Comment by petra
9 years ago
One weakness of all public transportation is the lack of personal space. Maybe if someone would have solved that either by more space or some deep psychological insights, it would become more popular among Americans?
9 years ago
One weakness of all public transportation is the lack of personal space. Maybe if someone would have solved that either by more space or some deep psychological insights, it would become more popular among Americans?
I disagree. Europe has many countries with at least the same wish for personal space as the US, and public transport works just fine. I'd suspect a big reason is the car-centric culture, which also gives rise to the image of public transport being only for those who can't afford a car. It's a cultural problem that'll be hard to straighten.
> Europe has many countries with at least the same wish for personal space as the US
Maybe this is me being ethnocentric, but it seems the American way of embracing diversity (through political correctness, affirmative action, etc) has come at the cost of craving for isolation and independence from each other.
The loudest voices I hear against big city life and cultural diversity come from those who have little experience with either. They don't need to try Green Eggs and Ham to know they don't like it.
You think people in Iowa are driving because of the huge amounts of minorities?
I don't think those policies have anything to do with how close people want to stand to each other in a subway. Americans simply like space and tend to have a lot of it.
That's hilarious. Affirmative action created a car culture, not the fact that cars came around when America infrastructure was bring created or that people live far away from where they work. I get it though, you personally crave not being around minorities.
Try any "excellent" public transportation system during commute hours. The lack of personal space isn't misperception. Systems are explicitly planned to have standees, and lots of them, in close quarters. We've gotten acclimated to something much more comfortable, and we get to vote.
It's not clear how public transit advocates will convince us to vote to downgrade our lives. Maybe the bicyclists and pedestrians in cities will be able to block suburban drivers from entering.
OK, but that's like saying "nobody goes to Times Square anymore. It's too crowded".
If there was more public transportation, the problems you bring up about personal space would go away.
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I will gladly vote for trains because it takes people off the roads and reduces traffic which makes it easier for me to drive to and from work.
I find that I have plenty of personal space on mass transit as long as there's enough transit. If I'm taking the 2/3 subway (in New York) or the 27-Bryant bus (in SF) at 9 AM on a weekday, it's totally fine. If I'm taking Caltrain southbound at 9 AM on a weekday or the 4/5 towards the Upper West Side at 5:30 PM, it's miserable.
That is to say, there's a known solution already: funding.
For me the main disadvantage is that it takes an hour, comes once an hour, has inaccurate timetables, costs 13$, and stops running at midnight. Hence why I drive from mountain view to San Francisco rather than bother with Caltrain.
It's too bad Caltrain electrification is getting screwed over... But it's even worse that BART was blocked from just going down the peninsula, to the point that we literally went the other way around the bay to get it down to San Jose. Criminally dumb.
Having the fine people of the peninsula share the cost of transportation with the hoi poloi of the East Bay is unamerican, hence they opted out of it.
Same for the North Bay (original plans had the BART go almost all the way from Petaluma to Gilroy).