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Comment by madeofpalk | Hacker News Reader

The situation is weird. No one thinks like this, or it isn't a problem, in cities that actually have good public transport. A drug addict has never entered my mind when riding public transport in London, Paris, Sydney, Tokyo, etc.

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When a transit system is bad only those in the worst situations use it because they have no other options. Thus all you see are societies worst.

When transit is good everybody uses it and normal people are the vast majority so you rarely see or notice the bad people.

The percentage of bad people is about the same in both cities overall

Even when a transit system is bad, you often find people use it anyway in situations where large events make driving a fool’s errand. There’s a hard incentive and comfort hurdle we’re decades from alleviating via impossible fuel prices for your average Joe

That is more mediocre versus bad. Most of the bad transit systems I'm aware of don't have service to large events at all and so it's not an option.

Fair point. I likely never encountered truly bad public transit since it was never pointed to as viable.

There are a lot of unviable transit in the US. Most transit systems have large unviable parts even if there is a viable core (generally in the city center). People often blame the unviable on lack of density, but there are examples of viable transit systems elsewhere in the world that have US suburb density.

Can you share some examples of viable transit systems in areas with similar density to US suburbs? I'd like to know more.

Nothing specific, but when you look at European cities you discover many of them have areas with similar density to a US suburb and yet have good service.

I do browse on Google Maps from time to time, and I do see areas with similar-ish density. I also see a lot of cars. I've known a few people who have lived in such places, and they say their transit is near useless (poor service intervals, limited hours, doesn't go everywhere, etc) and most people drive if they can. Which will be less than in the US, as operating a car is often considerably more expensive there than here, tipping the math towards just accepting the poor transit service.

Which is why I was curious about specific experiences.

And I do say, better than many US suburbs which have absolutely no service at all.

I'm sure people in those areas do drive a lot. However, the question was about transit and from what I can tell the trans system gets enough ridership to support decent service that is a bus every 10 minutes which is not ideal but acceptable.

I definitely agree, when it comes to connecting into the larger metropolises the rail is pretty effective from what I hear from those places, and once in the big cities its usually not too bad.

Maybe with gas inching towards $9/gal we'll finally get people in the US demanding actually decent transit options.

The busses around me are either natural gas or EV, so they're pretty disconnected to the current energy crisis.

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