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Comment by BadassFractal | Hacker News Reader

For urban dwellers blessed with proper public transportation and a good Walk Score, a car is a huge headache and drain on finances. They simply all need to go and be replaced with extremely efficient, clean and safe transit systems. Nobody enjoys sitting in traffic for hours a day commuting. Nobody enjoys wasting time on maintenance. Nobody enjoys the process of acquiring the vehicle.

At the very least, car sharing is a step in the right direction. Eventually as the Google car becomes reality, I hope that the # of cars on the roads is reduced to a bare minimum and we don't need to drive / pay people to drive any longer, and free up a lot of human talent to do something more productive.

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> Nobody enjoys sitting in traffic for hours a day commuting. Nobody enjoys wasting time on maintenance. Nobody enjoys the process of acquiring the vehicle.

Maybe not, but some of us find it vastly preferable to being crammed in with others on public transport. So don't tar everyone with your particularly preferences thanks.

I guess one has to balance the time spent in traffic and being crammed with others in public transport. Here in the bay area, one can get stuck on 101 for 2 hours when it would take only 40 minutes via Caltrain. I'm sure quite a few people would rather save 1.5 hours every day being crammed in with others.

Caltrain also has seats most of the time. The worst is that you might have to sit next to someone...cry me a river.

One of the more depressing things is that the conversation around transit is so frequently: "But... [horrified whisper] other people!"

Not to mention the amount of time spent circling city blocks in SF to find parking. I hate myself every time I need to drive to SF and find street parking. I remember spending 30 minutes circling blocks around pacific heights to find street parking, only for the purposes of eating at a restaurant near there.

Well, 40 minutes not counting getting to the train, waiting for the train, exiting the station, getting to your car & driving from the station home.

My 40 minutes includes that calculation already. If you plan accordingly, you don't need to wait for the train... just arrive on time. I bike to the station so that I don't need to pay for parking at the station.

On a side note, BART is probably going on strike this week, which means that an hour BART commute is soon going to turn into a 4 hour commute when the traffic on the highways double.

Ironically, though that's correctly pointed out as a vulnerability of "public transit," it's also a vulnerability of private automotive transit: if not for public transit, it would be far, far less convenient to drive from point A to point B, at least for some values of A and B

Absolutely. However I was imagining public transportation being improved to the point where being crammed is no longer a problem due to many more options and routes being run much more often.

At that point it becomes a lot preferable to spend 1h on a train somewhere reading a book / catching up on news or email, rather than getting enraged in gridlock traffic without doing absolutely anything productive (yes, you could theoretically do radio/audiobooks).

Give me a public transportation system that runs on time, doesn't spread disease, doesn't have punk kids who confront you for no reason, is safe, and has sane time schedules and I'll be happy.

Until then, I'll always prefer driving/walking/biking/anything. Unfortunately, I'm in a situation where I can't drive now, and I have to deal with an awful San Francisco public transit system that does 0 of the things I listed.

> "Give me a public transportation system that runs on time, doesn't spread disease, doesn't have punk kids who confront you for no reason, is safe, and has sane time schedules and I'll be happy."

The problem is that you live in San Francisco.

The biggest problem in that list (safety/perceived safety) has more to do with the city than the transit system itself. It's not a brokenness in the transportation system (though more can be done to curb it, certainly), it's a brokenness in the society it serves.

It's always a little depressing to think about how so many other cities - both bigger and smaller - on this continent put the transit of San Francisco utter, complete shame.

It's the same in Europe. As a visiting American, I'm in awe of the infrastructure they've built -- beautiful, clean, fast, charming -- but these were built with European society in mind, which generally raises kids to be respectful, clean, and polite.

But now there are a ton of pretty awful immigrants from the Middle East who harass women, destroy property, and threaten anyone they dislike... which is quickly making European cities very unpleasant places to live. I wouldn't be surprised if Europeans start their own version of white flight away from their cities.

I don't know about other European cities, but immigrants are priced out of the central areas of Stockholm, just like poor black people are priced out of Manhattan. I wouldn't be surprised if the same effect is true in other cities as well, due to the fact that most have been a lot more restrictive than USA when it comes to erecting high rises.

Is driving really safer than public transit?

In San Francisco? Probably yeah. Some of the routes are extremely rough, especially at night.

On many bus routes the conditions can be positively third world. Graffiti everywhere - seats, floors, windows. Human excrement. Urine. Addicts. Homeless. MUNI buses are one of the less fortunate places you can find yourself anywhere.

Having lived there in the past, I can sympathize with residents who want to drive, or take Ubers everywhere. The public transit in the city can be a very foul experience - though this is largely a reflection of the city rather than the system itself.

I will note that the concern is not that your bus will crash- it is that you will be mugged and/or shot.

Actually, the number of people physically killed by a Muni bus annually is significant: IIRC, there's a small but non-negligible (single digits) number of people who are run over and killed by Muni every year.

We focus on crime, because it's easy to lash out at order breaking down and can relate to being harassed by the small percentage of Muni riders who can genuinely be considered subhuman refuse. In reality, though, SF has several times as many annual traffic casualties (around 3000, from some rudimentary Googling) as crimes reported on Muni (around 1000).

That latter figure has some factors that may suggest undercounting (it's reported crimes, and I can see how people might have so little faith in Muni that they don't bother reporting it) but also some that suggest overcounting (it includes fare violations and eating on the bus).

Muni certainly needs to be cleaned up, but let's not get ahead of ourselves: you're much more likely to die via automobile in SF than being shot or stabbed on the Muni. I wouldn't be surprised if you're more likely to be killed being hit by a Muni than murdered on the Muni.

New York, San Francisco, Boston, Chicago, and Philadelphia are towns with the best walk-score in America.

For various reasons, it is still much cheaper to live in the suburbs and commute into the city than to live in San Francisco. I wonder how the other walkable cities are fairing.

Perhaps when people buy homes, they tend to not buy a new car at the same time - prior to the housing crisis, many people bought lots of homes. Then the market collapsed and they lost their money, further reducing the number of new cars bought.

Oddly enough, some 2000-model-year used Hondas and Toyotas did not depreciate in value between 2010 and 2013 because the used car market heated up.

Used Hondas and Toyotas did not depreciate 2010-2013 because the Cash-for-Clunkers débâcle reduced the supply of used cars, keeping up their price.

The suggestion that destroying operational vehicles would be a net gain for the economy is an excellent illustration of the broken window fallacy.

Cash-for-clunkers helped middle and upper-middle class people, including some friends of mine, who wanted to buy new cars. The cost of the program was born mostly by poor people, as is often the case.

Don't you just love central planning? It's always the poor that it hurts the most.

>and free up a lot of human talent to do something more productive.

Or starve, as the case may be.

Mincome. That won't be the only thing driving a post-jobs future, so we'll have to deal with it anyway.

Wealth redistribution could solve that problem.

After the redistribution is all finalized and completed, who controls the prices of goods that one can finally buy with this newfound wealth?

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