[ravenstine]

What are your ideas for improving public transit? Because the way I see it, public transit suffers from issues that are hard to overcome and are exacerbated by globalized societies.

Public transit simply can't take you everywhere. Even when I e lived in areas with dense bus routes, how one would get to a stop was often a question. Buses are relatively slow and impede traffic, especially in larger cities.

More trains would be nice, but they share many issues with buses, including the fact that they become de facto homeless and mental health shelters on wheels. The only place where I have lived where this wasn't a problem was New Zealand, and that was 18 years ago, so I don't know if that's still the case. I always give up on public transit after seeing enough acts of human degradation and fights breaking out. Let's not forget the smell.

Cars and self driving tech will always have an edge over public transit. We might as well not waste too much time on public transit, but make sure it is adequate while making car-driving more sustainable.

In fact, I would rather prioritize making cities bikeable and walkable more expanding bus service. For some cities it's pretty much too late, but for ones that are kind of spread out there is no reason why there can't be dedicated bikeways.

[Panzer04]

"de facto homeless shelters"? wtf? Is that genuinely a concern in some places?

Cars have an edge on transit because orders of magnitude more money is spent on the road system and on the vehicles than is spent on PT. Despite that, PT tends to be faster in cities, where it's simply not possible to jam more cars in (it turns out only carrying one person per car is a truly massive capacity constraint.

Cars will probably always be better in low density areas, as it's not reasonable to serve all areas with reasonable quality of service, but in any kind of reasonable high density environment properly separated PT (ie. not lumped in with car traffic) will have huge capacity and speed advantages.

[decafninja]

Yes - it's a genuine concern in the US.

In fact, looking at many of these public transit vs. car threads on HN, on the topic of safety, I feel transit advocates are not understanding the issue properly.

Most people that dislike using public transit in the US are not afraid that the train or bus will derail or get into an accident. The odds of that happening are definitely tiny.

What they're afraid of is some psycho on the train/bus committing anything from nuisance harassment to outright murder.

It doesn't help that many of the people that most advocate public transit are the ones most resistant to making transit free from being terrorized by such potentially dangerous individuals.

Even outside of that psycho scenario, you also encounter a lot of benign, but otherwise annoying or otherwise less-than-desirable-to-be-around people whether it's someone with horrific body odor or someone blasting loud music or someone coughing their lungs up.

I never felt afraid, anxious, or even annoyed in any way getting on the subway in Seoul, Tokyo, or Hong Kong.

I always feel at least some degree anxiety and annoyance, and sometimes outright fear, getting on the subway in NYC.

[foxes]

Every other country in the world can embrace efficient clean public transport, and then America can be a theocratic car filled wasteland filled with dangerously unstable individuals, and completely decayed social structure.

[beepbeepcabbage]

This is a US problem, not a train problem.

[wizofaus]

US problems have an unfortunate tendency to become world problems...

[woodruffw]

> The only place where I have lived where this wasn't a problem was New Zealand, and that was 18 years ago, so I don't know if that's still the case. I always give up on public transit after seeing enough acts of human degradation and fights breaking out. Let's not forget the smell.

You were supposed to describe public transit, not a rest stop on an Interstate Highway in the United States :-)

But seriously: the things you're describing are civic issues, not issues with public transportation. The only reason you see them less in your car is because the activation energy for them affecting you is much higher (specifically, instances of road rage, DWI, etc. culminating in someone colliding with you). But that doesn't actually make them less frequent; it just converts the drunk guy shouting on the subway bench into the drunk guy who's about to T-bone you.

[decafninja]

The drunk guy about to T-bone you is more difficult to encounter in the first place than the drunk guy about to stab you on the subway.

I agree these are civic issues, not issues with public transportation. However I always get the impression that many ardent public transit advocates are the ones who are also resistant to cleaning up public transit so that it is more attractive.

Yes, let's definitely work towards providing mental health solutions, but let's also not let the psycho claim an entire subway car because "he has every right to be there" or "it's inhumane to forcibly remove him" and still expect the general public to delight in giving up their cars and take the subway instead.

[woodruffw]

> The drunk guy about to T-bone you is more difficult to encounter in the first place than the drunk guy about to stab you on the subway.

Statistically, he isn't. If drunks stabbed people on subways at the rate that drunks killed people with their cars, around 46 people would be stabbed on the US's subways each day. And that's killed with cars, not "permanently disabled or disfigured"; that rate is even higher.

The problem with the "psycho" example is that it just isn't that common. It's chiefly a perception, a statistically misaligned one, that's been ruthlessly propagated to support economic structures that benefit from as many Americans driving as much as possible. That isn't to say that it doesn't happen, but to use the drunk driving example again: we tolerate orders of magnitude more antisocial behavior on our roads than we do in our public transit systems.

[decafninja]

Unfortunately, you're not going to convince people by laying out statistics, otherwise you'd (you as in transit advocates, not you specifically) would have succeeded already.

What you need to do is address how people feel, and transit advocates have been doing a poor job at that in the US.

People feel safe in their cars. People feel unsafe on transit. I don't know why this perception deviates from reality, but it does. Maybe it's because in a car you have tons of steel surrounding you from the drunk driver, while in transit you have at best your clothes protecting you from the psycho.

Address this, and you will win over many people to transit. But again - I feel like most transit advocates are highly resistant to doing what needs to be done.

I have nothing against well run transit. I love taking the subways in Seoul, Tokyo, Hong Kong, and other cities where subways are ultraclean and nearly devoid of potentially dangerous individuals. I hate taking the NYC subways because almost every other day I encounter someone I feel wary being in the same car or station with.

You're simply not going to win over hearts and minds by stating the homeless guy in the subway car raving about some lunacy is completely harmless and you should just ignore him and let him be. Even if he is actually harmless beyond just stinking up the air and causing a nuisance.

[Karrot_Kream]

> I love taking the subways in Seoul, Tokyo, Hong Kong, and other cities where subways are ultraclean and nearly devoid of potentially dangerous individuals.

Most Asian cities have horrendous track records on dealing with mentally ill and homeless, that's why. They're frequently driven out, dumped into homeless ghettos, incarcerated, or dumped into the countryside. Western society has higher expectations of their marginalized, for better or for worse. This is why US planners look to Europe for models to emulate instead of Asia.

> Address this, and you will win over many people to transit. But again - I feel like most transit advocates are highly resistant to doing what needs to be done.

Most advantages surrounding driving cars in the US are based around culture and perception. The mythos of the car in the US is huge and many parts of car culture is based around the mythos. Transit advocates by nature of not buying into the mythos are going to be types that are hard to sway through feelings and perception. I agree that transit has a perception problem that needs to be fixed in US big cities. The reason why this disconnect exists is because transit fans are by nature more driven by data and less driven by mythos or narrative. That doesn't mean this isn't a problem.

[pandaman]

Could you explain your statistics a bit? The first link I've found[1] shows 50,930 fatalities in 2019 with estimated 19% involving drunk drivers. So 9676 fatalities per year. Let's assume drunk drivers always kill somebody and survive themselves i.e. no drunk driver ever died in a single car accident. This makes 27 fatalities caused by drunk drivers every day.

Did you mean that approximately twice as many people ride subway than drive in the US? I could not find numbers on subway ridership but considering only few cities have a subway at all it's very hard to believe but I am open to the data.

1. https://www.forbes.com/advisor/car-insurance/drunk-driving-s...

[woodruffw]

I got 47 deaths per day from the roughly 17,000 fatalities that are directly attributed to drunk driving each year[1]. Even if we arbitrarily halve that to account for at-fault deaths at drivers' own hands, that leaves ~23 people dying, each day, because of drunks on our roads.

In contrast, around 300 people died in total on public transportation in 2020[2]. In 2019, 34 million people commuted daily by public transportation[3].

By contrast, around 76% of American commuters drive to work[4]. Assuming that "commutes to work" is the same as "employed," that means 76% of 158 million[5], or around 120 million driving commuters.

In other words: 4 times as many people commute by car than by public transport, but at least 20 times as many die each day just via the canonical example of unsafety on public transport. And the actual ratio is likely far higher, since the best number I could find for public transport fatalities (under 1/day) is not filtered by accident, suicide, crime, natural causes, &c. Thus the claim: the things that people claim to fear about public transport are far more real as dangers when commuting by car.

[1]: https://troopers.ny.gov/impaired-driving

[2]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1295843/number-fatalitie...

[3]: https://www.apta.com/news-publications/public-transportation...

[4]: https://www.statista.com/chart/18208/means-of-transportation...

[5]: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t01.htm

[pandaman]

NY troopers contradict NHSTA (https://www.nhtsa.gov/risky-driving/drunk-driving) by a lot. I wonder how do they gather their statistics?

But your math does not make sense even with the data you have: you said if the drunks were killing in subway at the same rate as they do on the road then 47 people were killed in subway every day yet you took the 47 number from much larger pool of drivers. Should not it be a quarter of that, 12 people?

Your 300 fatalities in public transit could be interpreted as the fatalities caused by the public transit, are you sure they count people stabbed and/or shot waiting for a bus? The page does not show the source and what counts as the death in public transit (it requires some kind of payment for that). If somebody is stabbed while waiting for a bus, does it count?

[ravenstine]

> But seriously: the things you're describing are civic issues, not issues with public transportation

They both are and they aren't. It is a civic issue that is inherently worse for public transportation, especially those that have nearly no supervision like subways. I totally agree that the issue is a civic one that should be solved, but if we're not going to solve it, then it's a problem that will prevent public transportation from reaching its potential. Would you rather encounter a crazy person out in the open or be trapped in a steel box with them? That's essentially the decision people are making when they board public transit in a major American metro. If a person is smelly out in the open, at least there's a breeze that can blow the odor away, but on a bus or train you are trapped in the recirculating smell cloud. Out in the open, one might have to pass by such things, but being on public transit can mean experiencing them for hours.

> But that doesn't actually make them less frequent; it just converts the drunk guy shouting on the subway bench into the drunk guy who's about to T-bone you.

That's a bit of a false equivalence. While there's indeed some mathematical soundness to what you're saying, I'd argue the vast majority of trouble makers (for lack of a better term) on public transit aren't there out of commuting necessity. They hang out on public transit because it's out of the elements and they are unlikely to be harassed themselves. It's somewhere for them to go. If all public transit closed, they'd just be out on the curb or in front of a gas station.

There is an incentive for city officials to ignore the problem as much as they can get away with. They know that the vast majority of their constituents aren't taking public transit, so what better place to allow the unwanted to be off the streets?

That's why it is a public transit issue. It's a much greater challenge to solve civic problems at a higher level, but cities could actually hire security to be on their trains and actually enforce tickets. No matter what, it's an inferior daily experience to being in one's own car. You can never get rid of smells and the low-level bad behavior. Not without society changing itself.

[ncmncm]

Buses do not impede traffic. Cars impede bus traffic.