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Comment by acdha | Hacker News Reader

Yes, and we have generations of people trained to think that walking further than a hundred feet is an extreme workout to be avoided and that transit systems are full of criminals. It seems like that culture is headed for a cliff, however, as the cost of cars continues to increase (the average sale last year was a year’s median pay!), budgets for road infrastructure become tighter, and climate change becomes harder to deny. It feels like we’re headed for a messy upset when all of the conflicts come to a head.

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> we have generations of people trained to think that … transit systems are full of criminals

Are they not?

The BART Police Department's reports for 2022 show the following numbers for Part 1 UCR Crimes: Homicide: 3 Rape: 4 Robbery: 156 Aggravated Assault: 81 Burglary (Structural): 17 Larceny & Auto Burglary: 783 Auto Theft: 136 Arson: 10 Property Crime Subtotal: 946 Total: 1,190

Just because one transit system isn't policed, doesn't mean all of them are. Transit, by itself, is not "full of criminals" and I'm not sure the one you gave stats for is either (or even correct -- how do you commit "auto theft" on a train lol)?

Anyway, assuming there are hundreds of train cars and thousands of passengers a day, the chance of getting robbed on any one of them, using your stats, is less than 0.001%. Seems pretty safe to me.

>Auto Burglary: 783 Auto Theft: 136

This is why I'm too scared to take my car with me when I ride the subway.

They literally do take their car with them when they ride. Lots of BART stations have huge parking decks because they service areas that are not walkable or dense so you “Park & Ride” to get into the city.

That has very little to do with public transit and everything to do with a lack of public transit.

Roads are filled with criminals too. 37 people died from drunk driving EVERY DAY in the US in 2021. That's 13,384 dead from criminal acts.

Sure, now do the roads outside of the BART system. There have been thousands of car thefts, carjackings, robberies, etc. Crime isn’t a transit phenomenon.

Per how many people transported and how does that compare with similarly dense and similarly geographically large systems? Paris’ RATP and NY’s MTA likely put up similar numbers. That doesn’t mean that it’s full of criminals when the likelihood that you personally will experience an issue is low.

so 90% are car crimes, not public transit crimes

I live in a place where sidewalks are everywhere but driving is just much more convenient. I'm lucky that there's a store within 1 mile. If I got a model 3 the payment would replace my current gas expenditure completely.

The people of Singapore pay a minimum of 100K for the privilege of owning a bottom tier car and the demand for cars there is overwhelming and insatiable, despite the world class and extremely clean mass transit systems.

The reality is that cars are freedom and still superior from a continence and comfort standpoint. Americans are insanely privileged to have cheap, powerful cars.

The Singapore thing is about status, not freedom.

For the last 15 years I've lived in various places around the world, and for all of them a private car is the most frustrating, least enabling method of transport available. Finding parking is a nightmare, traffic is a nightmare, having to concentrate on the idiots around me is a nightmare, not being able to drink when I go out is a nightmare, dealing with the mechanical problems of the vehicle itself is a nightmare, dealing with the bureaucracy of owning a car is a nightmare. This isn't what freedom looks like.

Most freeing? Riding a motorbike in Phnom Penh. Berlin's 5 different public transport systems. Walking everywhere in Bristol (UK). Mexico City's excellent underground.

Add riding a bike (or electric bike) in most of Dutch cities. It can be even fun.

I have a car and a bike in the Netherlands. Most everyone I know has both. Both are nice to have at different times, and I've never experienced any of the nightmares GP is describing.

I was curious so I just checked, and the number of cars is just shy of the number of people of driving age, even in the bicycle paradise of the Netherlands.

Sure but you cant bike and drive the car at the same time right? So they own a car and choose to bike. Imho this is even bigger win than people who have to bike because they cant afford a car.

Lots of the peoples car needs would probably be covered by some form of car sharing but this is something car manufacturers hate and it has been always quite expensive. Maybe that will change.

New driver licenses are rapidly dropping in europe. Lets see whats gonna happen but i think Netherlands/Flanders are for sure important pioneers to get inspired from.

I'm not following how that makes the nightmares from GP that I was replying to true, or are you making a different point? I didn't mean to imply that riding a bike was useless or anti-fun if that's how it came across.

My data does not align. We have 15 million adults and nine million cars.

It's possible I was looking at motor vehicles rather than specifically cars. Even six out of ten adults having a personal car would be a statstic I think that would surprise people who think everyone here only rides bikes.

A difference is most Dutch families have one car, whereas the majority of American families have two or more.

At least three of my neighbors I can see from my front door here in America have 5 to 8 cars.

But that’s also because they have to be multigenerational to afford a SFH these days.

Because in America, if you car breaks down, you're fscked.

This is true, and I think it’s driving a lot of generational backlash because a lot of younger people are realizing they may never be able to afford to have a commute under an hour, or paid well enough to ignore the mounting costs of that lifestyle, especially as a lot of the infrastructure costs are going up sharply to deal with maintenance.

I think those nightmares depend a bit on how many people own a car.

> I was curious so I just checked, and the number of cars is just shy of the number of people of driving age, even in the bicycle paradise of the Netherlands.

This might sound like a high amount of ownership, but if you compare it to some other countries then it’s not that bad (or impressive if that’s how you look at it).

The Netherlands has 588 cars per 100k inhabitants v. 908 in the US as an example[0].

If you go down the rabbit hole and look at the sources for these numbers, you’ll find that in the US only 8% of households don’t own a car[1] v. 26% of households in the Netherlands[2].

37.1% has two cars in the US and 21.9% has three or more in the US[1] v. 21% and 6% respectively in the Netherlands[2]

I think it’s safe to say that there’s less cars on the road in the Netherlands and thus less of that nightmare scenario that is described in GP.

That said, plenty of drivers in the Netherlands (not having the frame of reference of more busy countries) consider the Netherlands having “nightmares” for drivers. In particular when it comes to parking, where the main complaint is the price of parking and the lack of parking close to a destination.

Personally I don’t consider it a nightmare but a blessing that a lot of Dutch downtown areas force parking on the outer edge, leaving the shopping areas as pedestrian only areas. But that doesn’t mean that other people with other interests don’t consider it a nightmare.

Whenever, in the very rare instance, a city or town here in the US tries to marginally move towards such a situation, people start dusting off their pitchforks.

Just the other day I saw someone losing their shit on Threads because someone suggested that it would combat sedentary lifestyle somewhat if you’d have to walk 10 minutes from where you’d park every once in a while.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_vehicles_...

1: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/2023-car-ownership-statistics...

2: https://www.kimnet.nl/binaries/kimnet/documenten/publicaties... in Dutch

I believe you, since you seem to be fixated to using cars for the cities. People living outside of cities have none of those problems. Cars are truly one of the freedom most enabling inventions in the history of the mankind.

> The reality is that cars are freedom and still superior from a continence and comfort standpoint.

If you have them when other people don't, yes. The problem is that by the time this is no longer true, you likely have a large sunk cost fallacy and political leaders firmly committed to the model and will struggle to realize that all of the time in traffic, countless deaths, and lowered quality of life for everyone around are in fact not actually inevitable.

Cars are freedom, I kinda agree. But you picked the worst place for your comparison. A small, packed island where if everyone had a car, there won’t be enough parking.

Another thing: you can have both (ie: Europe). You use public transit to get to places and you use your car when you need space for luggage or taking the family.

I alwas thought that the Singapore car thing was a reason for dads to get a break from a crowded appartment.

Sleeping-car-dads-under-newspaper was a common thing to see when I was there 25 years ago...

>The reality is that cars are freedom and still superior from a continence and comfort standpoint.

Ask any Amazon driver; they much prefer peeing in bottles in the comfort of their own delivery trucks vs on trains.

Amazon delivery drivers use vans in my location

> The reality is that cars are freedom

You are not allowed to run a small business out of your house in US, so i dont think you have any freedom.

Private jets are freedom. like actual freedom.

You can do private business out of your house for food at least in California. Or you can just ignore whatever podunk laws they’re supposed to enforce because in the PNW, the cops are too lazy to enforce anti heroin laws let alone anti small business laws

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