Public transit is much safer than driving in your car. Someone skipping fare does not compare to even a light fender bender.
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.
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.
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.
Majority of elevators I take tend to be open to the public -- car parks being a big one.
And I say this as someone who still takes public transport a lot, but it's increasingly less comfortable.
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.
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.
[0]: https://everytownresearch.org/reports-of-road-rage-shootings...
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.
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.)
If you're a guy taking a ride, sure. Otherwise, get real.
Public transit in other countries feels nice. In the US, you feel poor. Design, maybe, matters?
I think the latter is the important thing. It's not normalized as a viable means of transport in the land of the automobile.
If it was closer to 1 in 100 people on the train displaying unusual behavior, it'd be a far less unnerving experience.
btw I live in Tokyo and moved here explicitly because of public transit.
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 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.