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Notes -
The real reason Americans don’t use mass transit is not because it’s full of unwashed, mentally ill criminals being creepy weirdos. It’s because mass transit takes forever to get anywhere, and Americans are impatient and rich.
Why can’t Houston build up its mass transit system to where it’s as efficient as NYC? Partly it’s population density- Houston sprawls more, so you’d need many more stops per person to achieve the same coverage. And of course, no one wants a bus stop in their backyard or adjacent to their business. Rich people want bus stops a few miles from the entrance to their neighborhood, so they can go pick up the maid in five minutes, but not so close that it’s easy for poor people who aren’t employed there to get in. Of course, people rich enough to afford an adequate number of cars but not rich enough to afford a maid want no bus stops near their neighborhoods, and in fact are often opposed to sidewalks between bus stops and their neighborhoods. This isn’t so much due to concerns about serious crime as it is concerns about poor people showing up looking for a handout, and littering while they’re here.
Business owners want bus stops located conveniently in front of someone else’s business, not so much because of crime concerns- people taking the bus are understood as working poor who are unlikely to assault or steal- but because they’re assumed to litter and smoke(cigarettes) while looking like they’re loitering, which turns off paying customers and makes it harder to monitor the security situation.
So you’ve got huge swathes of the city where it’s politically impossible to build bus stops, alongside the city needing more of them. Now let’s add in that Americans who vote are rich and can afford cars, especially in Houston where the working poor who actually need to have convenient bus access to the city have extremely low rates of political participation. Now let’s add in that American cities are notorious for fiscal mismanagement and cost overruns in a way Tokyo and London aren’t, and nearly all of them have massive unfunded liabilities to begin with. Finally, if the city is highly reliant on public transit, it’s going to face negative PR in the event of a mass disaster(and Houston suffers from hurricanes)- either the media will be mad at the city for not letting bus drivers evacuate, or it’ll be mad at the city for canceling bus routes that people in Houston have now come to depend on.
What? Rich people pick up their maids in cars? Is this actually a thing?
From the bus stop, not from section 8.
I know, but still.
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