[oldjim798]

All this applies to cars as well. Drivers are wild and driving is absurdly dangerous. I hate driving because other drives act like they are the car in the world - particularly post covid. Here in Toronto turn signals feel like they have been uninstalled. We have a ton of street racers tearing up the roads. I see motorcyclists pop wheelies and rip down major streets weekly.

All of your complaints about lack of pro social behavior applies to drivers too.

[SpicyUme]

I sit on the bus watching 10~25% of drivers on their phones watching videos at 60mph on my way to work. All ages too, including surprising old people. I live on a street that's posted 25 MPH and watch people impatient with the light down the block try to cut around traffic at ~40 down a narrow 1.5 lane street. Several times this year I've watched people cross a double yellows to drive into oncoming traffic to make a turn or skip past traffic. On Monday I was late to work because a driver ran into a pedestrian, stopped, then drove off, leaving him bleeding from the head on the side of the road.

Yeah, let's talk about antisocial behaviors. I'm getting to the point where I think roads should be designed specifically to inconvenience drivers. And I am one, I like being able to drive across the state, or across town to places that can take a long time by transit. Cars can be great.

[II2II]

> All of your complaints about lack of pro social behavior applies to drivers too.

I would argue that drivers are worse. I've had motorists stop me while crossing a multilane street asking for directions. I'm thinking, "WTF, this isn't a safe place to stop and talk." I've also have had drivers pass by me while I was laying on the road. (One time after flipping on my bike because of street car tracks. The other time after being struck by another vehicle.) And these are normal people I'm talking about here, not some "big scary" stereotype.

[LexiMax]

I've had panhandlers walk up to me at stop lights in suburban sprawl cities. I find it very hard to believe that the GP hasn't experienced the same.

[tengbretson]

Would you agree that being able to drive away from that situation is different from sharing space in a confined metal tube for 20+ minutes?

[LexiMax]

If you're sitting next to a homeless person for 20+ minutes you're not in danger, you're just uncomfortable sharing space with the less fortunate.

[inglor_cz]

"you're just uncomfortable sharing space with the less fortunate."

This is the sort of vacuous moral posturing that loses elections and if it wins them, it makes cities unlivable.

Why should I be fine sitting next to someone who shit his pants several times and likely has lice and scabies? And yes, it occassionally happens even in Czech public transport.

If you not just tolerate this, but scold people for being disgusted, the public transport system will lose the middle class and with it, any benevolence of the tax payer.

Civilizations always have some minimum for public behavior. Not stinking to high heaven in closed spaces is one of them. If you fight against such bare minimums and tell people that they are bad people for requiring them, you are promoting pure, unadulterated barbarism.

[LexiMax]

I don't know how it is in Czechia, but here in the US, we have a long and storied history of suburbanization, white flight, redlining, exclusionary covenents and discriminatory mortgaging.

The result is entire generations of people who grew up in suburban sprawl, isolated away from anyone who didn't look like them. I don't expect to be able to convince those people to suddenly turn over a new leaf - if anything, the argument was lost long before I was born.

You cannot make public transportation both useful and sufficiently sanitized to where these sorts of people won't be bothered. It's an impossible standard - at least for a country as diverse as ours.

At this point, what is there to lose by speaking the truth?

[woodruffw]

My experience is that panhandlers on the road like to post up at long red lights, at which point you’re effectively forced to share space with them for N minutes unless you intend to run a red light. In the subway, you just change cars.

(I’m riding the subway right now, and two people just changed cars because of weak A/C.)

[dmd]

Well, as one data point, I've been driving in the Northeast US since 1996, mostly around Philadelphia and Boston, and that has never once happened to me.

[xarope]

Saw a juggler in Barcelona do this. Was juggling at the lights, then ran around asking for tips. Ran up to me too, as a pedestrian, but I was crossing the lights then so he decided to focus on the cars instead.