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Comment by goda90 | Hacker News Reader

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

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.

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.

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.

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".

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.

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.

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