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This line of argument reminds me of the "to get people to ride public transit, you don’t have to fix the issues with public transit, you just have to make the experience of traveling by car much much worse" argument I see sometimes.
They’re both true. A lot of US cities have a problem wherein public transport is seen as only for poor people and homeless, and once something becomes a negative class marker it has a stink that’s hard to shake off. Forcing middle class people to use public transport increases cleanliness and safety (because they lobby for it; in NYC the effort to clean up the subway has big support, whereas in LA and SF nobody gives a fuck since only the poorest of the poor use it) and in the long term makes for better transport systems. Countries like Germany and Finland where middle class people use the bus sometimes have a much higher standard of public transport than places like the US where it’s only for poor people without a car / license.
Obviously cleaning up the smelly / scary / dangerous / drug addicted scum is highest priority, as is general cleanliness, but some pressure is probably necessary to provide the initial impetus for a switch.
Taking wealthier people class hostage to improve public transit doesn't work. People just resign themselves to subways with smelly and occasionally aggressive bums in them. And Stockholm Syndrome makes them turn on anyone who does anything about it privately.
Stockholm has a clean, crime-free metro.. Since mass immigration altered Swedish demographics, this requires significant spend on graffiti cleanup and Metro-contracted security staff who are willing to use the necessary force to keep it that way. This continues to happen despite Swedish politics being what it is, because voters are neither morons nor masochists.
For the avoidance of doubt, so does every other sufficiently large Continental European or first-world Asian city. The fact that America can't police public spaces without a level of lethal violence that normies won't tolerate doesn't mean that it is impossible, just that America sucks at policing. The absence of research interest in "Why can't Americans convert taxpayer dollars spent on policing into an absence of crime the way other first-world countries can?" is exhibit A in why criminology as a discipline is a waste of space.
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