It's more like the other way around: the idea is to make public transport cheap and efficient enough that it's a reasonable alternative to driving everywhere.
>> For example I live in a very public transit friendly city, but the buses are un-ridable most of the time due to the rampant homeless issue(and all that comes with a large homeless population) while the light rail is usually better about being a semi-safe, semi-clean environment, that just happens to be so overloaded between between 7am-9am, and 3pm-6pm, that there is almost any price I'd pay to avoid it.
I live in a small town on the South coast of England, which just happens to have one of the largest populations of homeless people, nationally. It also has very good public transport, namely, buses, that are always full. I've never seen a homeless person using a bus as crashing space, or causing trouble of any sort. I can't say I ever particularly noticed homeless people on a bus. If homeless people on buses are a problem where you live, that has nothing to do with public transport in general.
Anyway, I think everyone gets the public transport they deserve. If everyone wants to go around by car, then we won't have good public transport- because why would we?
That would be nice, but that's not the general opinion of urbanists in the US. They (generalizing) really do believe as the parent describes, to "make driving too expensive and/or too inconvenient, to force people to use public transit", and they truly believe this will magically fix public transit across the nation.
It's the urbanist version of "the beatings will continue until morale improves".
They'll often lie about it, saying "we don't hate them, we just want them to pay their fair share", or "to remove subsidies". But mostly, they just really hate cars. Especially electric ones (since they largely solve most of the problems of cars, while still being cars). Just browse the top 20 posts of /r/urbanplanning on any given day to see this in action
I don’t hate electric cars more than gas cars, what I will say is that electric cars don’t solve a lot of the externalities that actually bother me on a day to day basis (that said of course I would prefer all vehicles switch off of gasoline),
My big issues are that cars take more space than other forms of transport, cars endanger me more frequently when I’m trying to do my thing & we expend insane resources on supporting car centric lifestyles that we needn’t expend.
Basically I’m tired of subsidizing other peoples car centric life styles at the expense of my own.
They solve air pollution and some of noise pollution. But they don't magically cause people to carpool.
And even if they did, net passenger density for buses is higher, rail substantially higher again. An NYC subway R160 carriage can, in the space of about 4-5 car lengths, carry about 250 people, meaning those trains move a thousand or more people in the distance from a T-intersection to the back of a cul-de-sac.
Cars are expensive. It's just that you don't pay for it at the car.
They solve air pollution
Even pure displacement of air pollution to smokestacks is a huge plus in places like midtown Manhattan where the most respiratory health harms due to particulates, NOx, ozone, etc. are taking place. Less kids getting asthma, people getting heart attacks/strokes, premature births, etc.
There are 2 kinds of homeless, normal people down on their luck, and people who need psychiatric or addiction care. The normal people go use the bathroom in an alleyway or a bush somewhere, the ones off their rocker piss themselves while sleeping on the train. There are far more 'normal' homeless vs. mental homeless, and it's the mental homeless that cause the problems.
Unfortunately not. Mental illness is rampant among the homeless population. And, to be honest, even the most "normal" people will develop mental illness once forced to live on the streets for long enough.
Generally regarding the NHS and mental health, the subject is very controversial. Resources are continuously slashed and the care available is not adequate, in many parts of the country.
When you hear of people being aggressive, high, inconsiderate, or here in Portland two people had their throats slit on the light rail recently near my house, it makes the public not feel comfortable using the public transportation. Since it's called public transportation and these things effect the public and the transportation, it actually has a lot to do with the public transportation.
If homeless people on buses are a problem where you live, that has nothing to do with public transport in general
Example: VTA (Santa Clara County). They started allowing "homeless" to just hang out on a given long route bus all day, recirculating directions, so they could claim higher ridership. Of course, the real-world effect is that those people who would have used buses for legitimate transportation were displaced, and a death spiral of constantly falling legitimate ridership continues.
VTA's explanations (paraphrased):
2005-2008: "oh, so many more people are employed, they can afford to drive" (or, more realistic, they need prompt, reliable transportation).
2009-2012: "oh, so many people are out if work, they don't need buses to get to work"
2013+: GO TO 2005
Local transportation policy, maybe, but that is not "public transport in general", i.e. the concept of public transport in the abstract, as opposed to its implementation in specific situations.
To put it bluntly, Santa Clara County is not the world.
In Austin, they took the perspective "if we won't build it, they won't come". After the unwanted growth happened, it sure feels like the sentiment is "if we don't build it, they won't drive." There are fundamental problems with the driving infrastructure and instead of addressing it, they patch over it with toll roads, some planned or are only a quarter mile long, to allow "those who care (can afford)" through. They ignore major issues, like if one of the major bridges needs work or goes out, the city will be devastated.
When the limited public transport options do come up, they've seemed to be forward looking projects which is fine except they don't do anything about all of the other problems.
> I live in a small town on the South coast of England, which just happens to have one of the largest populations of homeless people, nationally. It also has very good public transport, namely, buses, that are always full. I've never seen a homeless person using a bus as crashing space, or causing trouble of any sort.
My guess is that if this isn't due to better services for the homeless, then the main factor is probably the local climate.
Talk about missing the forest for the trees. Or should I say, the city for the abandoned human beings.
If you aren't taking public transit because you don't like the homeless people on the buses, how about you help them become less homeless or have a place to stay, rather than just shooing them away?
https://blog.jaibot.com/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-eth...
This issue only comes up in SF because of the large wealth disparity between the upper-middle class and everyone below them. Here, the upper-middle pays for the option to remove themselves from public services.
The single tracking and random fires have been the issues here.
What changed was case law, as the court rulings made it much more difficult to keep mental patients in treatment against their will.
But how does it cause there to be more homeless addicts?
- It is very likely that drugs are more addictive when you are uncertain about obtaining your next fix. http://www.stuartmcmillen.com/comic/rat-park/
- The criminalization of drug addicts turns them into an excluded class. They find it harder to get jobs or even to stay out of jail. If they start young -- and many will, once the problem becomes generational -- they are prevented from developing certain life skills and successfully develop their personality into adulthood.
- If drugs are criminalized, people will be afraid to ask for help.
- The war on drugs guarantees an unregulated black market for drugs. This means there will be no quality controls. Drugs are laced with all sorts of things that can be much worse than the pure version of the substance.
- Being arrested for something that harms nobody instills a distrust on society that, many times, never goes away. Imagine being sent to prison for years for smoking cannabis. Your life ruined. It doesn't take a lot of empathy to see how one would never trust society and its institutions again.
- The solution for addiction is, many times, other drugs. For example methadone for opiate addicts, and Ibogaine -- which appears to be a miracle cure for many addictions, but that is Schedule I in the US (and by consequence in many other countries). The war on drugs is based on pseudo-science and fear.
These are not just a bunch of hypothesis. They have been empirically confirmed by a nation-wide, multi-decade trial in Portugal.
Policy-makers that ignore all of this are not driven by the desire to help people. They have other incentives and/or irrational biases.
We do need to provide "free homes" but we also need to coerce acceptance of assistance.
The homeless population in Seattle (where I live currently) vastly decrease my quality of life despite the vast sums of money our government spends on them. I would happily contribute a lot more to taxes if it actually solved the problem but I have yet to see anyone give a good solution.
I mean, the stupidest thing about this is this isn't that hard a problem to solve. Homeless people are just regular people with a problem and no resources to fix it. You provide them resources and help and they are no longer homeless and no longer a nuisance. Instead, people see them like pests, as if rats invaded the buses and need to be exterminated.
Typically the government would be the best way to provide funding and access to the resources and help, but they suck at execution, and they always get screwed in funding. If citizens would see that funding for helping homeless people would improve their commute & community, they might invest more, which would both solve their immediate problem, as well as the homeless' problems. A citizen led organization could do this with a combination of private funding and grants (as many today are), but first they have to convince selfish privileged assholes to reach out and help. Good luck there, as it seems privileged people just don't want to help, even though it would actually be helping themselves.
But to say that simply providing resources will fix the problem is naive. It's hard, and heartbreaking. I believe there are solutions that we can and will work toward, but they're not simple.
For example, if someone is mentally ill, maybe they just need medication. But still don't have any income and perhaps no housing. What happens if they get mugged, or lose their meds, or forget to take them? Now they're unstable again. They need housing, and some small bit of income, food, security, and assistance. These are all resources, and providing them _all_ gives someone a much better shot at getting better and staying that way.
But it's also a misnomer that most homeless are addicts or crazy. One out of every 30 children in America were homeless in 2013, a disproportionate number being LGBTQ. 12 percent of homeless are veterans. In 2009 there were >535K homeless families. In fact, mental illness and addiction are the third and fourth most common reasons for homelessness.
Homelessness disproportionately affects children, destroying their education and keeping them in a cycle of poverty. If we focused more on providing them an education as well as food and shelter, this would have a big impact on outcomes of future homeless. Is providing these things simple? No, but the decision by the population to commit to actually providing them, is simple. The work will get done if we decide to.
We went to the moon on a whim. Surely we can feed and educate some kids.
We all want to "fix" the problem of homeless people misusing public transportation, but at least 10-20% of the homeless people I have worked with wouldn't even agree that a problem exists.
I want to add resources to "fix" the problem, but first you have to get all parties to agree that their is a problem to fix. There is a ton of grey area, and we don't talk about Hobo's anymore like we did in the 60's. But many people choose homelessness.
Of course that leads to massive social decay.
Agree with your other points, but both is the correct answer. It'd be wasteful to treat someone's mental health and leave them in a situation that deteriorates their mental health.
We also require they call the police when a crime is occurring. And the fire department when a fire occurs. And the city's department of works when a water main breaks. We also require they follow minimum driving standards and laws, take a test to certify they can drive, and make sure their vehicle passes a regular safety inspection.
"Public safety" in America is funny sometimes. In the rest of the developed world, produce and eggs don't usually come pre-washed, and you can even buy unpasteurized cheese and milk. But we Americans take so little responsibility for our own welfare that we literally force our society to protect us in every possible corner case, because taking the time to protect ourselves is too much to ask.
Except when it comes to necessities, like guns. Then we'd much rather be dead than safe.
Another fun example of how it's a citizen's responsibility to help: ending unjust laws that unfairly target people with no ability to defend themselves. Like the homeless. In many cities in America, it is illegal for a citizen to give a sandwich to a homeless person. They also are banned from many public spaces, and pushed out of the few places that they can actually have a space to rest or sleep, like highway underpasses and abandoned train tracks. They can't form a coalition and petition the city on their behalf; they don't have the resources. But we do.
We also have the resources to vote to install more shelters, more food banks, more outreach programs, more clean needle exchanges, more job programs, or hell, even just a place someone can have a shit and a shower. We have the resources to vote for programs to help hire homeless people, and to vote to expand low income housing. We have the resources to vote to distribute blankets and food during the winter, and expand safe spaces for more vulnerable homeless like women, children, LGBTQ youth, and so on. There's a lot of things we could do as citizens that wouldn't require you to actually do anything other than check off a box on a ballot, and maybe fork over an extra $1.50 in local taxes.
That's the least a citizen could do, but I don't see that being done either.
Which cities? This is the first I've ever heard of this.
It's the job of the people we elect to govern our society.
Just as a man riding on the same transit system, I totally believe that level of frequency and wouldn't expect anyone to be willing to put up with it. There were other anecdotes about drunks vomiting, fist fights on buses, racist slurs, and more.
I love the idea of transit, but it has some serious personal space, privacy, and safety problems that make personal transportation much more appealing.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=591309
[1]: https://www.google.com/search?q=public+transportation+women&...
She also avoids the last hour of transit.
We also got a car recently and this was one of the big reasons.
Skytrain - yes, you sometimes have the one off homeless guy, who jumped the compass gates, on the train who makes it awkward for all riders. 98% of the time during the normal commute it's peaceful. Last few trains of the day, you should anticipate the drunks on board. At least they are not on the road driving
Bus - when it's crammed, it's crammed and awkward for everyone. At least Translink now has a means to track rider data to understand the routes that require more frequent services to mitigate the crammed bus situation.
Considering Uber and Lyft have had blocks thrown in their way for approvals in Vancouver, we do not have the alternative means other cities do. Transit and bike lanes is slowly improving, but still has a ways to go.
How can this be true? Public transit allows your attention to wander and typically is much, much faster than traffic. Adding uber/lyft will get two of the worst attributes: traffic and high cost, although you’ll be able to do something else simultaneously.
Furthermore, it’s not clear how parking fees affect low income families: for my commute (between east bay and SF), public transit is an order of magnitude less expensive than driving, especially if you consider parking.
Finally, it’s not clear what homeless people have to do with this. The cost of affordable transit is interacting with your neighbors. If you don’t like your neighbors, please don’t screw them over by investing in car-oriented transit.
It's so bad she refuses to use public transportation here in seattle without me due to how unsafe she feels.
Buses and trams are slower as they're still in traffic, and now have to stop every 500 m to pick up or drop off passengers.
I'll usually take an uber if I actually need to get somewhere on time and it's not near a train station.
Excuse me, but- where does that happen?
I mention in another comment that I live in a town in England, where I've never had any problems with homeless people in public transport. I also work in London, travel by rail across Europe and often use public transport in three different European countries, France, Italy and Greece. I have never noticed the kind of problem you and the GP flag up.
I'm getting the feeling that it's a problem local to a very specific part of the world and by no means a global issue that has to do with the nature of public transport, in general.
Trains are mostly fine, but I won't take a bus or a tram if I can avoid it. If I can get somewhere by train or bus, and the train would be 10 minutes slower, I'll take the train.
The other day on the tram I had to deal with drunk ex-con listening to his bluetooth speaker and verbally abusing a poor Asian lady to the point she had to get off the tram. I was disgusted, but I wanted my teeth to remain in my mouth, so I couldn't do anything.
I've had to deal with plenty of abusive arseholes on the bus too. And even just people being noisy, like South Americans treating the bus like it's a nightclub (which I personally don't mind) or just drunk people yelling at each other because they've forgotten their inside voice.
Then some people treat public transport like it's a landfill. Especially on a Friday or Saturday night, public transport will be filled with beer bottles.
The drivers don't care. They sit in a little perspex box so that they can't get assaulted by the passengers and just drive the bus or the tram around.
Sydneysider here. I didn't realise the trains were bad in Melbourne. I travel to Melbourne regularly but rely on cabs when my legs won't suffice i.e. to/from the domestic airport. The MEL CBD is very walkable thanks to being a grid.
Do you think trains are more affordable in Melbourne, thus a good option for the homeless? I can't figure out what the difference might be, but I imagine the Opal card system here might be a barrier to people with little money.
> Ferry is the best option though.
Being able to enjoy a beer/wine/cider on the ferry is great. That you can tap your credit card to pay the fare is cool too.
> Perhaps it's because of the sunshine?
I always thought Melbournians were more artsy (for lack of a better word) because of the cooler weather. Just as in Europe the colder climates encourage quieter pursuits (philosophers, poets and thinkers) while the Mediterranean caters to hedonistic pleasures.
I don't think that trains are bad in Melbourne, although I haven't been to Sydney to compare, it's the buses and trams that have the anti-social behaviour. Having cops at all the train stations at night definitely helps keep the trains in a better state.
Affordability doesn't factor in at all here. The people who cause trouble on public transport don't pay for public transport. I'm not sure what it's like in Sydney, but most train stations don't have gates and the driver doesn't do anything if you don't tap on on the bus.
Ironic that you say that warmer weather caters to hedonistic pleasures when all the clubs in Sydney close at 3, meanwhile Melbourne is one of the few cities in the world that still has 24 hour clubs.
Minor stations lack gates, popular stations have them. We still get people avoiding fares, homeless people sleeping on seats, people who leave a lot of rubbish etc. But Sydney's modern Waratah trains would be the best I've tried compared to trains in Japan and France...well the Shinkansen is pretty cool but it's not your average commuter train.
> all the clubs in Sydney close at 3
Depends on where you are. The CBD has lockout-laws but a lot of the nightlife migrated to areas like Newtown where pubs and bars can close at 5am. I've noticed Melbourne is very CBD centric, whereas Sydney is similar to LA in that there are many satellite cities/communities that are the cultural hubs. I'd say some of the most boring areas in Sydney are the tourist traps, i.e. CBD/Circular Quay.
The transport system was better before Myki in my opinion. More affordable, weekly passes, and paper tickets. In contrast, Sydney's transport used to be a mess with every operator requiring a different ticket, so no transfers from train to bus or ferry. Now with Opal, everything is much simpler, and the best part is going to the airport is really cheap now, if you let your Opal card go negative :)
A friend who lived in Athens, Greece once told me how his sisters, who live in New York, came to visit him. He said that they were afraid to go on the tube, because they thought it wouldn't be safe. He said that they were used in the NY tube that they didn't think was safe.
I've had a few similar experiences myself (e.g. people being afraid of side streets in my cheery seaside town, where the biggest danger is someone from a hen or stag do getting sick on your new shoes). That's even more striking considering I don't actually meet that many US citizens. The few I do seem to always be looking over their shoulder.
I guess, the flip side of it is that people in Europe don't realise how safe our little region of the world is. We kind of take it for granted that just walking down a street in London or Paris, or other big European capitals doesn't automatically put your life and property in danger. For people living in places with high rates of violent crime, like the US, South Africa, Brazil or Mexico and so on, it's all very different.
I get that, in that sort of context, public transport is seen as unsafe- because anything "public" is seen as unsafe, and probably for good reasons. But that's not because public transport is inherently unsafe; it's public spaces that are unsafe in specific parts of the world. It's hard to decouple the two in peoples' minds though :/
Even if they people on the bus are okay, they are still uncomfortable.
But the bay area local governments are self-sabotaging parody where it's difficult for anything like that to get done.
Sorry, but that's called society and it will never be able to compete with the bubble you've built for yourself.
If more people were willing too embrace society instead of hiding from it then there's a better chance of improving it.
It's hot, noisy, uncomfortable, nausea inducing, and I have to put up with people falling asleep on me or homeless people harassing me.
The light rail (in Seattle) is fine, but the coverage isn't good enough.
Driving is subsidised in about a zillion different ways in the US; it's already hideously, ruinously expensive, we just don't realize it. You wouldn't have to artificially raise the price of driving to make it less appealing, you'd only have to make the actual costs more transparent.
It's a self-reinforcing status quo of people who accept government spending on roads, traffic congestion, crash casualties, total cost of ownership of a car in the thousands of USD per year, physical inactivity, and air pollution. And they expect free parking and cheap gasoline.
Of course everyone has different thresholds. But I'd guess most people work hard to earn enough for their own time saving luxuries, even if the external costs will hurt their children later in life.
If you've got a city that really is dense enough to be pedestrian-friendly, I think it's likely to be the case that the time situation is shifted considerably. Not only will it take less time to walk and bike places, but you probably find that the kinds of places you might want to walk or bike to end up being located closer to where you live and work. At the same time, driving becomes less convenient due to congestion.
Whereas, in car-centric cities, it often ends up being the case that businesses float out to the periphery of town.
My own pet theory, which seems to hold in every place I've lived or visited, but hasn't been backed up by any any rigorous data gathering, is that, no matter where you live, everything you might need to get to (e.g., the supermarket) ends up being 10-20 minutes away using the dominant mode of transportation in that city, regardless of what that mode is.
> Smeed also predicted that the average speed of traffic in central London would always be nine miles per hour, because that is the minimum speed that people tolerate. He predicted that any intervention intended to speed traffic would only lead to more people driving at this "tolerable" speed unless there were any other disincentives against doing so.
Anecdata: there are 3 grocery stores within a 5 minute walk from me. But I live there because of that.
My commute is a 7 minute walk. I go home and eat lunch with my family several days a week. I would have a very hard time giving that up, and I couldn't even imagine going back to spending 10% of my waking hours stuck in traffic. Life is too short for that.
If there are two or more in a small car, it's also usually less expensive.
If the parking problem were forthrightly addressed, this, along with the increasing use of efficient Uber/Lyft/taxi, would greatly reduce traffic and associated pollution. Most of those cars are orbiting, looking for a parking spot. The half life of a parking spot is about 20 seconds.
We'd fill a shopping cart with all the heavy items we needed for one or more weeks, sorting a few fragile or temperature-sensitive items. We would fill one or two bags to carry home with us immediately by taxi. The rest went back to the cart and got a delivery ticket attached at a service counter. Within an hour or so of us getting home, friendly supermarket staff would be delivering the remainder to our condo doorstep.
Meanwhile, we had walkable, outdoor markets where we could grab produce or even some short-order carryout stirfry. So, we'd often grab just a few items at a time, lived with a much smaller refrigerator than we do in the US, and only did the supermarket run for heavy bottled/canned goods or the odd import item that helped with culture shock or homesickness.
1. You can always get wheeled carts to carry your groceries. I take transit everyday and see a lot of senior citizens doing their groceries this way. If those frail 80 year olds who need sometimes a minute to get off the bus because they are so slow are happily doing it, it shouldn't be a problem for most other people.
2. In a walkable city, your shopping habits and life change. I live in the walkable (not downtown) part of my city. Usually I get off the train back from work, walk 5 min to the grocery store, buy 2-3 days of groceries easily carried in resuable bag and walk 10 min back to my home. This has been an excellent change over my past life because I am always able to cook with fresh ingredients and barely have to freeze anything or eat processed foods.
I recently downsized places for a much more walkable environment. Keeping less stuff in my house is a feature. One I was worried was going to cost me.
But my budget has largely not changed. Any increase in costs associated with bulk buying are at least offset by lowered transport costs. It’s really hard to exactly account though.
My instinct is that it is much more efficient for stores to warehouse things & me do JIT buying. I’d love to see research on it.
I don't really keep any food in the house, except for herbs and spices, and condiments. I don't keep anything perishable or frozen.
Every day or so, I'll go to Aldi and get my vegetables for one or two meals.
My food wastage these days is about zero.
Conveniently I live practically next door to an Aldi so I don't pay a lot for my food, I'm down to $7 day or so as I've moved to a vegetable based diet.
We could stop by not subsidizing it in the U.S.
Corn, Oil Exploration, Oil Reserves, federal highway funding, and many state highways and local roads, and vehicle police are subsidized by income tax payers instead of tolls, fuel taxes, or vehicle registrations.
For example, in Japan there are many less homeless people on the buses and trains. No surprise there though, as there are very few homeless people in Japan. Even in Tokyo there only about 0.1 per 100k, compared with 795 per 100k in San Francisco.
If someone is in a car, that does naturally insulate them from the homeless people, though it certainly does nothing to alleviate the root problem of there being a lot of homeless people.
If our homeless epidemic is so bad that it is ruining our public parks, transit, and sidewalks, one would hope fixing it would become a political priority. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be much political will in the US these days to take on big, difficult issues. :/
Also, just curious, where did you see the strategy of cracking down on public transit behavior that was effective?
It's chicken and egg. Public transit needs ridership to get better. It won't get ridership until it's better.
The large stick of presenting more of the previously hidden costs of driving, is partly banking on public transit getting better as more people are nudged towards it.
This is why I'm really happy to see in my area two towns are putting in a rapid transit bus system between all the major hubs (two malls, a downtown, regional transport, and two universities) and the universities are getting all students, faculty, and staff plus families passes. These passes will also cover regional transit (mostly useful to get to the airport).
There is enough incentive in all of this for a massive influx of people to use public transit and make it a way of life (the universities signed 10 year contracts) such that I hope the way of life will have sticking power if they don't renew the contracts.
Two observations.
1) We need to think outside of the box.
2) We need to redefine what public transportation means. I would classify Uber/Lyft and dockless bikes/escooters as public transportation, at least from a city planning perspective.
Zurich did just that in 1973 after a public referendum killed a projected metro.
The city figured out long and hard what makes public transport attractive and determined that it's not necessarily the time that you spend to get from A to B, but more importantly the expectation of time needed.
Consequently trams (streetcars) were provided independent tracks wherever possible and trams and buses were granted priority at all signals.
Additionally the attractiveness of roads for private vehicles was reduced and parking was restricted. In 1996 the "historical compromise" was reached to restict the number of parking spaces on the level of 1990 [1].
Another important factor was the creation of the S-Bahn (regional rail transport system, comparable with Paris' RER). Combined with that an integrated ticketing and fare system for the entire canton was introduced. Except taxis you can use any mode of transport within your tickets validity.
I think calling it a roaring success and extremely visionary is not an exaggeration.
Now if the city would only become more bike friendly it would just be about perfect in all respects of public transportation.
With a more leftwing government chances are that there's finally more movement in that direction.
Sure, that model is not easily transferable to other cities and it took decades to grow to what it is now. But there certainly are other shining examples of successful public transport implementations in (mostly) Asian and European cities.
It's not impossible once the fetish for cars and parking (which is heavily related) is put aside.
[1] (https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2012/08/lessons-zuric...)
Most of the article talks about walking, and making cities more walkable. This isn’t about public transport.
The housing problems and transport problems in many cities are both symptoms of the same urban planning decisions; in a nutshell it’s about zoning regulations.
>I've seen that has a chance to change this is to come down hard on poor public transit behavior, perhaps by putting actual people on the buses with the specific job of cracking down on the drunk/high/piss soaked/etc types, in an effort to improve the quality of the service to the point that the middle-upper income groups uses it again.
Or you could, I don’t know, treat them like human beings, get them counseling, and reintegrate them into society?
I think the best you can do is that every building is next to one one-way car lane (shared with bikes going the same way) and one bike lane (for going in the opposite direction). The road should not be asphalt but some softer, less conductive material. No street parking. If you want to own a car, you can't externalize the cost to society but build a garage for yourself. Of course, there is a maximum size on the cars that you can buy and 30 km/h speed limit on most roads. You can have mini-buses (20ish people) and subways to take people around.
I think this is already a massive improvement on car centric cities. With the right distribution of retail and housing, you can have people enjoying a really nice life.
You can however plant a lot of trees which would make a huge impact on the sustainability of cities by regulating the heat/cold much better. Also if you look at old European cities you can pretty much compress away all the car space. Jan Gehl's "Life Between Buildings: Using Public Space"[0] is a fantastic read if you're into thinking about this sort of thing.
[0] ISBN 978-87-7407-360-4
[1] https://www.treehugger.com/bikes/urban-arrow-e-cargo-bike-re...
The solution is to charge correct prices. Nobody in the US knows what the actual societal and cost burden of driving is, because none of them pay for it. Yes, that would make it "too expensive" to drive for those at the margin, if that didn't happen it wouldn't be a solution.
The way that you get the benefit of correct prices without burdening the poor specifically is to refund the difference via a general tax mechanism like the income tax. If driving taxes go up by $5000/yr but income taxes go down by $5000/yr, then the net burden is zero for those who don't change their behavior but it's a net benefit for those who do.
That being said: I prefer biking, and with two saddle bags I can easily do the shopping for two. And I've seen friends get e-bikes and ditch a lifelong car lifestyle on the countryside.
EDIT
And "by the way": why do the richest societies of the world afford themselves the " luxury " of having homeless people at all? It's so weird...
They could do more for sure. But it's a bottomless pit. The more you invest the more "poor" people are "pulled" into orbit of the programs requiring more spend, which brings more poor which requires more spend ad inifinitum.
> I am fine with spending "other people's money" (AKA money belonging to people who don't need it)
Oh ok then, I just decided that you don't need your money and I will spend it on the poor. Since I am "good" and I have everyones best interests at heart because I said so, then there's no problem. I will also decide who does and doesn't "need" their money. What an awesome power to wield.
What weasel word language you're using "life for those with the least advantages" just because you are poor doesn't mean you didn't earn it or don't deserve it. What simplistic logic you are using, what gigantic and awesome powers you propose to wield with such little thought.
The most basic standards of care and concern are absent from them, they litter and loiter and harass and stink and steal without any regard. So attract them to your city at your peril.
>That being said: I prefer biking, and with two saddle bags I can easily do the shopping for two
^This right here. You don't come into contact with them ever, so you don't see the problem. You probably never will but you cluck cluck whenever somebody who does have to deal with them complains.
Although your rhetoric is terrible, you're not entirely wrong there.
But using jackbooted thugs to kick homeless people off public transport is not the solution though, and doesn't achieve anything. It simply pushes the problem somewhere else. You need to actually solve the causes of the problem, rather than trying to cover up the symptoms. That's not even starting on how you determine if someone is homeless or not. I saw a hipster the other day who I genuinely thought was homeless, until I saw that he had a bottle of craft beer under his arm, rather than a $2 bottle of wine.
If anything, banning homeless from public transport is just going to make the problem worse, because you've just pushed them somewhere else. Now they have no means to move anywhere (or they'll just steal bikes), and they're just going to shelter anywhere else that they can, including breaking into buildings.
Society does need to find a way to "deal" with homeless people, but you can't just make being homeless illegal. Just like you can't "deal" with heroin addicts by banning needles.
They already do all of these things.. and also they befoul public transport and harass people on the subway and buses.
You merely assume I want to do unethical things to them meanwhile you don't really condemn their unethical behavior denying their agency while amplifying mine. I think we should just round them up and take them to a place outside of town that feeds them clothes them and gives them whatever drink and drugs or amusements they want so long as they stay there. ALL benefits are contingent on life reform so they can continue to receive benefits if they leave, or they must stay there (kind of like a gilded cage).
For example I live in a very public transit friendly city, but the buses are un-ridable most of the time due to the rampant homeless issue(and all that comes with a large homeless population) while the light rail is usually better about being a semi-safe, semi-clean environment, that just happens to be so overloaded between between 7am-9am, and 3pm-6pm, that there is almost any price I'd pay to avoid it.
The sad part is that no matter how excessive the taxes or how limited the parking the ones to suffer first, and worst, will be the low-income families and workers. The homeless will continue to do whatever they can get away with, and those of us with higher incomes will grumble a bit and pay the taxes. The only solution I've seen that has a chance to change this is to come down hard on poor public transit behavior, perhaps by putting actual people on the buses with the specific job of cracking down on the drunk/high/piss soaked/etc types, in an effort to improve the quality of the service to the point that the middle-upper income groups uses it again.