> They forced all manner of people into close quarters with one another.
I'm convinced this is the root of all animus towards public transport in the USA. Racism plays a huge part, but it's not exclusively racist, it's also classist - my parents for example would never want to be seen on a bus in their midwestern home town.
This view obscures real problems with safety and hygine on buses and trains. It isn't racist or classist to hate meth smoke blown in your face, or teens setting off fireworks and assaulting passengers on the subway:
These days, a much bigger problem for public transit than racism/classism is a general lack of public safety on buses on trains, for all passengers no matter their race or class. Most actual public transit passengers know this. For example, the jury that acquitted Bernie Goetz included two black people; half the jurors had been victims of crime on the subway themselves. A black woman who witnessed the shooting said the teenagers "got what they deserved:"
My public transit experience is mostly DC and New York. The few times I've ridden BART, cleanliness was nonexistent (fabric seats were not the best design choice!) and safety was at best questionable. Some examples from the news:
The chance of an incident on any given day is low, but palpable. When it happens to somenone else, it happens right in your face with no physical separation. Maybe that's why many choose to drive instead, despite the higher actual risk of accident per mile. That in itself is a tragedy, but people want the perception of safety just as much as safety by-the-numbers. Hygiene and comfort matter too.
>cleanliness was nonexistent (fabric seats were not the best design choice!)
I'm a New Yorker and before you say you think I want to do away with cars, I think the ideal is a combination of mass transit and private vehicle ownership if you need it. That being said, my mind is always amazed at how clean and well maintained the DC Metro seems to remain. The cars have cloth seats! But the trains are always clean! New Yorkers were so surprised in 2020 when city subway stations got regular bleachdowns. It humors me to no end.
I love the DC Metro for all the reasons you list. That's what made its recent missteps all the more frustrating. The Yellow Line which serves Reagan National Airport will shut down for maintenance soon for eight (8!) months, even after it was shut down all summer in 2019. Meanwhile, the new 7000 series cars continue to have serious safety problems, which are not well-understood but may be inherent to their design. They've just recently been brought back into service following a serious derailment last year.
This is to say nothing of the dysfunction and alleged racism in the WMATA union, or public safety on the trains, which while generally still good has lately deteriorated. Masking was never enforced during the height of COVID. Buses are and have always been worse. I hate driving in the DC area, but Metro seems like they're doing their very best to keep me on the road.
"Unsuck DC Metro" used to be my go-to source for Metro reporting. Sadly, the man behind that account passed away last week:
"Meth smoke blown in your face, or teens setting off fireworks and assaulting passengers on the subway" is somehow not a problem in parts of the world where public transit is not seen as something for the poor people only.
Lack of investment in metro cops, maybe. By every other metric, American mass transit costs more and underperforms compared to European and Asian systems:
Just like with healthcare and internet service, America often pays a lot more while getting a lot less. Just because America paid more for its mass transit doesn't mean they were better designed, more pleasant to ride on, or that those system are well maintained. It could also mean things like our public transportation had to cover more ground, that unique challenges in geography increased expenses, that politicians were wasting tax payer money in exchange for kickbacks and favors (no-bid contracts), or companies were simply overcharging Americans for the work.
Real, meaningful investment in infrastructure and improvements to the environments people spend their time in can do a hell of a lot more to prevent crime than cops do. There is a lot of research to support this. I don't doubt that if we invested more in making our mass transit systems better and more enjoyable to use crime rates would drop.
Here's a start if you want more information on the impacts of our environments on crime:
Planting trees is not a serious solution to gun violence or mass transit safety.
The correlation between increased, properly-utilized police presence and a decrease in crime is one of the most well-researched, replicable, and best-understood conclusions of social science.
I've been on mass transit in a few countries now, and I saw more police presence in the US than anywhere else, but it never made me feel any safer and somehow other countries with better, cleaner, public transit systems don't have the kinds of crime problems the US has.
You want enough police around so that they can respond when there is a problem, but not so much that the environment becomes oppressive.
I'd rather reduce crime by improving the public transpiration system and surrounding neighborhoods than waste tax payer money on having cops sitting around all day on trains and subway cars.
I sincerely wonder what mechanism makes planting trees reduce crime more effectively than increased policing. If true, that lends credence to Broken Windows Theory, no?
The main problem I have with Broken Windows Theory is that rather than being used to improve the environments (fixing the broken windows) it's often used to justify flooding the streets with police and aggressively harassing people. It identifies the source of the problem (the run down areas of a city), but then ignores it because overaggressive policing is an easier sell than spending that money improving the living environments of "the wrong kinds of people". Making those spaces into more oppressive environments won't tend to do much to solve the crime problem because it was an oppressive environment that caused the problem in the first place.
Cleaning up and maintaining the run down areas communicates to everyone that the area and the people living in it have value. People start to expect more from the area and from each other. It also makes those spaces less attractive to people looking to cause trouble and more attractive to businesses and to people from outside of that community. The health and mental well-being of the community improves and so does their economy. Shooting jaywalkers and setting up stop and frisk checkpoints just makes everyone feel like criminals and sure enough that's what you get.
Broken Windows Theory isn't wrong, but Broken Windows Policing is a problem because what these areas need aren't just police, but rather urban developers, landscapers, and construction crews. Cities that clean up, improve, and maintain the run down parts of town see crime drop. Cities that simply use run down areas to designate "problem populations" and send in the police harass those communities over every possible minor infraction don't get those kinds of results.
True, stop and frisk is just one of many ways broken windows policing can aggressively target the people, when what's actually needed is to target the environment. Policing has a role in cleaning up run down areas, but it's a small one compared to the infrastructure, urban planning, and landscaping improvements needed to reduce crime. Too much/aggressive policing is just another broken window that needs fixing. It signifies that the area is a bad part of town and sets that area apart from the nicer parts of the city.
Counterpoint: Detroit. It's jam-packed with trees and gun violence. Maybe planting trees where they weren't correlates with improvement, but I seriously doubt trees are causal to peace.
Trees sure aren't enough if they're surrounded by vacant lots and abandoned houses. You can't fix everything with landscaping, but improving areas into nice communities that are more in line with the rest of the city goes a long way.
Probably has alot to do with how the cops are trained and what cop culture is embraced as well.
US police are more often a problem then police in other western countries.
I remember the NYC subways in the 1980s (which wasn’t as bad as the 1970s). BART, today’s NYC subways etc are clean and safe by comparison. I love them, where they work.
Melbourne still has a thriving and beloved streetcar system.
I rode the bus every day for 10 years in SF, and I've had less than one bad experience per year. Yes, you may see a drug user on a bus (I once had someone smoke meth next to me, for the length of one stop), but assault isn't very common. Likely the most common issue is theft, when you aren't paying attention to your belongings.
The issue is very much racist/classist, because problems and complaints like this are much less common in places where everyone uses public transportation. The public transportation is better funded, more frequent, and better maintained (and cleaned). Rather than being filled with people who are forced to use public transport, it's filled with everyone, and that helps with the general culture/vibe of the transport too.
Live somewhere where public transport is the norm, rather than exception, and get back to us.
Where I live the classism is reversed, in that arriving by bus means you can afford to live by public transit.
The same goes for showing up to a party with a salad from your backyard garden or fresh baked bread. Having the time and space for these is a luxury now, whereas my mother would prefer to pick something up on the way.
Perhaps if you have the « choice » for public transit.
What we saw in toronto for example during Covid is that ridership dropped in higher income neighborhood (especially the ones that have access to the subway). The highest ridership lines were bus routes in low income neighbourhood, where people still had to go to work as some type of essential workers and did not have a car.
Let’s not make a blanket statement that transit is for the rich, the reality is that the rich takes it when it gets good enough but they always have other choices. Some people just don’t have that choice and transit is their only way to go to work, that’s why it’s essential to the economy.
So the rich people of Toronto first wanted picket fences and built the inner-suburbs, and drove everywhere, plus forced the elimination of transit payment zones.
And now the rich are living more in Old Toronto and the poor(er) folks are forced to the inner-suburbs where the design does not condone efficient transit.
I wouldn't say transit is for the wealthy... Only that that transit should be more ubiquitous within population centers and widespread regionally, with high enough frequency to be a workable option for everyone.
> Where I live the classism is reversed, in that arriving by bus means you can afford to live by public transit.
Interesting thought, I had to think of what kind of places these are. Maybe urbanized bedroom communities or connected suburbs like Naperville in Illinois? Where do you live?
It isn't racist or classist bullshit. It was that people liked cars for the independence they provided. Today's live in their parent's basement generation can't comprehend the concept.
It absolutely is. Often, the determining factor as to whether one rides public transportation or not given its availability is whether driving is an option or not. Driving is never an option when one doesn't have a car. Cars cost money, and money (in the US) is pretty directly linked to both race and class.
I'm convinced this is the root of all animus towards public transport in the USA. Racism plays a huge part, but it's not exclusively racist, it's also classist - my parents for example would never want to be seen on a bus in their midwestern home town.