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Comment by davnicwil | Hacker News Reader

I appreciate what you're saying and am a big fan of long distance train and bus journeys myself and have done a lot of both, sleeping and not.

But one huge factor that you have to contend with is the randomness of the tragedy of the commons problem on public transport / shared transport. A train journey can be blissful to sleep on right until a loud group gets on and sits across from you and there's no seats available to move.

I think this is something that can't be overlooked, especially if you're talking about something like a short trip where if you don't sleep well en route, quite a large proportion of the trip time is going to be affected. Having a private vehicle where you can guarantee control of your environment is a really huge plus.

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It is a chicken and egg problem. As long as the majority of people who would maintain the social environment are avoiding the social environment, the healthy consensus/operating regime can never emerge.

In my experience the majority consensus is to maintain a quiet, generally polite environment on trains and buses.

But that's precisely the problem, it only takes a very tiny minority to change this. If one group, one person sometimes, in a carriage of 50 people decides to go against this, then that's that. It's not even particularly common, but it happens, it's random, and so it's just something that must be contended with.

I think that is the case if the majority has or exercises little to no effective social power to enforce the norm.

The majority consensus is to desire a peaceful environment but do nothing when it is violated.

Correct. But the golden question is, do what? The authorities don't care. Rules and laws are rarely enforced, and when they are enforced they're done so unevenly. If you decide to take matters into your own hands, it's much more likely that you will be punished by the law than the person you were correcting. So, what do you expect people to do?

My point is that in established cultures there are expectations around how these situations are handled, and what you expect people to do is specific to the culture. A single disapproving grandmother can put a stop to it.

That is why it breaks down — once it is discarded in a melting pot the cultural expectations are unclear and it seems you’re at least initially dependent on the state or mob dynamics.

>A single disapproving grandmother can put a stop to it.

I think you have to go further upstream socially - there are people that should not be free, but are. Public transit has not just loud talking or music on phones, but the mentally deranged, babbling, even actively drug using population walking a knife's edge between erratic and aggressive behavior. From my POV it's so far past a stern stare on the US west coast that the suggestion comes across comical.

Create vigalantee laws that legalize “taking matters into your own hands”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philippine_drug_war

Extremely popular and objectively reduced crime and drug usage. In portlands case, you keep weed, steroids, psychedelics, and party drugs legal and come down like hell on the society destroying stuff like fenty

China needed to do similar drastic things to get out of the slump caused by the opium wars. They call that period the “century of humiliation “ for a reason.

It's not. Pass a law that continuing to be noisy or disruptive on a bus or train after a warning results in 10 years of prison time with no parole and consistently enforce it. The problem will solve itself without a chicken and egg problem. Problematic people can simply be removed from society to make for a good social environment. Adding more good people is not the only option and in fact only hides the problem instead of solving it.

This would involve incarcerating a lot of homeless people, which is expensive, and pro-homeless activists would see it as a human rights abuse and fight it.

It would be expensive, but would have everyday visible tangible effects which you can't always say about other government spending. In regards to people thinking it's abusing people's rights they will just have to be ignored or taught to respect other people's right to a good experience with public transport.

Deeply unfortunate, but we're arguably in a lose-lose situation where suffering from the problem has abuses, and yet so does fighting those who profit or benefit from the situation.

There's immense social capital and NGO patronage at work surrounding 'homeless' - and I parse that as mentally ill now, as it's an insult (IMO) to the homeless who are perfectly capable of respecting others and participating in the social contract.

I honestly find it horrifying that you think stripping a person of their freedom and dignity for ten years is a reasonable penalty for being “noisy” on a train.

I’d much rather be around the noisy-but-relatively-harmless person than someone with so little regard for their fellow man.

>for ten years

Or longer if they show they are unable to reform while in prison.

>penalty for being “noisy” on a train

That is ignoring the second order effects of the situation. This noise is holding back the flywheel of public transportation that could have economic benefits to millions of people. The penalty is for the enormous cost of holding the rest of society back. The person who has such little regard for their fellow man is the one who is letting the few ruin society for the many.

You can make this kind of specious argument for any infraction, no matter how minor. Hard pass on your ridiculous dystopia.

Living in a society where you don't have to worry about people stealing, being violent, doing drugs, scamming you, breaking into your car, etc sounds like the opposite of a dystopia.

Yeah, but you mentioned none of those things, instead you suggested a 10+ year sentence is reasonable for people who are too “noisy”. I assume you’d recommend slow torture and then the murder of their entire family if someone dared to actually “do drugs”.

Fortunately, your views are wildly extreme and unconstitutional. Regardless, I hope you find some empathy and some peace out there.

Having actual consequences and holding people is all related to solving these problems.

In regards to doing drugs I'd prefer only the death penalty or other equivalent permanent punishment for those have used or distributed them and not the whole family. When we have a war on drugs, murder is not the correct word to use. Drug usage is an extremely fast spreading social virus that needs to be immediately and swiftly snuffed out.

>your views are wildly extreme and unconstitutional

If having properly waited consequences to people's negative actions is considered unconstitutional than I believe the constitution should be changed as it is allowing society to be held back. I see nothing fortunate about allowing people to not have to be responsible for their actions that have negatively impacted society. I hope you too find some empathy.

Cars are not the solution to that. Hooligans and irritating people are just a possibility in literally every social environment, they always have been, and they always will be. Answers to that problem are social - it's a bigger problem in America than Japan, for exmaplem.

Answers which involve removing oneself from society (by entering a private car) are not good answers. And when you factor in the externalities, you're just displacing "I'm upset, possibly even unwell due to sleep lost" onto "we replaced 90% of the local natural environment with pavement and paint it with crushed human beings every single day".

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