Are they not?
The BART Police Department's reports for 2022 show the following numbers for Part 1 UCR Crimes: Homicide: 3 Rape: 4 Robbery: 156 Aggravated Assault: 81 Burglary (Structural): 17 Larceny & Auto Burglary: 783 Auto Theft: 136 Arson: 10 Property Crime Subtotal: 946 Total: 1,190
Anyway, assuming there are hundreds of train cars and thousands of passengers a day, the chance of getting robbed on any one of them, using your stats, is less than 0.001%. Seems pretty safe to me.
This is why I'm too scared to take my car with me when I ride the subway.
The reality is that cars are freedom and still superior from a continence and comfort standpoint. Americans are insanely privileged to have cheap, powerful cars.
For the last 15 years I've lived in various places around the world, and for all of them a private car is the most frustrating, least enabling method of transport available. Finding parking is a nightmare, traffic is a nightmare, having to concentrate on the idiots around me is a nightmare, not being able to drink when I go out is a nightmare, dealing with the mechanical problems of the vehicle itself is a nightmare, dealing with the bureaucracy of owning a car is a nightmare. This isn't what freedom looks like.
Most freeing? Riding a motorbike in Phnom Penh. Berlin's 5 different public transport systems. Walking everywhere in Bristol (UK). Mexico City's excellent underground.
I was curious so I just checked, and the number of cars is just shy of the number of people of driving age, even in the bicycle paradise of the Netherlands.
Lots of the peoples car needs would probably be covered by some form of car sharing but this is something car manufacturers hate and it has been always quite expensive. Maybe that will change.
New driver licenses are rapidly dropping in europe. Lets see whats gonna happen but i think Netherlands/Flanders are for sure important pioneers to get inspired from.
But that’s also because they have to be multigenerational to afford a SFH these days.
> I was curious so I just checked, and the number of cars is just shy of the number of people of driving age, even in the bicycle paradise of the Netherlands.
This might sound like a high amount of ownership, but if you compare it to some other countries then it’s not that bad (or impressive if that’s how you look at it).
The Netherlands has 588 cars per 100k inhabitants v. 908 in the US as an example[0].
If you go down the rabbit hole and look at the sources for these numbers, you’ll find that in the US only 8% of households don’t own a car[1] v. 26% of households in the Netherlands[2].
37.1% has two cars in the US and 21.9% has three or more in the US[1] v. 21% and 6% respectively in the Netherlands[2]
I think it’s safe to say that there’s less cars on the road in the Netherlands and thus less of that nightmare scenario that is described in GP.
That said, plenty of drivers in the Netherlands (not having the frame of reference of more busy countries) consider the Netherlands having “nightmares” for drivers. In particular when it comes to parking, where the main complaint is the price of parking and the lack of parking close to a destination.
Personally I don’t consider it a nightmare but a blessing that a lot of Dutch downtown areas force parking on the outer edge, leaving the shopping areas as pedestrian only areas. But that doesn’t mean that other people with other interests don’t consider it a nightmare.
Whenever, in the very rare instance, a city or town here in the US tries to marginally move towards such a situation, people start dusting off their pitchforks.
Just the other day I saw someone losing their shit on Threads because someone suggested that it would combat sedentary lifestyle somewhat if you’d have to walk 10 minutes from where you’d park every once in a while.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_vehicles_...
1: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/2023-car-ownership-statistics...
2: https://www.kimnet.nl/binaries/kimnet/documenten/publicaties... in Dutch
If you have them when other people don't, yes. The problem is that by the time this is no longer true, you likely have a large sunk cost fallacy and political leaders firmly committed to the model and will struggle to realize that all of the time in traffic, countless deaths, and lowered quality of life for everyone around are in fact not actually inevitable.
Another thing: you can have both (ie: Europe). You use public transit to get to places and you use your car when you need space for luggage or taking the family.
Sleeping-car-dads-under-newspaper was a common thing to see when I was there 25 years ago...
Ask any Amazon driver; they much prefer peeing in bottles in the comfort of their own delivery trucks vs on trains.
You are not allowed to run a small business out of your house in US, so i dont think you have any freedom.
Private jets are freedom. like actual freedom.
For one thing, I think a lot of American suburbs could be way more bike friendly if people just had a safe path to ride in. We are talking a half a lane worth of pavement.
Another thing is that this isn’t all or nothing. Still owning and perhaps needing a car but reducing the number of trips per week is a win.
Look at pictures of European countries that used to use their central squares as parking lots. It can be done.
Change certainly won’t happen via defeatism.
Cycle paths can be added at a step by step basis and keeping some gaps isn't an issue and if some paths aren't used much initially there isn't a big problem. Also sometime a single line painted on the road is enough for a start.
If businesses settle in dezoned area they need to attract an audience quickly, but the will be less attractive than the hyperstore or mall for car drivers and depend on a bunch of other businesses in walkable distance. Financing the period till it works can be tough and will cycle through a few businesses till a working mixture is established.
And even then: In the car centric land usage, distances are too far quickly for quickly walking over to the bakery for fetching bread for breakfast, 15 minutes as a guidance for reaching everyday shops, doctor offices, a bar, ... density has to be increased. But people won't give up their yards.
I have seldom seen this solution get respected by cars.
It is better than nothing, but it is a weak start, when the goal is save cycling.
My point is: if you live in a place where a lot of drivers behave like selfish idiots to other drivers, bikers, and pedestrians, then a lot of bikers will behave like selfish idiots too.
I don’t have a solution, but I just wanted to add the data point because I hate most bikers with about the same intensity I hate most drivers. As a pedestrian, both groups ignore me and put me at risk every single f-word day.
They even put a bike lane in on the road at my parent's house. Again, there's a perfectly usable trail/sidewalk right alongside the road that's far, far from busy, and the bike lane is also used for parking. I'm not going to swerve in and out of the road when there's a place that's 100% safe to bike down.
Hell, for that matter - laws be damned, I bike down the left side of the road here. I want to see a car that's not paying attention to me coming, where I'll at least have a chance to react. Again, it's not like a city where you're sometimes in the flow of traffic. The cars are going 40mph when I'm going maybe 15mph?
The problem is the disparity of speed between travelers, same as for a highway. Pedestrians appear suddenly or don't know about your sudden appearance or intended motions, and pain or injury results.
Anyway, it would be nice if they built some nice, protected bike lanes, but they'd have to remove lanes from the cars to do that.
I'll... try to be more assertive, I guess we'll see how that works out.
You should rent one of the Docomo red rental bikes and ride it around some, and then you can see what it's like being one of the cyclists. The last thing you want as a cyclist is pedestrians who make unpredictable movements as you're passing. Also remember, pedestrians here have the absolute right-of-way, and cyclists are pretty much always at fault if there's a collision.
I've also seen bicyclists trying to make their way through crowds riding a bike where there is barely room for people to walk.
Not to mention cars won't see you so they will turn into or pull out of driveways, or fail to stop for you as you're trying to cross a road.
Enforce actual bike lanes and ensure people biking following the laws and rules of the road and we'd be a lot better off. But letting people too dumb to wear helmets* or to understand why they need to be in a bike lane and not on a sidewalk onto the sidewalk with zero consequence? Absolutely not.
* I do not even remotely care about the anti-helmet arguments. I’m sure you’re a cyclist who has done all the research and proof as to why if you’re good and paying attention a helmet is unnecessary or even bad. Fine. Most people on bikes and most people in cars aren’t you. Wear a helmet!
Until we put shops very close to homes, end the huge big-box retailer’s death grip on everyone’s spending habits, and learn to live leaner, European style public transport will never work.
We put shopping centers far away from homes, and we put homes all over the effing place, making public transport effectively impossible to get right for even a small percentage of the population.
I agree with rest of the comment, but I feel that connection between walkability and population density is misunderstood. It's not "we need XXX people/sq. mile in US to have walkability", it's "allowing walkability and building corresponding infrastructure leads to increase in local density in places where people want to live".
Maybe the most offensive thing about public transport to an American is that it cannot really be profitable by itself. Infrastructure rarely is but it is still worth investing in for the downstream effect.
The difficult part was getting a sense of direction because there aren't really any obvious landmarks to look out for when wandering through wide-scale suburban sprawl. It's like the availability of GPS has just allowed this kind of sprawl to become even more labyrinthine because nobody needs to bother with street names or directions any more.
I'm not sure how it was in the 80s, but these days people just use Google Maps to navigate to wherever they're going.
But it still might be worthwhile to find policies that at least help to steer things in the right direction without being failures themselves. Easier said than done, obviously.
The solution to this problem as has been shown by most other civilized countries on this planet is trains, yet in the land of rugged individualism and capitalism, it's somehow not viable.