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Quality post. I don't have any factual or analytical quarrels, just a different point of view based on experienced-influenced shifts in value prioritization.
I once had a 90 minute each way commute for about a year. That's 3 hours in the car Monday to Friday. I hated it. Traffic is a stress machine; you have to be vigilant constantly in what is a boring situation with high stakes (even a fender bender has long term impact on your insurance premiums, what if the other guy doesn't have insurance, wear and tear on your car compounds, etc.) Especially on the drive home, I would get back feeling far more drained than I anticipated and this would sap my energy and motivation to do much more than sloppily prepare a Bro Dude dinner and veg out in front of the T.V.
For most of my career after that (even pre-COVID) I had either sub 30-minute public transit commutes, or a healthy mix of WFH mixed with 1 - 2 times weekly sub-30 minute driving commutes.
Without an ounce of doubt, the public transit experience was worse than every other mode including 3 hours daily. This is because it makes you tired and weary of people.
In any major American urban city with public transit, for going on close to a decade, daily riders are confronted with antisocial behaviors ranging from the mild yet still inexplicably annoying (those folks who play music on speaker instead of using headphones) to the low level criminal (open drug use or exchange ... panhandling) to the worrisome (erratic enough behavior that you must become vigilant in anticipation of potential threat) to the just .... disheartening (fare evasion by someone who obviously could pay it but understands "hey, no one is going to stop me" is now a policy in many cities). The compounding effect is that you have a constant availability bias. I can remind myself all I want about bad mental models and cognitive biases, but if I saw another homeless dude taking a shit on the platfrom this morning, I'm probably tipping a little lighter, I'm probably scoffing a little harder at a "therapy instead of jail" article in the Atlantic.
The "public space" is only public insofar as there's an understood order and general preservation of the space by the public. Otherwise ... it's a No Man's Land with a random free-ride-machine punching through it. There has to be some sort of collective respect and even pride in the thing itself. Public transit should be more than a competitor to private cars, more than a utilitarian cost-per-mile exercise. A ride should be considered part of the experience of that locale, that city, that city's culture. But ... if the current lowest comment denominator of that city's culture is open air drug market / improvisational lavatory / au-plain-aire insane asylum / literal free rider problem Illustrated ... then that public space and that public good (the transit system) is no longer what I would call capital P Public. It's a state run shitty service through Thomas Hobbes' human ant farm.
I'll let the wonderful Mottizens debate specific policy, but I'll die on the hill of this larger point - public spaces without genuine daily public support (in the form of prosocial behavior) and an understood order of things become lawless lands. It is the job of Government to reasonably encourage the prosocial behaviors (posters and the like) ... and decisively enforce actual law breaking. I do not understand how any public servant, especially elected ones, can look at fare evasion and go "oh well. It's not like they're killing anyone!" No, I suppose they aren't stabbing Cash App cofounders to death (oh wait .... sorry, too soon?). The suicide of citizen cohesion is done in slow motion and one cut at a time.
Thanks, and interesting - I've had pretty similarish experiences both of long car commutes (though not that bad) and chaotic transit commutes and ultimately I still preferred the latter. Part of it is probably going to be personal preference but that constant boredum-plus-hypervigilance as you put it just drove me crazy. At the end of a long day of work I can at least read Wikipedia or whatever on the subway.
I agree completely that something needs to be done about criminals and crazy people on trains and buses. Part of my support for transit is that I think it's actually pretty easy to address those things. We have all the tools - stricter entrance/exit security plus law enforcement onboard - we just lack political will. This might still sound like a tall order, but still seems actually solvable in a way that the unpleasant part of driving just don't.
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What? I think I may have heard of this, but this is still new to me.
Bob Lee was stabbed to death in SF a day or two ago.
Yeah, just saw this article confirming that.
I feel like I was thinking of a different, older incident involving a techie.
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This is a good comment, and again illustrates the divide between those who have experienced clean, safe, decent public transportation, and those who have experienced the reverse.
I don't like to drive, and now have a 30 minute commute so that I can have a yard with children and chickens and fresh eggs, but previously relied on public transportation in several different cities. Busses in the Southwest were mostly civil, but I had to sit out in the brutal heat for up to an hour to get them. I eventually got a car when my plan became to take a bus in the morning to the first part of my job, then a ride from my family member at lunch, another ride from a co-worker or walk through an air force base, another walk back, then another bus ride, so I was spending probably three hours on this daily, and involving multiple different people with cars as well. This only worked for a month, and wouldn't have worked at all if I weren't single with no other obligations.
Chicago was interesting. For the most part, I actively enjoyed their public transportation. Even though there are some panhandlers and some smelly homeless, they're kept in line, and middle class businessmen still ride the trains. Also, the CTA was built in the brief window of knowing how to build impressive stacked roadways, elevated trains, underground garages with parks on top of them and so on, and before everyone decided not to do that, and that it was too much work. So the multi-level train rides were both civil and actually interesting in their own right. But there were certain stops I was warned away from (maybe this was unfounded prejudice -- I didn't test them to find out). My commute there also involved driving to the metra, walking between the metra and CTA line or a 40 minute walk, and took over an hour each way, but it was an hour I enjoyed, which made all the difference. Also, I didn't have any kids or really hobbies, and still needed the car anyway. If LA could become more like Chicago that might be worth doing, but it doesn't seem possible, the city simply isn't designed that way as far as I can tell.
The first relevant map I could find shows jumps in violent crime rate of as much as 5x between adjacent Chicago neighborhoods.
I've seen similar astonishingly sharp gradients in other cities... but I admit the idea of seeing a sharp gradient along a commuter train route is particularly shocking, and there seem to be a few of those here - Armour Square to Fuller Park?
The idea of "many criminals strike near home because they're too poor to have a car" always seemed a little bit odd to me, and they surely can't also be too poor to jump a turnstile, right? Is the real explanation a vicious/virtuous cycle of policing, where a criminal expects to be caught if preying on a "safe neighborhood", so they stay in the "unsafe neighborhood", which makes the job of the police on the "safe neighborhood" beat easier and makes them more likely to catch criminals who don't stay out?
Maybe there's some prosaic explanation, like "crime rates are normalized by residential population but people are being victimized in commercial areas that they commute to, so the numbers on that map have the wrong denominator".
This seems plausible. Among the South Side neighborhoods, there was the city worker neighborhood, where cops lived and were comfortable raising children and setting off (ostensibly illegal) fireworks on holidays, and repelled an attempted BLM protest. The cops were standing on the side of the street handing out recruitment fliers to people in their cars last I visited. And there are the other neighborhoods, where they're always investigating the last shooting, and there's barbed wire and metal detectors installed in the high schools. Presumably in the city worker neighborhood, if a person (especially a person who looked a certain way) were standing in a parking lot breaking into a car, someone would notice, call the cops, and those cops would come right away. In the other neighborhood they would not.
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There's some of that, but there's also a huge factor of "most criminals are lazy and stupid". You hear more about those who are less so, but robbing one's neighbors is just a lot easier than striking out across town and robbing someone there.
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