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Comment by rg111 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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