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Comment by rickydroll | Hacker News Reader

Thanks to regenerative braking, my brake disks rust long before they wear out. Tire particulates are an engineering problem that will be solved long before the social problem of convincing people to live close enough to make public transit practical.

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I'm never going to take public transit in the United States if I can help it because there are too many unhinged psycopaths and it takes just one. When I visit Europe it's all I take day in day out. Except certain parts of Paris and the UK which have had lots of recent arrivals. But even the new arrivals are less insane than many of the characters found on US public transit.

You have to be a hermit in a cave if you want to actually do that. Those same people you worry about are also in the grocery store, in the parking lot, at the airport, on the sidewalk, walking around your property. Really there is no added risk in taking transit because you’ve already taken on the risk anywhere else public facing. If anything there’s less risk on transit than many other places you’d find bad characters considering there are surveillance cameras, witnesses, and a driver whose job it is to call the police.

Violence and "crazy" people tend to be clustered in certain areas and not spread generally among the populace. For example, I bought a house in a "genteel" part of a mill town. In other words, the houses are maintained. 2 miles away in the "mill worker" section of town (not very well maintained housing) we've had numerous reports of violence, and one or two murders.

I can go to my local supermarket, Home Depot, drugstore, ice cream stand and never encounter any violence. Travel on the bus however and well, the police reports say it's a different story. With the reality? Not sure but every time of been on public transit, it's a cluster of "crazies" mixed in with the general populace.

What this tells me is the problem is not public transit or urban spaces. We need to build a more humane city like what they have in Scandinavia (high public trust, services to keep you from being desperate, respect for common individual property) and the risk of violence will drop both in city spaces and on public transit.

Nope, I lived in downtowns for ten years: Houston, Miami, Denver, and New York City. I've had enough.

As opposed to in traffic? Plenty of road raging psychos out driving cars.

The conclusion is that the US just has more psychos. But the restraint of wrecking their vehicle to accost me holds them in line. On public transit they can accost me and nothing stops them.

Here in Austin people shoot at eachother on the highway all of the time, there's no need for them to wreck their car

Let's be real for a minute; the relative incidence rate of highway shootings is far lower than the relative incidence rate of violent crime on public transit in American cities.

My not-sufficiently-informed opinion is in agreement with yours. Do you have any studies that we can use to compare shootings versus violent crime rate on public transit?

A quick Google search revealed some data collected by the US government on the topic.

https://www.bts.gov/content/reports-violent-crime-property-c...

And your tires?

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