I live in San Francisco. I don't take public transit regularly but I've lived in this area for 17 years and have personally witnessed several incidents on BART, Caltrain, and Muni. I also lived near Koln Germany for four years where I took public transit hundreds of times without issue. I think it's fair to say that some places have public transit that is just safer than others.

I'm pretty sure public transit is safer when it's not viewed as something that's only for the poor who can't afford to drive.

When everyone uses it, then the share of regular people who just want to go somewhere instead of harassing others gets up. But if only marginal people take public transit, then of course you'll mostly encounter marginal people there. The problem is how to start making everyone take it again.

Yeah, that sounds really weird to me, in france I went to school alone starting at 7 years old (although it was on foot and really close by), then using public transportation at 10, and I was never in danger.

As a note, in Atlanta, both private and public middle school children take marta often.

Well, I'm an American. I might feel differently if I were Japanese.

Here, children are driven to school by their parents. When school ends, the parents are there waiting in their cars. Kids mostly don't even play outside anymore.

Those of you thinking public transport is fine are likely at least a little bit physically imposing and/or you are in relatively fancy locations.

What a strange land. In the UK, I was using public transport and cycling to school by myself from the age of 16. I'm curious, are there large cities in the USA where this can happen? Are there any significant moves by politicians to wean North Americans off cars?

Conversely, are there large cities in other countries that are similar to the US, where this does not happen? I'm going to suspect the Middle East, due to ubiquitous air-conditioning.

16 is a bit old? I was 13. Many other children were 11. This was a city in the Midlands.

When I moved to London for university, there were 5-6 year olds on buses and trains, accompanied by an older sibling. And they were the rich children attending the private school I lived close to, normal children that age would live close enough to walk to their local school.

> I'm curious, are there large cities in the USA where this can happen?

Yes, GP appears to be ill-informed about how kids get to school in large parts of the US. In NYC, students take public transit (and are provided passes, if necessary) from approx 13 years old. The same concept applies in most cities I know of on the East Coast (I can't speak for further west, though it appears Chicago has a similar system).

It's because our news is completely unregulated and local news always spotlights and aggrandizes crimes and whatnot, so that the population is terrified of itself constantly.

Obviously if people took the time to look at the crime statistics, the chances of being a victim of a crime is less than half of what it was when I walked a mile to elementary school every day.

For the oddball crimes, that is true. Kids aren't actually getting swiped off the streets.

For more normal crimes, the lifetime chance of being a crime victim is serious. For stranger-on-stranger violent crime, there is a total lifetime probability of about 5.3%.

You might think "oh that is just 5.3% so no big deal", but the chance of dying in a fire is only 0.09% and we still bother with smoke detectors.

Violent crime is a life-altering event. Given the potential for horrific consequences, it is reasonable to be concerned about the possibility. Transportation choices change that risk.

I've been victim of violent crime. Somebody hit me in the face for no reason at all and ran away. While that sucks pretty bad, dying in a fire, or even just losing all my stuff in the fire, is incomparably worse. Being a victim of violent crime doesn't mean that you land in the hospital. Violent crime has a pretty broad definition.

I grew up in the suburbs and was walking to the bus stop by 8, and taking public transit to places by 15. It wasn't especially unsafe, although it would leave you stranded places after 6 in the afternoon.

High school kids usually use normal CTA buses here in Chicago

> Here, children are driven to school by their parents. When school ends, the parents are there waiting in their cars.

Do parents get out of their work in the middle of the afternoon to drive their kids from school to home? Do they go back to work for the last couple hours after that? Or do kids have 8-hour schooldays?

Luckily my wife only works a few hours a week, so she was able to pick up our kids from school (before we opted for homeschooling). For my brother and his wife, they both work full-time. They can get some help from Grandma, some help from friends who have a stay at home mom, and some help from us. On days where none of that lines up, either he or his wife have to leave work, take kids home, and usually go back to the office. There is no public transportation available here and they removed school buses maybe 10 years ago as a cost cutting measure. When I was a kid, the school bus worked fantastic. It is crazy they don't run them anymore.

I'm sure it varies by family.

Some people have fully flexible time. Some people have a part-time job or two, so they simply don't agree to work shifts during the times they need to drive the kids around. Some people don't work, often because a single income is supporting a two-parent household.

Or they don't work, because the parent is expected to wait for the child in car, although the child is big enough to transport itself had there been reasonable public transport.

It's called housewives, a concept abandoned by most of the modern world.

And for good reasons.

Good reasons such as? I think the rise of the dual income household is a major contributor to many problems. This is not to say that woman in the workplace is bad, I think a diverse workforce is a good thing. But the dual income family has lessened parent-child interaction and raised the average household income which I think raises general prices for just about everything, but especially housing. This makes it harder to get by as a single parent (which tends to affect woman more than men). And the increased cost of housing is a major problem and contributor to poverty and all the issues that brings.

It might have been better if the addition of woman to the workplace included an equal shift of men to a househusband role.

PS I like your username.

I am women. It would have to be me who would have to stay.

And I did stayed some time while the kids were small and disliked that a lot. You get used to depression as a normal state, basically.

And people wonder why the environment is screwed up...

> Here, children are driven to school by their parents.

Weird, here in New York I see kids riding the subway to school every day. I must be imagining them.