With crazies it's not that bad. I remember the bus getting pulled over once by a car with people with pipes/bats who beat a grandpa for getting in an argument with one of the guys prior. That was the only actually violent occurance over thousands of rides, however I still have yet to feel as threatened with a personal vehicle. With a car I could have rammed the fuck out of them or ran them over, with a bike I could have been gone in a second, when the bus driver stops and opens the front door you're just stuck. Again, realistically it's mostly crazy homeless people who pose no threat but I prefer to have some control at least.
My issue with electric bicycles is:
If limited they don't fit with pedestrians or cars so you need to complicate infrastructure. Good for going to the post office but not as a daily since they're just not fast enough. Lovely for old people and to an extent kids.
If not limited they are less tested motorcycles with usually shitty tires and brakes, no ABS, TC, etc with pedals to fulful some potentially existing legal loophole since there's no way you're doing anything close to the motor output manually yet since you feel inclined to pedal gear becomes problematic.
I still have yet to try an electric motorcycle but I'd guess the little electric scooters would be great for commuting. I'm guessing an electric scooter that can do 100-140kmh would be the utility sweet spot. You'd be able to go everywhere and charge for pennies with minimal maintenance. You'd also get the scooter benefits of improved road muck/weather protection and actual underseat storage.
Anecdote, paid $15 x 2 to take two citi bikes across Brooklyn to avoid a two-leg l-shaped subway ride. Coming home took a $25 uber. The bike trip was ~30% faster. It sucked having to navigate around all the delivery trucks and random private cars parked in the bike lane.
$15 seems too much to me for the citi bike for a 25 minute ride. But I'd do it again to save 10 minutes sitting in traffic in an uber.
Oh and the next day we did the same journey via l-shaped subway ride. It took about 10 minutes more than the bike ride, and included an awkward street-level and overpass transition between the two subway lines. Much much cheaper than uber or bike.
My take is there are a variety of crappy options to get around Brooklyn.
There's an old saying that if you can't spot the sucker at the poker table, you're the sucker.
If you've never felt threatened while driving a personal vehicle by all the road-raging, speeding, tailgating assholes--
One does need to know where one is going to service it, though, because they can sometimes have stupid electrical issues which are objectively easy to fix but hard for you to fix on your own cause you don't know which wire goes where.
The amount of crazy people on there is a lot too. Every friend has some story of some person assaulting or nearly assaulting them on the subway. No one truly feels safe on it.
You know what's more dangerous than riding the subway? Driving in a car.
https://www.chopranocerino.com/blog/new-york-accident-statis....
> There were 5,809 crashes on the busy streets of Manhattan in 2023. The borough reported 34 deaths (19 pedestrians, 11 motorists, and 4 cyclists). In total, there were 7,253 injuries.
https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/how-rare-is-crime-on-t...
> ...there were 1,120 violent index crimes reported as occurring on the subway in 2023, compared to 935 in 2019
Even comparing just Manhattan to the subway system as a whole, driving is more likely to result in an injury by a factor of 7x.
Dangerous to who? Cause you seem to forget about the people outside of the car.
Motorcycles are definitely not the solution. Motorcycle usage in NYC has skyrocketed since 2020 and as a result the streets are far noisier, more chaotic, and more dangerous, especially for pedestrians and cyclists.
And there are scooters and commuter bikes which are tamer, even electric ones. I'm not saying everyone should get sports bikes with 16 Rs in the name and a straight pipe or a Harley Tractor.
Out of curiosity, are motorcycles actually more dangerous for pedestrians and cyclists than cars? Couldn't find anything quick enough.
And the real danger of motorcycles is to yourself. You could end up living with a feeding tube slipping in a shower let alone a minor scuff at 25mph.
> being in a pod with a hundred people you don't know and who have not been screened for insanity, excessive odor, sickness and general obnoxiousness.
These events do happen, but they're pretty rare. For the most part, people on the bus are just people, who happen to be on a bus. Just like there are crazy drivers, there are sometimes crazy bus passengers. At least the crazy bus passengers aren't piloting 4000 lbs of steel :)
"Stroad" is a term invented, I believe, by those crazy folks over at "Strong Towns", who probably also have things to say about congestion pricing, and why it's taken so very bloody long to implement it in a supposedly modern and advanced nation.
I favor public transit, or ideally walking (problematic) or bicycling (even more problematic). Bicycling can be very problematic in America, to the point that a tourist from Florida in downtown Seattle once remarked "wow, the cars here aren't trying to kill me!" as we sat at some stinky car-strewn intersection. Basically you're a second class citizen if you walk or bicycle. Folks in cars will yell at you or throw things sometimes, and I have the correct skin color and sex, so it's strictly worse for others.
Buses? Sure, you can find the spicy runs with all the homeless (why are there so many homeless in America? Money out the ass and yet a nation so poor …), but I've had a lot more and a lot worse direct problems with folks who sit in cars, not counting indirect problems such as the noise, air, and real estate pollution (sometimes called "the high cost of free parking"). Usually the bus crazy will do something evil like offer you a joint, or wacky conversation, and will not do something upstanding like to change into the lane that you are bicycling in, forcing you off the road.
And SF's public transit is worse (both less useful and less comfortable) compared to NYC, many European cities, and any Japanese or Chinese megacity. I still find it perfectly fine, and preferable to dealing with a car.
I'm not sure how well 1 and 2 could generalize from Germany to America. You'd need Harberger Taxes or liberal use of Eminent Domain to put rail networks into a city. You'd need competent and well-funded law enforcement to curtail the crazies.
#3 we could fix in either area with UVC and filtered air circulation; or I could just get comfortable with being the weirdo wearing an N95 mask every day
I have also commuted by motorcycle for around 30k miles. It does save a lot of money, but it's not much faster than cars if you're strictly following the law in the 49 states where lane splitting isn't fully legal. You also have 90 times the risk of death per mile travelled, compared to a car, which balances the increased disease risk on a train.
Will never happen. Too 3rd worldy for many of the demographics that tend to drive policy on transit matters.