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Comment by hifromLA | Hacker News Reader

Psychological safety matters just as much as physical safety. If you think that you won’t see some shit on public transit I welcome you to come to LA and take the red line for a day.

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Having spent 6 months in NYC over the past year, you see shit on the subway lines all of the time, but normal people use it all the time.

I think the latter is the important thing. It's not normalized as a viable means of transport in the land of the automobile.

BART's (the Bay's commuter rail) problem is that post-covid there aren't enough normal people to dilute the deranged ones. I've got a couple friends in SF, so I'll occasionally ride BART into the city for a night out on the town. Problem 1. is that the hours on BART don't really allow for that. Last call is 2 hours after the last train, so either I'm calling it short or crashing on a couch. This heightens number 2: There's not a lot of people using BART like that, so when I'm riding maybe 1 in 5 of my fellow passengers are noticeably up to something strange, whether it be actively smoking bud cannabis on the train (I'm no prude, smoking on the platform or using a pen or something I would find odd but not in a "I can't trust this person because they're clearly willingly to completely ignore the social contract" sort of way), leaving all their clothes save a baseball cap and a hypodermic needle tucked behind their ear on the platform, vandalizing the train car with a sharpie (including scribbling over the cameras, which was my cue to find a different car), or merely reeking due to not having bathed in far too long.

If it was closer to 1 in 100 people on the train displaying unusual behavior, it'd be a far less unnerving experience.

Buddy if you want to convince people to use public transit, saying a little shit is normal is not the way to do it

btw I live in Tokyo and moved here explicitly because of public transit.

That wasn’t the message - it’s the presence of having normal people. Public transport is just as popular in NYC as it is in Tokyo despite the shit.

Just got back from 3.5 months in Europe (17 cities), and yes it’s vastly better there, far more clean and sane. Still, coming back to NYC I’m not not taking the subway despite spending nearly my whole life in SoCal. It’s easily the better option over owning a car if you’re in Manhattan/Brooklyn.

I see where you're coming from, but the "normal people" leave because of these incidents. If you want everyday people riding the train, you gotta make sure that the poorest people in society aren't so miserable that they're unpleasant to be around.

I've never heard someone give the subway as a reason for leaving NYC. They leave because they're priced out of what they consider acceptable housing, the weather, or issues with the city itself. But never the subway.

Yeah of course, but there's also the people that got sick of the subway and bought a car, right? Hopefully they could buy a bicycle instead but with theft being what it is and how dangerous the streets are there's even less people willing to do that...

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