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Comment by dfadsadsf | Hacker News Reader

Main reason normal people do not use public transport is this attitude and police giving up on enforcing basic public order on transport. Personally I am voting against any public transport funding until all homeless/druggies are kicked off public transport (even if they are willing to pay). You have to pass certain very low behavior bar to use public transport (no intoxication, no aggression to other passengers, no smell, no shouting random things).

It's not rocket science and other countries figured out how to do it.

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It's not a policing problem, it's a homelessness and mental health problem.

You'll never have enough police for regular enforcement on buses. The numbers don't add up, not even remotely.

Other countries do a better job when they're able to keep people off the streets in the first place. Which then becomes a much more complicated question about social spending and the civil liberties of mentally ill people who don't want to be institutionalized.

Same here -- except for roads. I'm opposed to all road funding until all drivers follow the letter of the law.

Car-related taxes (vehicle sales, gas tax, yearly registration fees, in some cases tolls) have historically covered the majority of roadway infrastructure costs. I don't think free buses are going to be able to maintain the roadways.

A common misconception; usage fees only covered about 50% of highway-related expenses a few years ago. Feel free to find the latest numbers. This is less than the fare box recovery ratio of many transit systems, though not all.

And that, of course, does not include all the unpriced externalities of roads. For example, if you value a life at $1M, then the 40,000 people killed by drivers each year cost us collectively another $40B.

I kind of agree. I grew up with a well-funded, well-staffed railway which has suffered slow managed decline, so I've got pretty good frames of reference.

A big problem now is people playing loud music, loud TikToks, phonecalls and videocalls on speaker phone (almost the default), feet on seats, vaping, bags on seats etc.

There are now no staff who enforce the norms and laws (Yup some of that legally could land you a prosecution if the railway chooses that).

Yes, society was less anti-social 20-30 years ago but IMO with strict enforcement of heavy punishment, the issues could be stamped out.

What's interesting is that one fairly large section of the railway does still have lots of staff who enforce anti-social behaviour (Merseyrail – they operate somewhat independently) and from what I've read and heard is that there tend to be far fewer issues in that network than the rest of the network. It's interesting to have the two areas to compare.

Unfortunately this governments want to continue defunding the railways, and so are happy with the cycle of managed decline and people opting to drive instead.

I used to be extremely pro public transport but it's fighting a losing battle. Trains are overpriced, delayed, cramped and anti-social

> "Normal people do not use public transit... kick all homeless off (even if they are willing to pay)"

At the risk of feeding the trolls, I have to object to this ignorant, callous, brutal bs. Please, read this account^1 of NBA player Chris Boucher staying alive by riding public transit, and try to put yourself in his shoes for a moment.

[1] https://www.theplayerstribune.com/chris-boucher-nba-boston-c...

Thank you to share that article. It is chilling.

> Personally I am voting against any public transport funding until all homeless

Statistically you're just a few days of bad luck from being both homeless and carless. What's your plan for getting to work to not be in that situation?

> Statistically you're just a few days of bad luck from being both homeless and carless.

What makes you think so? The poster you replied to might be sitting on a decent nest egg, have supportive friends and family, and insurance against all contingencies.

And some people are willing to bite the bullet and even say: 'Well, in that case, I shouldn't be on the bus, either.

Though it's fairly clear from context that the commenter you replied to doesn't want to check every person's home address before they are let on the bus. They want to ban anti-social behaviour on the bus, and 'homeless' is just a short hand for that, unfortunate as it is.

And a few days of bad luck might make you lose your home, but won't necessarily turn you into a drunk who shouts a lot.

> What makes you think so?

"In effect, more than half of Americans live paycheck to paycheck and one crisis away from homelessness." https://www.usich.gov/guidance-reports-data/data-trends

I don't know the commenter specifically - that's why I said statistically.

> Though it's fairly clear from context

Ah, the classic "didn't mean the well presented part of group X when I said X". That's a cliche way to mask prejudice. No, if they didn't actually mean homeless, I'm calling them out on writing "homeless".

> "In effect, more than half of Americans live paycheck to paycheck and one crisis away from homelessness."

They say that, but they don't really substantiate that on the page you linked to.

If only we could follow links and had some form of search for similar text to find multiple studies published on that topic...

> Personally I am voting against any public transport funding until all homeless/druggies are kicked off public transport (even if they are willing to pay).

That's a bit silly. I have sympathies for your views, but you can't have a policy of literally 0. Even spotless places like Singapore don't achieve that, even though they come pretty close.

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