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Comment by gavin_gee | Hacker News Reader

Some good commentary in this thread, however one topic thats never raised in the topic of affordable housing is fast cheap public transit.

I could never imagine being able to buy a house in London. but the train network makes it possible to live in a more affordable neighbourhood and commute as needed.

In the US we seem to think that cities can continue to have affordable housing in the most desireable areas. this is a false hope. what we need to have is faster cheaper transit to satelittle communities.

Seattle is the perfect example. If we have high speed rail between Bellingham and Seattle it would dramatically change the dynamics of the housing situation in Seattle.

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Available transit needs to include safe transit.

The current bus and light rail situation has turned off swaths of the working class to support the dredges of the drug-addict class by their lack of fare-enforcement and other low-end enabling schemes that sound great on paper, but lead to complicated downstream chilling effects on the entire region.

Public transit is much safer than driving in your car. Someone skipping fare does not compare to even a light fender bender.

I think when most people use "safe" in this context, they mean "comfortable" or "psychologically comfortable". Nobody enjoys sitting beside someone tweaking and shitting themselves, even if it's perfectly safe.

Well, even so, while most drivers don't mind driving, there is a significant minority who are actually kind of freaked out by driving -- big overlap with people who have experienced a serious wreck. I've met a few people like that.

And besides the ones who are so anxious about driving that the rest of us know about it, there's probably a lot of people who have mild anxiety about driving but just suppress it, get through it, and/or minimize unnecessary driving, because you can't avoid driving where they live.

And, considering the risks, it's not an irrational fear. Perhaps it's us who don't mind driving and are acclimated to it who are the strange ones.

Heck, I do find myself feeling this way sometimes. I've been driving long enough to be pretty comfortable, but I do notice feeling a lot more comfortable on safer feeling roads, eg with slower speeds, frequented by less hurried drivers. I think everyone does, to some degree, otherwise complaining about the crazy drivers from the next state over wouldn't be such a universal pastime in America :)

We pretend the risk and the associated rational anxiety of driving doesn't exist because driving is so commonplace, but it's there and it's pretty big.

Exactly.

I don't ever mind public transport. I have used public transport in multiple areas of the planet.

There are two quips:

1. You have to be there in someone else's time. You can't have 5 or 10 or 30 minutes if something comes up.

2. What you say. I don't want to rub my body with people who are wearing dirty clothes, smell, and has god-knows-what liquid on their clothes who might choose to cough without using their hands. (This has happened to me) So, I avoid public transport where there is this kind of intermingling. Fine with me where there are upper classes or similar in transport and it is enforced strictly.

If the rail comes every 15 minutes, you know you can plan to be a little early. Not hard at all.

True for subway. But not for longer distance/inter-city.

Maybe, I took an IC to get to school and it went from a village to a city center, so its possible, otherwise light rail the the norm. I figured out that if I got off at a certain stop, I could shave 15 minutes off my commute by switching to light rail from the IC. That took a couple tries to get timed out right to make the transfer.

Do you avoid elevators?

This isn’t a fair comparison, and you have to be arguing in bad faith to say this.

I have never seen someone pull out a gun, tweak out and rip out the hair of the girl sitting in front of them, or shit themselves, on an elevator. I have seen all of these on public transport in Seattle.

From another city, my younger brother was on the L in Chicago when a gun went off. Someone shot into the ceiling, no one got hurt, but holy hell idk if I could ride after that.

I still like the light rail in Seattle and am a massive supporter of public transport, but I understand people who won’t take it because of the psychological threats.

I've never seen any of that on any public transport anywhere in the world. I've been in an elevator when someone's thrown up though.

Majority of elevators I take tend to be open to the public -- car parks being a big one.

Elevators tend to be restricted to a specific group of people (inhabitants, customers, employees, etc.) in a way that public transport is not. If an elevator smells like urine, has suspicious stains or trash, chances are I'd look for an alternative. But it just so happens that the elevators I come across tend to be clean, unlike the public transport.

And I say this as someone who still takes public transport a lot, but it's increasingly less comfortable.

Not GP, but I certainly don't look forward to them. They are also much shorter duration experiences, and I can probably count one one hand the number of times I have shared an elevator with someone tweaking or shitting themselves, vs. the every day experience of seeing that on the bus.

Maybe not explicitly when traveling but when picking a place to live, sure.

There's security at the gates- much before the elevators.

> 1. You have to be there in someone else's time. You can't have 5 or 10 or 30 minutes if something comes up.

There's this cool thing you can do in the 21st century where if you go into Google maps, or Apple maps, or any other map app, you can check how long it takes to get to your destination

> 2. What you say. I don't want to rub my body with people who are wearing dirty clothes, smell, and has god-knows-what liquid on their clothes who might choose to cough without using their hands. (This has happened to me) So, I avoid public transport where there is this kind of intermingling. Fine with me where there are upper classes or similar in transport and it is enforced strictly.

Oh no! How will the upper class in every other society that uses public transit deal.

There is something to be said about fare enforcement, the homeless, and societal norms, but this certainly isn't it.

You can't get mad at someone and think that will get them to agree with you. lol.

> Someone skipping fare

This, obviously, isn't what raises fear in people. "Safer" for some statistics, like a car crash, but also much less safe for things like getting stabbed, spit on, confronted. Sure, it's somewhat rare on public transport, but they're exactly zero in my car, at freeway speeds.

edit: A quick google search shows two stabbings, one slit throat, and a page full of fights, in my area, over the last two years. While the statistics are low, in terms of per person*miles, this real difference, and the 2hr vs 30 minute times, is what keeps people and families in cars. Fundamental changes are needed.

I may never get stabbed in my car, but I will get brake-checked, cut off, buzzed, rammed, and shot at [0]. Driving is stressful and I dread every getting on the highway.

[0]: https://everytownresearch.org/reports-of-road-rage-shootings...

Everytown is definitely a biased source to use

You can still get shot on a train.

> things like getting stabbed, spit on, confronted

Also how much fentanyl and methamphetamine smoke do you inhale/touch everyday in your car? Compared to public transit

https://www.washington.edu/news/2023/09/07/uw-assessment-fin...

>> Researchers detected methamphetamine in 98% of surface samples and 100% of air samples, while fentanyl was detected in 46% of surface and 25% of air samples.

What's funny is over-policing public transit would probably take only a fraction of the resources that private transportation does.

> two stabbings, one slit throat, and a page full of fights, in my area, over the last two years

That's basically nothing next to car accidents. Car accident injuries can be pretty gruesome. Maybe the fundamental change that is needed is awareness of the risks of driving and the yearly death/mutilation toll in each community. (And the awareness that bigger and bigger SUVs with higher and higher bumpers is a zero-sum game.)

Sure, but when family is in the car, I drive in the slow lane, to help protect them. When family is on the metro, wtf am I supposed to do, beyond maybe a pocket knife on my belt? I took my family on the metro exactly once, and never again, after a younger one almost stepped on a syringe, and a homeless guy was rambling about hiding in a dumpster.

If you're a guy taking a ride, sure. Otherwise, get real.

Surely you can do something to give yourself an illusion of control on the metro just like you do on the freeway.

I can assure you, I don't place used needles, or feces, in my car, which are the statistically significant threats that I've faced.

Yeah, but it doesn’t feel like public transit is safe. That’s important.

Public transit in other countries feels nice. In the US, you feel poor. Design, maybe, matters?

Psychological safety matters just as much as physical safety. If you think that you won’t see some shit on public transit I welcome you to come to LA and take the red line for a day.

Having spent 6 months in NYC over the past year, you see shit on the subway lines all of the time, but normal people use it all the time.

I think the latter is the important thing. It's not normalized as a viable means of transport in the land of the automobile.

BART's (the Bay's commuter rail) problem is that post-covid there aren't enough normal people to dilute the deranged ones. I've got a couple friends in SF, so I'll occasionally ride BART into the city for a night out on the town. Problem 1. is that the hours on BART don't really allow for that. Last call is 2 hours after the last train, so either I'm calling it short or crashing on a couch. This heightens number 2: There's not a lot of people using BART like that, so when I'm riding maybe 1 in 5 of my fellow passengers are noticeably up to something strange, whether it be actively smoking bud cannabis on the train (I'm no prude, smoking on the platform or using a pen or something I would find odd but not in a "I can't trust this person because they're clearly willingly to completely ignore the social contract" sort of way), leaving all their clothes save a baseball cap and a hypodermic needle tucked behind their ear on the platform, vandalizing the train car with a sharpie (including scribbling over the cameras, which was my cue to find a different car), or merely reeking due to not having bathed in far too long.

If it was closer to 1 in 100 people on the train displaying unusual behavior, it'd be a far less unnerving experience.

Buddy if you want to convince people to use public transit, saying a little shit is normal is not the way to do it

btw I live in Tokyo and moved here explicitly because of public transit.

That wasn’t the message - it’s the presence of having normal people. Public transport is just as popular in NYC as it is in Tokyo despite the shit.

Just got back from 3.5 months in Europe (17 cities), and yes it’s vastly better there, far more clean and sane. Still, coming back to NYC I’m not not taking the subway despite spending nearly my whole life in SoCal. It’s easily the better option over owning a car if you’re in Manhattan/Brooklyn.

I see where you're coming from, but the "normal people" leave because of these incidents. If you want everyday people riding the train, you gotta make sure that the poorest people in society aren't so miserable that they're unpleasant to be around.

I've never heard someone give the subway as a reason for leaving NYC. They leave because they're priced out of what they consider acceptable housing, the weather, or issues with the city itself. But never the subway.

Yeah of course, but there's also the people that got sick of the subway and bought a car, right? Hopefully they could buy a bicycle instead but with theft being what it is and how dangerous the streets are there's even less people willing to do that...

I think it's important with discussions like these to include the city or area, and time period.

I can say for sure that the subway in DC was better and safer than cars for the most part, when I was there many moons ago -

However if you look at the people who are riding the bus in my current city, or at the times when I was in Vegas.. and I've heard the NY subway at night is nothing like the DC subway..

These discussions can have all people right and all people wrong when they are discussing how they view their apples to others oranges.

I think people mean a more irrational feeling of safety, rather than hard statistics. They don't want to see or be near those antisocial behaviors when they're taking transportation. Old people seem to suffer from this irrational feeling more than younger.

"Irrational" is a strange way to describe it. People don't go around memorizing statistics of how likely someone who is exhibiting one kind of antisocial behavior (being obviously high, defecating in public, etc.) would be to engage in another kind of antisocial behavior (committing physical violence upon another person). And especially when the cost of making the wrong judgment is high, it's entirely rational to want to avoid it entirely.

> Old people seem to suffer from this irrational feeling more than younger.

Old people generally have more to lose. Young people, especially young males, are well known to think of themselves as invincible.

> People don't go around memorizing statistics of how likely someone who is exhibiting one kind of antisocial behavior (being obviously high, defecating in public, etc.) would be to engage in another kind of antisocial behavior (committing physical violence upon another person)

So you're saying people don't do a rational analysis of the risks... but calling it "irrational" is strange? Lots of human behavior is irrational. It doesn't have to be unusual to call it irrational.

Overestimating the risks of one choice and therefore not getting the benefits of it, and incurring the higher risks of alternatives instead (for the elderly, being socially isolated at home or driving with impaired abilities) is the kind of irrationality that people would benefit from correcting, through education and changing social assumptions.

> So you're saying people don't do a rational analysis of the risks... but calling it "irrational" is strange?

GP's wording implied that rational people take public transit because they've done the risk-benefit analysis, and irrational people don't. I'm not sure if there's actual evidence behind such a risk-benefit analysis.

> people would benefit from correcting, through education and changing social assumptions.

If the goal is to attract more people to use public transit, it would be vastly more effective to police the occurrence of antisocial behavior on it, instead of telling people that it's actually OK, the chance of stepping on a puddle of piss or being shouted at incoherently or being pushed onto an oncoming train is much lower than they think, and is lower than the chance of being injured in a car crash while driving to work. Whether or not that is true (and I wouldn't mind seeing some cold, hard data on it), most people will prefer to roll the dice with their car.

In other words: if you're a social architect keen on implementing your vision of a flourishing public transit system, it would be irrational not to account for people's loss aversion, whether or not that loss aversion itself is irrational.

People also (rightly or not) feel they can influence the outcome when driving much more than they can on transit (note this doesn't really apply to planes because planes are mass transit that so obviously beat driving after a certain distance).

And they might be right, something like 30% of traffic fatalities involve alcohol, so you can avoid driving after drinking and avoid times when others are drink driving, and improve your odds.

How many places have public transit systems used by older people, and how many have accomplished this by policing the antisocial behavior away? It seems like it is at least as easy to get older people to use public transit where they might see people with mental illness and addiction than it is to keep mental illness and addiction off of public transit. In countries that value civil liberties it is probably easier. As you observed, fear is driven by perceptions and rare incidents of violence covered in the media, not by statistics, and you can't pull somebody out of a bus or a subway car because they contribute to somebody's fear. You can arrest and remove a person who shits on the floor or threatens somebody, but for every one person like that, there are twenty people who are obviously in bad shape, obviously suffering, and look like they might do something alarming at any moment. You can't arrest and remove those people. You can get people to ride public transit despite the odds of seeing people like that.

>I think people mean a more irrational feeling of safety, rather than hard statistics

Also, the generic statistics of the probability of getting in an accident might not accurately apply to me. I might be a particularly good or bad driver. Totally anecdotal, but of my 28 years of driving, both of my small accidents occurred in the first two years.

>They don't want to see or be near those antisocial behaviors when they're taking transportation

I guess I think wanting to avoid seeing antisocial behavior is rational. It almost seems like that is the exact response expected in order to define the behavior as antisocial in the first place. :')

>Old people seem to suffer from this irrational feeling more than younger.

Older people are also more vulnerable. What might come across to me as just annoying or gross could be cause for more legitimate caution to a more vulnerable person. In my mind, when someone is acting particularly antisocially in public, there does seem to be a rise in my expectation (although slightly) that this person could do something violent.

That’s a dishonest comparison. Skipping fare not same as a drug addled person hassling commuters.

> The current bus and light rail situation has turned off swaths of the working class to support the dredges of the drug-addict class

Tell me you never use public transit without telling me you never use public transit. This is so out of touch it reads like a rant from the chronicle.

That's a public health issue that no one wants to address. We're completely ok with de-funding public healthcare and social services while complaining about the results.

SF problems

This is not just SF problems. These problems are _everywhere_ in the US, with just a reduction in other major hubs where transit is effective for the middle class.

There are threshold effects. Going down into the bart tunnels is a decent into human misery, but in Chicago feel much safer because don't see people loitering.

I've been told since childhood that the main obstacle to inexpensive public transit in the the majority of US is racism - keep those people in their neighborhood. I've never done any sort of research or anything, and even though it's depressing, it sounds plausible.

It's very true. Look at the way "urban" is used as a dog whistle for certain groups of people.

A bit of local history from where I live: Boston rapid transit was intended to extend to the northwest a considerable distance, putting more communities on the system and allowing easy, car-free commutes. It saw vociferous neighborhood opposition from groups who "didn't like the idea of increased traffic and certain urban elements entering their quiet suburban town." Sound familiar? https://boston.curbed.com/2014/2/13/10144086/the-red-line-st...

> vociferous neighborhood opposition from groups who "didn't like the idea of increased traffic and certain urban elements entering their quiet suburban town."

Urban areas generally do have higher rates of crime than suburban or rural areas (and this is certainly true of the Boston area[0]), and prima facie I don't see anything wrong with letting the residents of Arlington determine for themselves the benefits and disadvantages of having the Red Line extend into their town. Not everything has to be a dog-whistle; unless you're suggesting that the residents of suburban Boston are less virtuous than the number of "In this house we believe..." lawn signs might suggest?

[0]: https://www.city-data.com/crime/crime-Boston-Massachusetts.h...

These neighborhoods also happen to be the ones that enforce "driving while black" rules.

I'm not a US citizen, and racism may be the issue.

OTOH, given US's geography and culture of wide streets, suburbs, and driving around, it's pretty obvious that public transit is pricier than it is in Europe, similarly to broadband connection. As a European, I could also complain about terrible traffic congestion due to narrow streets in constant need of repair, or lacking parking space, which makes every car ride a source of stress. Your Uber is also dirt cheap compared to where I live.

The culture is manufactured though. It is hard or downright illegal to build traditional American towns or housing styles.

(It also dates back only to the postwar era.)

Sprinkle in a dash of car-industry lobbying and suburban sprawl

In the SF Bay Area, I think that crowd basically went to, let’s block any and all development, period.

There is a serious NIMBY/xenophobic component up and down the West Coast though.

As an example that I can talk about, I once took voice classes from a teacher in Berkeley, and the neighbors made her apply for a business license from the city and limit the hours of operation… not that there were ever more than 3 of us and we were already finishing up by 8. To be clear, she was born across the Bay, and I emphasize was not of a skin tone that is associated with recent immigrants. For me, coming from NYC, it never ceased to amaze me how spiteful a certain set of long-timers can be.

Another example I can talk about, all the old people in Mountain View who complained about the new restaurants that were coming up, like that brewery that was just off of Castro like 15 years ago. I’ve since concluded that some folks are just angry and spiteful and need to be the absolute center of their world. A long time ago, the West Coast must have attracted a lot of them because there was a whole lot of room for them to live out that life.

> made her apply for a business license from the city and limit the hours of operation

That's not an example of being "spiteful", it's just following the law, as all home-based businesses are required to do in most larger towns.

I was living without a car in an affluent area of SoCal recently and I made the mistake of using google maps to walk to the nearest cafe, which was 20 minutes away.

Google maps literally made me walk on the highway to get there. I later realized local people use the paths through private property to walk where ever (if they ever walk anywhere that is).

Puzzled, I asked someone why there were no sidewalks anywhere. They replied without sarcasm that it's probably because people didn't want to encourage "outsiders" to wander around their neighborhood.

It's race also, but Americans don't know how to talk about class either, lest god forbid the commies take over.

The buses came only once every 2 hours and the closest bus stop itself was at the cafe. When I got on the bus, people realized right way that it was my first rodeo. Everybody on the bus was extremely helpful, chiming in randomly to help me to get to where I needed to go. I'll let you guess their ethnicity.

While I agree the public transit in the US is abysmal at best, I'm not sure the UK is a good measure anymore.

Rail strikes and engineering work are happening with such frequency that getting around seems to take longer and longer. A 1+ hour commute to just travel 10 miles is pretty absurd.

Insane cost overages and years of delays aside, the Elizabeth line has suffered from nearly 10% of all services being canceled in August.

At one point I was needing to take the Northern line from Clapham and would have to wait 3-4 trains before I could squeeze on. The max I waited was 10. Then I moved away.

Add to that infrastructure issues like Hammersmith and Wandsworth bridge closures and commuting becomes a soul crushing prospect.

I don't know what the solution is but with such a high tax rate in the country you'd expect much better. Other European countries seem to have it figured out.

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-66754481

Perhaps experiences like yours is why I was downvoted for my London comment. But we are talking relative to the US here, and I do believe there is no comparison. I also found the bus network rather extensive and frequent in the suburban areas, and not unpleasant compared to other countries.

Senior citizens are also more flexible with their travel times and often have the luxury of avoiding rush hour

Many western economic powerhouses of old seem to be facing the same infrastructure problems, whereas autocratic countries that are building everything from scratch appear to have their shit together by comparison. It's not good PR unfortunately.

London is very expensive, driving Londoners out of the city. It's nice that they have public transport, but it's not helping much, unless you're saying that it could have been much worse. And despite being praised for public transport, the average commute time in London is bad. They're also not building much housing, affordable or otherwise, which means that it's only going to get worse.

> Seattle is the perfect example. If we have high speed rail between Bellingham and Seattle it would dramatically change the dynamics of the housing situation in Seattle.

It's not like Bellingham is affordable anymore. Median price is ~$650K. (People looking to escape effects of climate change in parts of the country that are becoming hotter are moving to places like Bellingham)

Yes, high speed rail and other forms of public transit are needed, but we're still going to need to build a lot more housing units in those outlying areas.

Bellingham isn't very affordable, but Marysville and Darington are still kind of affordable. And those two places aren't that far north of Everett.

Ok, but if high speed rail from Seattle to/from those towns was added they wouldn't stay affordable for very long. In order for that not to happen lots of housing units would need to be added to those areas.

Those places already growing at a steady clip. They aren't very desirable though.

In high school, I lived in South Snohomish county (it was still just Bothell even though it wasn't in King Co). Within striking distance of Seattle, so it grew quickly. I had friends from Marysville and Darington however, they didn't like living in those places very much.

It cannot be overstated how important getting transit right is and what an abject failure transit policy in the US has been.

Cities can not efficiently scale with car-only infrastructure, and the long-term costs are too high. This doesn't mean "we all go live in skyscrapers" either, and in fact you can keep your car. But we have to stop prioritizing car traffic (and its problems) over everything else.

Seattle really is the perfect example. I love living here, but I can only afford to own real estate in the suburbs. But, the moment I buy something in the suburbs, I'll either have to buy a car, or take 3+ busses to get anywhere I want to go in my off-time, which just drives the cost of my decision to move up, or it harms my quality of life.

For now I rent and hope that the cost of living doesn't screw me.

If I could just bike to the nearest train station, and zip around everywhere I needed to go, the radius in which I would want to live would be much wider. Hopefully some of the light rail expansions will make things nicer, but a high speed rail would be a complete game-changer.

I don’t know about that. There’s a whole lot of people in Bellingham who’ve been saying it’s unaffordable for them now.

Yep, I have family there and heard the same. The game changer is the stops that would inevitably be put up in places like Burlington, Mt Vernon, or Conway between Seattle and Bellingham. Smaller towns which are connected to the big city should be able to attract folks gp has in mind.

The constant whinging about NHS notwithstanding, I think London is actually a great place to be if you're 65+ and lucky enough to a have a roof over your head. From what I have seen, senior citizens are very active and proactive -- someone living there a few months a year can end up connecting with a walking group, bird watching group etc, where people are inviting and polite by nature. There's lots of free events, access to large parks and nature is possible using the rail network etc.

In the US, senior citizens can be individually active, but I haven't come across the same level of proactive organizational behavior and openness to noobs and outsiders that I have come across in London. The prerequisite for such a thing of course is proper public transport.

Seattle is actually quite sprawly already for how small it is, by European standards. Bellingham is 140km away, just not a commutable distance in general.

Seattle has quite a lot of room to densify. Density could double, and it would still be less dense than Queens, NY, which still has plenty of homes with garages and yards.

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