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Comment by csharpminor | Hacker News Reader

A respectful culture is needed for public transit to properly function, and the Bay Area doesn’t have that.

Some behaviors I’ve seen on public transit in the Bay Area: loud music, dumping beer and food on the floor, clipping toenails, smoking, jumping up and down on seats, drug deal, fighting, hitting the driver, attacking the bus with a machete. All in the past year. Granted I take transit more than most.

And people are generally afraid to speak out against bad behavior because you never know when someone has a knife/gun and is mentally unstable.

So I don’t think it’s just a frequency/headway problem. I wish it was better, but I also understand why many people are decide they’d prefer a private car.

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Ehhh...

Frequent, accessible public transit is the main point. Anything else is more of an excuse, honestly. Nothing puts people off more than the bus being 15 minutes late on a half-hourly schedule. 5, or even 10 minute frequencies are required to get the level of service you need for people to reliably use public transit in a "turn up and go" manner.

Missing a timed transfer and having to wait 15 minutes is awful. Why did I miss my last timed transfer? Police activity on BART (again).

The more common public transit use by the general population the more you dilute the fringes of society with normal people. There’s vastly more normal people than people on the fringes of society but if it’s normal for people to drive then that’s what normal people will do. Lots of normal people also tends to enforce social conformity.

You see the same effect in any pace where the general public visits. Walmart at 6pm is a very different place than Walmart at 3AM not because the store is different but because you’re self selecting for people who don’t need to be asleep at 3AM.

Oh whatever. Short of attacking the driver I saw most of that in a relatively short stay in Paris. So, yeah, okay that kind of behavior drives people to private vehicles… where the anti-social behavior involves shooting at each other or running people off the road.

e.g.

https://www.ktvu.com/news/15-month-old-baby-riding-in-vehicl...

https://sfstandard.com/2023/08/02/man-flashes-gun-drives-bac...

https://sfist.com/2023/06/27/chp-investigating-alleged-road-...

https://sfist.com/2023/09/06/road-rage-shooting-on-i-280-in-...

https://news.yahoo.com/sf-road-rage-suspect-leads-040649333....

A road rage incident where someone pulls out a gun is notable enough to get a newspaper article. Phone snatching, seeing people smoke meth on BART, encountering disgusting things, etc, etc are daily occurrences. This is not an apples to apples comparison.

I find your experience very different from mine. I live in Texas. I would expect a number of open carry handguns in any public place, and if someone started shouting half of those open carrying would put a hand in their gun and look tense.

OTOH, stealing a phone, smoking meth, or disgusting excretory things outside of a bathroom would be unthinkable. I would not worry if I left a cell phone on the seat if my pickup in Waxahachie or Hurst with the window down all day. I did leave my wife's cell phone in the seat of my pickup with the windows down when I ate in a restaurant in Waxahachie a day or two ago. She made fun of me for it, and I replied "It's Waxahachie."

BTW, the last car dealership I passed on the way home (before I stopped for dinner and answered this post) is called "Lifted Trucks." Seriously. You can look them up on Google Maps in Hurst, TX. LOL. This is Texas.

This might be true in rural Texas, but it's certainly not true in any of the major cities. People do crazy shit all day long and no-one bats an eyelid at it.

A small minority do crazy things anywhere. People exaggerate how often it happens.

Transit looks worse just because the people most likely to do that have 'mental issues' (possibly drug caused, but there are other causes) that also mean they can't keep a job and thus can't afford a car. However even then they are a small minority that you see because you are paying attention not because it is very common.

I encourage you to commute daily via BART for 5+ years and come away with the impression that I am "exaggerat[ing] how often it happens".

Yeah, well. It's not that you're exaggerating about how bad BART is (although there is that to some extent), it's that you're downplaying how much nonsense goes on with personal vehicles. Over the past couple decades I've commuted by car, Muni, and BART and while Bay Area transit isn't as bad as the suburbanites claim the drivers are among the worst I've experienced anywhere. At this point post-pandemic it's like a parody of Max Max.

> This might be true in rural Texas, but it's certainly not true in any of the major cities. People do crazy shit all day long and no-one bats an eyelid at it.

True.

I mean, there's a whole stretch of Lake Merritt where people go park and hotbox their cars and the drive away every single day. That doesn't make the news even though the consequences of riding BART while high are much, much lower than the consequences of piloting a car while high. And I'm sure you've seen the videos of people driving up to do what the kids these days call 'bipping' (a.k.a. snatch and grab).

Making the news isn't really a good indicator of risk here.

> Oh whatever. Short of attacking the driver I saw most of that in a relatively short stay in Paris.

When public transit advocates dismiss such inhuman conditions as a non-concern, I can only laugh. The average driver in America will never be shot at in any point in their entire life, but by your own admission inhumane filthy conditions are so common on city buses that you saw all of the above behaviors, excepting only the assault, during a short stay in Paris. I prefer the very infinitesimally small chance of getting into some sort of Mad Max scenario in my car to a 100% chance of encountering disgusting filth on a city bus. Most Americans agree with me. Most people who say they disagree actually have no choice and when they say they prefer the bus they're just coping: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fox_and_the_Grapes

If America had a civil and clean population like Japan, then the situation could be different. Clean city buses would be inoffensive, but that's not the reality we're dealing with. The deranged antisocial population of America is substantial. Maybe you'll say that we should fix that. You bet your ass we should. But until that happens, don't expect people to put up with city buses when they have any other choice. Just because you're okay with wallowing in filth doesn't mean the rest of us should be.

The fact that there are drug addicts and people with mental health problems is a problem that a public transport system cannot and should not solve.

Seems you think you're rich enough to put a wall around yourself and never see these problems. Fair play but I don't think any public money should ever go to solving problems in this way.

> a problem that a public transport system cannot and should not solve.

Then people will continue to drive, no matter how much you whine about it. If you can't make city buses safe and clean, then people won't use them.

> Seems you think you're rich enough to put a wall around yourself and never see these problems.

In fact, owning and using a car is an effective way to avoid the filthy of city buses. You seem to think this is a mistaken belief, but you're simply wrong. You will never persuade Americans to give up their cars and use buses instead unless you acknowledge the problem of filth and fix it. You can't gas light people into thinking the filth is fine or their cars aren't an option. Denying the problem and trying to shame people who acknowledge it will never get you to the state you want society to be in.

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