Hacker News Reader

Comment by xtracto | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

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.)

> 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.

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".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com