?”

Maybe this will change now that bikes cost more than most used cars. Spending 15K on a bike is a thing now.

Ah, let us look at the data. In reality, only rich (and white) folks can afford to live in areas that are not car-dependent.

https://granfondodailynews.com/2020/01/17/is-north-american-...

> From 2001 to 2017 the number of people cycling increased the fastest among high income, highly educated, employed, white men between the ages 25 and 44.

That doesn't have data. It doesn't even have good summations.

How is "cycling" defined? For pleasure or for day-to-day travel? How was the data collected? How did they include/ account for the unemployed 20-somethings in poor suburbs who aren't biking to work, aren't "cycling" in events, aren't carrying the family groceries home in a basket, but are on bikes constantly going between houses (and maybe a gas station food mart)?

All that means is that pedestrian-friendly neighborhoods are in demand, which is great! What if we built more and more of them?

> In reality, only rich (and white) folks can afford to live in areas that are not car-dependent

It’s just artificial scarcity, like fine art.

The cause and effect might be reversed.

1) Most people prefer to drive... look at any country that is getting richer - people want to buy cars.

2) It is only when people cannot afford to drive or driving is too inconvenient (traffic, or narrow streets/lack of parking in Europe, or outright restrictions ), they will use alternative modes of transportation.

3) The more people are thus inconvenienced, the more public support there is for the alternative modes (simply by the numbers); moreover, an average person biking and taking transit becomes richer/nicer, so the political will to improve the experience increases even faster than the number of people; plus the experience becomes nicer even without extra investment.

It's a flywheel either way.

Now, you could argue that global warming is bad / enough freeways cannot be built / etc., sure. Maybe we cannot have nice things.

But don't argue that people want to live in urban paradise and some contrived system is simply not giving them what they want. Most people everywhere, when they can, want to drive and live in houses. Except in some places many can afford that and have the infrastructure, and in some only a few do. It's not like car ownership and traffic is that low in Europe, given how admittedly convenient it is to not have one and how relatively expensive car ownership is, esp. in relation to incomes.

> It's not like car ownership and traffic is that low in Europe, given how admittedly convenient it is to not have one

Indeed. Germany, France, Italy, Spain, etc. are all among the countries with the highest vehicles per capita in the world (it's not as much as in the US, but then in the US people can drive starting at 16 years old, so it messes the stats quite a bit).

> 1) Most people prefer to drive..

You don’t know that. You would have to run the experiment - spend equal amount of money on infrastructure for bikes and for cars. Then see.

Most British cities are tiny, you can cross most of them on an e-bike in like 15 to 30 minutes. Except London of course. But there is usually no safe way to cross them.

When I ask people in London, why are your not cycling, 95% say they are afraid of getting hit by a car. They are wrong - they will be killed by a truck. Most cyclists in London due to 4 axle construction trucks. I have seen one of the bastards illegally drive into a cycle lane, then onto a pavement where women walk with kids, and drive on that pavement to get around traffic. I have seen a BMW stuck on a bend in a segregated cycle way at Tower of London. I’ve seen a wolksvagen in a cycle lane upside down.

Go to a rich and cycling safe are of London like hackney, there are plenty of bikes. Go to an area with dangerous roads, like Surrey, no bikes

We spend insane amount of money on car infra. We just built a new tonnes in east London, the only way to cross the river for miles, and you can only cross in a car.

Here's a great link: "Vehicle ownership starts to grow quickly when countries reach income of about 2,500 per capita in purchasing-power-parity (PPP) terms. Rapid growth continues until income per capita reaches about 10,000. Saturation level is at about 850 vehicles per 1,000 people."

The limiting factor for having tons of cars is income.

https://www.imf.org/-/media/Websites/IMF/imported-flagship-i... [pdf with per-country history]

I fail to see how this accounts for difference in car vs bike infrastructure.

Countries at "income of about 2,500 per capita" are not exactly known for their car infrastructure. Moreover, by necessity with low car ownership they cannot have car-centric cities - most people don't have cars. I mean have you been to Hanoi or Belize City, or some place similar?

Yet, despite crappy roads, short distances and chaotic traffic (and good climate, in many cases), people get cars as soon as they can afford them - instead of staying on bikes and mopeds that they are already otherwise using. Until, if IMF is to be believed, they reach 0.85 cars per person.

Those places are freaking deathtraps. It's basically what the article is talking about! Those cities are _extremely_ anti-pedestrian. They may not be car-centric, but they are definitely moped centric.

There are usually no sidewalks, or the sidewalks are full of parked mopeds or you'll be walking along and the sidewalk will just end abruptly.

You are usually forced to walk along the road. Nobody will stop when you're crossing the road, they just weave.

A quick Google search shows that Vietnam has 29.81 per 100,000 of population deaths from traffic accidents.

These places are awful examples of safe bike/pedestrian cites. Of course people prefer cars there, it's much safer!

Well they don't have much car infrastructure either, and operating a car there is much less convenient than a moped or a bicycle, not to mention extremely expensive relative to income. Plus the car is not necessary by definition since most people don't have one. So it's not really massive spending on car infrastructure, or distances created by car-centric lifestyle that's driving the adoption. It really feels like moving the goalposts, these cities are more convenient for bikes and mopeds than cars by any standard (faster, much cheaper, easier to park etc.). I don't think safety is a primary driver either...

Or you can also just take middle-income cities, like Moscow. It wasn't built with many cars in mind, and there's severe lack of parking in particular. People used to have fistfights over public parking spots when I was a kid :) Yet, they still buy cars until traffic becomes completely unreasonable, it used to be that transit across the city (where I was going) tool ~1 hour, and my co-worker who drove a similar route would take 2 hours thru traffic, and he would still drive. Obviously so did all those other suckers stuck in traffic, that's how much they wanted to drive :)

> Well they don't have much car infrastructure either

They have hundreds of motorways -> roads exclusively for car use. They have zero cycle ways. Like this is not subjective, look at the amount of money spent on ‘active travel’ anywhere, it is never even 5% of road budget.

> Moscow

I’ve cycled in Russia. Drivers stick their hand out of the window to yank on the steering or push you. There is zero tolerance for cyclists.

We are talking about in-the-city commuting. The local roads/streets at some stage of poverty are full of mopeds and bicycles, with very few cars. When people have no choice. When they have a choice, they could get better bicycles or mopeds. Instead they get more cars, before these cars are even convenient to use (e.g. you may get stuck behind a bicycle with a produce cart for 10 minutes at 5mph as mopeds stream around both of you).

These cities start out in no way optimized for cars, basically by definition (nobody has cars). The reasons cars do better in them too, before the govt responds with more car infrastructure, is because cars are just simply better in terms of convenience. If people wanted to continue cycling after they get more rich, the govt could have built infrastructure for that much cheaper and easier.

Also btw, no matter what, bicycling is still marginal in most climates and for many people who are not fit. The real thing to discuss is transit... many of the middle-income and even poor cities have great transit, but people don't clog the transit and then grudgingly switch to driving, it's the other way around :)

But you're assuming that people want to own cars to make short journeys.

When I lived in Edinburgh, I had a car but I would never use it within the city or anywhere that I could get to on a train/bus. This attitude was pretty common among my entire social circle.

Reading all your comments in this thread felt surreal to me. I guess I'm in an anti-car bubble, because I've never met anyone with your opinion before.

How short is short? Edinburgh looks pretty small. I just plotted a route from a random point in the center to a place called Bonaly that looks like a residential area, 5 miles away. Two observations is that traffic is pretty bad (red), so it looks like people drive even though transit is available, probably confirming my prior observation that people will choose to drive until driving capacity is used up or over-used then switch to other modes. 2nd is that transit will take 43 minutes vs 25mins of driving (and that doesn't account for waiting time, nobody has exactly perfect timing), so driving is still faster :)

As for cars it's actually one of the biggest things I changed my mind on in my life. I used to be anti-car and always lived in walkable areas till my mid/late twenties. Then I actually tried driving and living in non walkable areas and I couldn't believe how wrong I was :) Especially when I go back to visit walkable areas and it's annoying and getting anywhere takes forever, something I never noticed when I lived there because it was the default.

> Most people prefer to drive

> It is only when people cannot afford to drive or driving is too inconvenient (traffic, or narrow streets/lack of parking in Europe, or outright restrictions ), they will use alternative modes of transportation.

This is literally a tautology. "People find driving more convenient, except when driving is less convenient".

> But don't argue that people want to live in urban paradise and some contrived system is simply not giving them what they want. Most people everywhere, when they can, want to drive and live in houses.

Price signals are real. The fact that millions of people choose to pay large amounts of money to live in big cities and not drive instead of moving out to the sticks is proof that it is an extremely desirable lifestyle for a large fraction of the population.

It's not. First, there's the "afford" bit, that is the key. And second obviously it's a tradeoff based on infrastructure available, but my point is unless you outright restrict it, everywhere in the world people will fill up as much driving/parking capacity as available, then a bit more, and only then consider other options. Hence gridlock and expensive/scarce/both parking in all of the "big cities".

That is not true for biking or transit - nowhere in the world, that I'm aware of, do people clog the bike lanes or trains until they are barely usable, then switch grudgingly to other modes of transportation.

People in big cities still drive. I mean, LA discussed here is a big car-centric city, why does this have to be about living in the sticks?

>Even a lot of the anti-cycling stance comes down to, “What am I, poor?”

I agree with the overall point that people don't want to cycle because the experience sucks, but your description feels like an unnecessarily inflammatory way to say "people are willing to pay for a more pleasant experience". Nobody says "a lot of the anti-cheap laptop stance comes down to, "what am I, poor?".

Nothing about the post you responded to says "people are willing to pay for a more pleasant experience".

The closest is "people aren't willing to pay to improve an unpleasant experience" which isn't related to purchasing a laptop in anyway.

> Nothing about the post you responded to says "people are willing to pay for a more pleasant experience".

Are we reading the same post here? The one I'm seeing lists out all the reasons why cycling/public transport sucks, all of which can be avoided if you pay several hundred dollars per month for a car.

OP's whole point is that paying for a car is a much more dignified and enjoyable way to travel.

And then the tax base doesn't want to pay to improve public transit, because they already have a car.

I have literally seen people scoff at biking or riding the bus as something for poor people. It is a common sentiment.

This is a hyper regional statement. Where I live, you'd be considered a weirdo for carrying that sentiment. Drive an hour away, and the statement could be considered a lot of credence. All we can do is make the right choices for ourselves and help influence those in our spheres to encourage the behaviour we want to see.

Anecdote time. Ten years ago I (Mexican, living in Mexico, a bit "white-er" than the average Mexican skin color) worked for a Silicon Valley startup with HQs in Mountain View. One time I was visiting said HQ, I met several people, I got to talk with one of them (Chinese/Asiatic looking woman) about how I was moving while I was there, and where was I staying (she didn't know where I was from).

At some point I told her that I hadn't rented a car, so I was basically walking. And because I wanted to go to some outlet, I was thinking on taking the bus. Her comment was: "Don't take the bus, that's for Mexicans!", I had to swallow my surprise and keep a poker face, just answering something along the lines of "ooh yeah? thanks for the advice".

I guess the stigma that only poor people (And we Mexicans are poor you know haha) take the bus is pretty alive in some parts of the US.

What a weird thing for her to say given that Asian Americans use public transit in great numbers.

Then again, I've noticed that the ones with money are utterly alien to those of us that don't have it or grew up without it.

If you take the ethnicity out of this and stick to economics does it have the same outcome?

You can't do that! Without keeping differing ethnicities at war with each other, how can we maintain power?

Asian Americans lump together homeland countries of over half the world’s population.

The waves of immigration also look different demographically; the people who came over to build the railroads and staff laundromats, restaurants and nail salons are very different from the tech worker on H1B. (And the latter often look down on the former.)

Yeah, I had a similar experience as a European travelling to the US. My coworkers were horrified at the idea that I'd take a bus.

The one time I had visited and hadto travel longer distance in the US I took a greyhound and boy, it was a interesting experience. Back home, going by bus was the norm but in the US it's... Really different.

Greyhound is a really bad bus operator, and they are the only option for a lot of routes. But on more competitive routes like NYC to Maine or NYC to upstate cities you get much better operators. I’ve had very positive experiences riding on those corridors with OurBus and Concorde Coach Lines. Clean seats, quiet passengers and on time departure. So it’s not bad everywhere in the US.

greyhound literally is for poor people.

Surprisingly, more people are opting for Greyhound because of the horrors of flying since COVID-19.

Greyhound is also, in my mind, significantly different than regional public transit. I consider it more like an airline for poor people. Public transit, definitely there are poor people using it, and there are also commuters, especially on the Express lines, which have a premium fare and operate exclusively during office-commute hours. (R.I.P.)

> Surprisingly, more people are opting for Greyhound because of the horrors of flying since COVID-19.

Are we talking during the covid era (eg. 2020-2022), or the post-covid era (2023+)? I can understand how flying during the covid era sucked with mandatory masks and PCR tests, but my flights in 2023 were all pleasant. All the covid protocols were lifted, and I didn't experience any long lines at check-in or at customs/passport/security lines.

Greyhound is owned by German Flixbus.

That's just ownership though. The conditions, culture, and experience and nothing like in Germany.

Same for me. I visited my company's US branch in San Francisco (I work in Copenhagen) and the colleagues there were horrified that I was planning to walk to a nearby Best Buy (~10 minutes walk). They didn't actually let me do it — they insisted to give me a car ride until I relented.

that's about the equivalent of calling someone 'asiatic', a term used for animal species lmao. of course you probably don't give a shit, and neither do we really care about calling you names either.

There's a difference between using an inappropriate word but describing the same phenomenon, and treating an ethnicity as synonymous with "poor".

mexican isn't an ethnicity. it's a nationality. there are native american mexicans and the whitest of white european mexicans as well as "asiatic" (lmao lol) mexicans.

>mexican isn't an ethnicity. it's a nationality

It's both, but as an ethnicity it's subdivided in several cases based on their origin (e.g. "white mexican").

But can also be seen as the future/aspiring all-encompassing Mexican ethnicity through the inter-mixing (cultural and genetical) going on for centuries...

(It's not like "Spanish" in Spain are some pure ethnicity that always existed either, it's one that emerged by combination of several ethnicities).

Asiatic just means "from asia". It's used for all kinds of things Asian, including animal, plants, artifacts, geography, climate, and peoples.

It's gone out of favor in the US (because people like to change every term with newer versions) but it's still a word just meaning "being from asia".

> I guess the stigma that only poor people (And we Mexicans are poor you know haha) take the bus is pretty alive in some parts of the US.

Because it's mostly true.

It's not _always_ true and we shouldn't hold prejudices, but it would be just as wrong (though not as un-PC) to claim that public transit was used equally across income levels, racial/ ethnic checkboxes, etc.

"Americans who are lower-income, black or Hispanic, immigrants or under 50 are especially likely to use public transportation on a regular basis, Pew Research Center data show."

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2016/04/07/who-relie...

The bigger problem for most folks (not your racist co-worker) is the crime, drug use and general anti-social behavior on public transit. This will vary by city/ transit district, but it's gotten much worse in the last decade (after it had gotten much better for the previous two).

The funny thing is that a lot of the “crime, drug use, and general anti-social behavior” on transit is overblown in the very minds of people who don’t take transit regularly. Sure, in the US it’s nowhere near as pleasant as it could (or should) be, but it’s really not that bad, nor as slow as people with a car imagine it is.

My realtor said I was the only person she’s worked with who has ever bought a house that doesn’t own a car — in Los Angeles, of all places.

Yet 8 years later, I still get around by a mix of Uber and trains and bus. And the funny part is, I am almost always the first to arrive because I don’t have to worry about parking, and even with 50% of my trips done via Uber to fill in gaps in the network, after gas/insurance/parking I am still spending less!

I do walk a lot too, but that’s one place I would agree LA has absolutely systemically dropped the ball on outside of the historic pockets that the city didn’t demolish. I often feel like I’m the only one who has walked on a given sidewalk in years, and wonder if I’m supposed to be walking there

> The funny thing is that a lot of the “crime, drug use, and general anti-social behavior” on transit is overblown in the very minds of people who don’t take transit regularly.

Yes, it's unheard of that folks can become accustomed to circumstances which most people would view as abnormal or dangerous.

I've been riding public transit almost my entire life; I started riding _by myself_ when I was 8 so I could get to and from school, back when the Bronx was much more violent.

Riding during rush hour is a very different experience than riding off-hours. While I almost never felt unsafe (gotta keep your head on a swivel), lots of women have told me how they've regularly felt unsafe. Maybe it's some dude ranting on a subway car. Maybe it's one ranting on the subway platform. Maybe it's a dude sitting WAY too close on an empty bus. Then there's the open drug use on some systems like BART.

> but it’s really not that bad,

Maybe you're just more tolerant of crime, drug use and general anti-social behavior.

> general anti-social behavior

This term always amazes me, along with ‘loitering, was it designed to criminalise undesirables?

I’ve seen police called for ‘antisocial behaviour’ on kids swimming in a river and on teenagers hanging out and chatting at night.

I didn’t say it wasn’t pleasant— there’s so many ways transit comfort and safety could be improved — but it’s really not as bad as people who have never taken a train or bus, and never will regardless of how comfortable it is, say it is

I agree with you and I think it's the main point of the article: cities need to push to make public transport a "first class transportation medium" so that people from all Socioeconomic levels take it.

The same thing happens here in my city in Mexico: public transport is uncomfortable, slow, insecure and dirty. So, mid/high income population avoid using it and instead buy cars. The government then has to spend more money in infra for those cars; money that could be used to improve public transport.

I guess a difference between Mexico and USA is that because here the m as majority of people are "poor" , more people use public transport.

I spend more time in the Bay Area than I would like to. Despite everyone being outwardly extremely “progressive”, people in SFBA are generally extremely insular and bigoted. This expresses itself in many ways, including racism when the other person thinks you’re not the race they’re talking about (and it’s definitely not the exclusive provenance of whites).

My own recent anecdote: For context I’m white, but I speak Spanish, lived for a time in South America, and ended up marrying a US-born Mexicana. I wanted to get some legit Cali-Mex food while I was on a trip so got an Uber over to Mission and 24th which is a predominately Hispanic area. My Uber arrives and it’s a hippie-looking white woman in a Prius /covered/ in left-wing bumper stickers including one that said “Stop Racism” and a BLM sticker.

So we make small talk on the way, when we get to my destination and as I’m about to open the door to step out she says to me “be careful, this area isn’t so safe, there’s a lot of Mexicans.” I don’t know how to react exactly so I just leave. As I’m walking around looking at restaurants I realize nearly every street parked car is a relatively new import luxury vehicle. So it’s safe enough to street park your $100k car, but I need to watch out for those scary Mexicans.

As a white person I encounter this stuff a lot outside of work where people feel comfortable “confiding” their racism to me. For the record I gave her 1 star in Uber. The more left-leaning an area in the US, the more affluent and white it tends to be and the more likely I am to encounter casual racism.

There is this story that nobody takes the bus in L.A. but when I go there and ride the bus the bus is always full. It is not bad at all to ride the bus from Beverly Hills to Hollywood but the bus does not stop at Rodeo Drive, you have to pick it up on the next street over.

Surprised to hear the bus is always full. I took the Metrolink train from Union Station to San Bernardino recently, during an hour when people ought to be going home from work, and it was spookily empty. The one single other passenger in sight told me it was usually so empty. I thought of how crazy it was to offer this huge rail infrastructure - which really did seem cheap and convenient - for so few people to use.

You have to provide public transport infrastructure _first_ if you want people to use it. You can't get rid of your car in the hope that 8 months down the line you can get a train; unless your boss is happy for you not physically attending work for 8 months, at least.

That line had over 10k daily riders in 2019, before people stopped commuting to office jobs and it dropped to about 1500. https://metrolinktrains.com/globalassets/about/agency/facts-...

It's still less than half its previous average at 4700 daily riders now. https://metrolinktrains.com/globalassets/about/agency/facts-...

that is honestly very little, barcelona is a lot less populated (1.5M) and even during non-tourist season we get 2 million riders per day (not deduped and people coming from nearby areas). I dont have stats of any particular line, but dividing that between the approx number of routes gives you about 50k riders per line. Some routes will have less, some routes will have way more (particularly subway lines)

>There is this story that nobody takes the bus in L.A. but when I go there and ride the bus the bus is always full

By that they mean "no middle class and up white person takes the bus".

Looking down on cyclists is a common sentiment in some parts of the world. Meanwhile here in Cambridge (the UK one) there are numerous people who cycle around the city simply because it's a better way to get around for lots of reasons. Those people range from students at the universities who in many cases will have very little disposable income to professionals with some of the most highly paid jobs in the country.

The idea that cycling is "for poor people" seems quite bizarre after living somewhere like this. Indeed it is one of the few things - in a city among the worst in the UK for inequality - that truly spans almost all financial and social classes.

The idea that a lot more money and resources need to be invested in improving facilities to make cycling and walking more attractive does resonate though. The arguments made in the article look on point here.

The sentiment that having money makes one "above" a form of transit is a bit despicable, but it absolutely is the case. I think particularly with public transit. "Hey, would you like to take a multi-leg two hour journey with at least ten minutes of waiting between each leg, or drive fifteen minutes?"

Two hours with a transfer to fifteen minutes is a bit much (not that I doubt such poor public transportation options exist), but the mental toll of driving, even just fifteen minutes is not to be ignored.

One problem in the United States is that transportation planners apparently think that buses are for the poor and people won’t ride them. Instead they want to build expensive light rail or subway when a good bus system would be much better, flexible, and affordable.

Curious what would be a good bus system? I've only ever lived in the US and can honestly say I've never seen one.

I use the busses in Boston all the time, and have been for over 20 years. Way back when it was a pain but ever since bus tracking apps showed up on the scene about 15 years ago it's been a smooth experience.

I live in Boston and would still use the T buses as an example of bus service as an afterthought. The buses are loud, uncomfortable, bus stops frequently have no shelter and are on busy roads with no buffer from 2-3 lanes of traffic, and there are almost no dedicated bus lanes so the bus gets stuck in the same traffic as all the cars.

In San Francisco Muni shelters are largely all the same whether for street level bus or tram. They're all equally awful because they were designed to be inhospitable in an attempt to prevent people from sleeping at them.

https://www.sfmta.com/sites/default/files/styles/teaser-col-...

Plenty of bus stops, special bus lanes, modern buses, air-conditioning, clean environment, frequent on-time schedules, and plenty of routes to take you to/from all major city areas and suburbs. No crazies and violent crime either.

Of course the city also needs to support walking the final 300-2000 ft to your destination after the bus stop. If most of your stops are some BS office or industrial zone, with roads build for cars, no shade, no shops, and nothing to do around, it's pointless.

Buenos Aires has about 200 bus lines with fairly high frequency (2-7 minutes during peak riding times) and almost all lines have overnight service, albeit at low frequency. Bus rides are highly subsidized. Congestion can get pretty bad during the day but you can get anywhere you want within the city.

The Berlin one… mostly doesn't suck? At least in zone B[0]. I don't trust them to not get in traffic jams in zone A.

They have USB chargers and WiFi on half of them.

[0] Zone A: core; Zone C: the part of the commuter belt outside the city limits; Zone B: between A and B — https://sbahn.berlin/en/tickets/the-vbb-fare-explained/fare-...

I was pleasantly surprised at San Antonio's bus system. They were everywhere downtown, frequent, and even had lines that go about an hour out of the city.

I was only there as a tourist though, I don't know how well they'd be for day-to-day life and cross-town trips.

In other cities where I have used buses regularly, I've found them to suffer a bit from limited routes, transfers, it taking 2 hours to get anywhere, and then buses stop running too early at night.

Buses could be ok, but the same attitude of compromise that swapped steel wheels for rubber also generates--

+ hard plastic seats

+ inadequate climate control

+ poor maintenance leading to excessive nose and exhaust fumes in the cabin

+ extremely poor personal space

+ seating configurations with poor leg room

+ convoluted routes and schedules, degrading point-to-point travel

+ the driving can be uneven, because they aren't much better off than riders

Light rail is better because the folks who design and operate the systems aren't bent on bargaining away the entire rider experience.

  hard plastic seats

https://s.hdnux.com/photos/01/23/05/56/21781404/4/1200x0.jpg

  inadequate climate control

I've not spent enough time on the current crop of Muni streetcars, but the old ones were horrific. They had fixed windows and really unreliable A/C. Perhaps the one saving grace of the first generation ones is that you could open the windows. BART's much worse, but the drivers will typically take note of cars without A/C because it can be indicative of bigger electrical problems.

  poor maintenance leading to excessive nose and exhaust fumes in the cabin

Poor maintenance is poor maintenance. For a while Muni drivers would disable the door interlocks on the trams because the doors were so unreliable. Used to be inattentive drivers would take off without checking to see if anyone was trying to board. Ask me how I know…

  extremely poor personal space
  seating configurations with poor leg room

https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2F...

Check out that seat right by the articulation joint. Or the seats next to the stairs

  convoluted routes and schedules, degrading point-to-point travel

This is a system not mode issue. BART's designed for point to point travel (mostly out of hubris really) and Muni is designed around multi-modal transfers.

  the driving can be uneven, because they aren't much better off than riders

Then you've really not seen just how bad auto train control can be. When manually operated I'd run into drivers who couldn't remember how long the train was and accelerate out of a 90 degree turn and knock people at the back out of their seats. In the early 00s Muni managed to actually derail real dramatically for the same reason.

Light rail can be better but not always. Certainly the diesel vs electric issue can come into play (although you can make some truly awful trolley coaches too).

There is another reason for building rail systems. The routes are fixed. It is easy to change a bus route by moving the stops around and issuing a new map. It is, as you say, expensive to change a rail route.

Because rail routes are fixed, that means that developers can count on their longevity, and therefore they develop real estate to match it. A rail line can greatly gentrify the neighborhoods it runs through, given a decade or two to get started. This is a big reason why many neighborhoods will protest and block and vote against any rail lines being built near them, because they know it will start the timer on rising property values, rising rents, new neighbors, and the destruction of low-income and affordable housing.

That flexibility is also a reason for building bus routes: they can be re-routed as needed due to construction or changing rider patterns, buses can be replaced (improved) without having to retrofit the entire system, new ones can be added where needed, old ones can be removed where not, etc.

Central planners might like the idea that they can choose which neighborhoods will succeed, but count me among those who think they can F themselves.

Buses work. They're cheaper than every kind of rail. They're more flexible. But planners and meddlers want control.

There's an ad in rotation right now on a popular local radio station where the whole bit is that character A's car isn't working, and character B talks about the great deals at a specific car dealership. "Don't walk," he exclaims and he shares the gospel of car ownership.

Literally, the whole framing is that walking sucks and is embarrassing :(

It's like idiocracy where they say something like "you drink water? like water, that you use to flush the toilet?". People are easily manipulated because they want to signal that they're valuable and/or rich; "walking is for poor people" ... well yes, also people who want to stay fit, or who care about the environment, or want to be closer to their community, or ...

If you're walking there are fewer opportunities to advertise to you

> If you're walking there are fewer opportunities to advertise to you

How so? I’m reminded of that sequence of shots in Zabriskie Point where Mark Frechette walks around Los Angeles and is assailed by billboards everywhere around him.

Perhaps GP meant that you can't fruitfully have cars advertised to you if you don't want to buy one

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mmXn01PbAss

Hey! Don't settle for walking.

In the vast majority of American postwar development, walking does suck and is embarrassing. That’s why the article’s framing about dignity for pedestrians in street design is interesting.

> inflammatory way to say "people are willing to pay for a more pleasant experience"

You got it all wrong! It does noy matter how the expience feels physically.

The problem is social stigma attached to cycling.

Like tell you mates you spent 3 weeks fixing your car, or built your own house, and it was super u pleasant and you broke your hand in the process - you are cool.

But tell them you cycled to work to improvr fitness, and you are a weirdo.

Few companies have showers on site, and "fitness" is frequently associated with sweating.

The last thing I would want to do is show up at an office for an 8 hour shift soaked in sweat. Where I live, it is humid enough during the summer that there's really only at most 4 months of the year where "pleasant" can be described to use the weather for biking.

In fact, the weather forecast for today is 85% humidity, and is going to hit 93% twice this week.

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