Hacker News Reader

Comment by closeparen | Hacker News Reader

>We live in communities, not economies.

The City already tries to foster community by forcing people to share space against their will, via public transit. It's a dystopian hellscape, not a community. You can't just build those by force.

View on HN

It's hard to imagine your local city bus is so unpleasant to be called a dystopian hellscape.

While I was a BART commuter, I walked a gauntlet of slumped-over hard drug users, sprawled-out homeless people, human urine, and feces every day. Fortunately, I've only seen people drop their pants and take a shit on the sidewalk in front of me twice. Missed a random stabbing on the stairwell into my station by about 5 minutes.

This is Civic Center Station, which serves Twitter, Uber, and Square. No amount of tech worker foot traffic is going to clean up an area if the government isn't willing to police it.

Video doesn't even show the worst part, but helps to illustrate: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5gT5NULvRSk

> No amount of tech worker foot traffic is going to clean up an area if the government isn't willing to police it.

And policing will just drive the problem somewhere else. What America desperately needs is a new approach to a lot of issues that goes way beyond ever more police, courts and jails:

- drugs and addictions (now that enough white middle class people suffer from heroin or worse, something hopefully will be done beyond the "put them all in prison" attitude that caused the War on Drugs in the first place)

- mental health resources, whose lack of is directly affecting or even causing much of the homeless population

- medical resources

- housing

What's worse than heroin? I thought it was the most addictive thing we knew.

Fentanyl

carfentanil. 50 000 times stronger than heroine. (allegedly.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=COduXp6Cw3g

What matters is effects per dose, not effects per gram.

It matters if you want to smuggle the stuff.

Which nobody was talking about.

And until we discover and universally [0] implement that "new approach," public space will be avoided at all costs by those who can help it.

[0] San Francisco welcomes the downtrodden from everywhere in the world; it's not enough to solve poverty in the US to clean up SF's streets; you must eradicate it from every inch of the Earth.

That's not an inherent problem of public transit. It's just a symptom of failing to take care of poor people in your society. Try taking public transit in a civilized country like Germany or Japan.

I have, in fact witnessed someone defecating beside an U-bahn track in Germany. It may be less common, but it still happens.

there are untreated mentally ill people everywhere, just like there is poverty and corruption everywhere. It's a matter of scale & proportion.

We don't have this problem in New York. From an outside perspective at least San Francisco seems to be a uniquely fucked up place in this department.

That's because New York gets cold enough that trying this in New York will kill you through the cold. You'd freeze to death in the first year.

No, it's a symptom of lax policing and lax justice system.

I didn’t say it was an inherent problem of public transit. But it is an inherent problem of compelling people to share space in San Francisco. The library, for example, is a similar story.

The array of policy, economics, and values that make Germany and Japan work so well are not going to magically appear in an American city just because you try to cargo-cult some of their second-order effects. Public space in those countries is genuinely good; you don’t have to ban alternatives to get people to use it.

Perhaps move out of the third world city you live in and move to a developed one?

Only problem I've encountered on public transport on 5 continents is the occasional drunk group singing on Friday night.

I've been to third world countries and they were much more civilized than this.

> video: "... the city's jurisdiction ends when you head down those BART stairs."

That's shocking to me. Get city policy in there if the commuter cops can't handle it.

NYC cops be in there removing people stat if this happened here.

I always thought that force would work pretty well to build a dystopian hellscape.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com