I've never been to SF, but I've visited NYC, and the subway there feels like stepping in to a horror movie.
During a two week visit I saw people passing out and being ignored (I was the only one attempting to help), individuals swinging around bricks in socks, and various other obvious examples of severely mentally ill individuals.
In London I've never seen anything like it.
It genuinely felt like stepping in to some sort of twilight zone. Compounded by the fact that other commuters seemed jaded, as if it was normal to be regularly surrounded by individuals who act more like rogue AIs than human beings.
I suspect that elected officials would feel significant pressure to act if this happened in London on a regular basis.
In my country, our recently former Prime Minister was known to regularly catch trains while going about his government business. Sometimes with a cabinet minister. Sometime on his own. And rarely, if ever, with a visible security detail.
https://www.google.com/search?q=Malcolm+Turnbull+train&tbm=i...
Only time I've ever been jumped or harassed on a train was in Madrid.
how can you tell when values are wrong?
That's a chilling but very accurate description. I don't have children, but I doubt I could live in SF/LA/NYC with kids. There isn't a major European city I'd say that for.
It's not often that I see people having fights in public here in Australia, but on the odd occasion that people are misbehaving, I really don't want to cause myself trouble and hurt myself. I'm not inclined to get bottled or stabbed for trying to help someone out.
On the other hand, if I do come across someone passed out in public who looks a bit fucked up, I will make sure they're alive and at least vaguely responsive, and roll them into the recovery position. I wouldn't call an ambulance though because they're expensive and I don't want to cause someone a $2000 bill because they were just drunk and sleeping it off.
While Marcel Rohner[1] was CEO of UBS he took the train from Aarau, where he lived, to UBS' head office in Zurich. That's despite the fact that the CEO of UBS has a car and driver at his disposal.
But the point is that he'd nevertheless be stuck in traffic jams like us mere mortals and taking the train is just that much more efficient.
And that's the thing. People chose their mode of transportation based on efficiency and economics. You're not, by definition, a social outcast just because you use train, trams of buses and that goes for a lot of countries outside the US, provided there's investment into the public transport infrastructure. But unless people feel safe it's a non-starter if you have alternatives.
Untimely train schedules. Disorderly conduct. Blatant disregard for the rules.
I took the 7 Train from Grand Central to Flushing with a visiting Japanese colleague in NY. The face of concern he gave while on the train was like he was witnessing purgatory. I remember he looked at me and said, "Is this safe?", to which I replied, "I don't know, I guess so". Retrospectively, the honesty did not ease the anxiety. The crowdedness part he had no trouble in managing, given how packed the Tokyo metro could be. What struck the most was: 1. The lack of fucks people gave on train, 2. How much of a free-for-all the US metro systems are, and 3. How on-edge people are. There's people who take naps with their phones out on Japanese trains. On the NY metro, he was wide awake and clutching his belongings for dear life the entire ride. Of the various things to appreciate about the U.S., that was certainly not a highlight.
The attorney's duty is to maximize the perceived level of risk, just as it is the defense lawyer's job to dispute that. The article only mentions a single statistic showing a 28% increase in crime in the first 6 months of 2018. One hopes the complaint is more statistically rigorous.
It's because of this subjectivity that I said I hoped the case would turn on a more rigorous definition.
BART is certainly more dangerous than other transit systems in other developed countries, because the US in general is more dangerous than other countries. Deplorable as this is, clusters in small sample sizes are often misleading as to statistical trends, and many of the people commenting here seem not to have first hand experience riding BART.
Remember also that existing transit links are beyond fully saturated. It’s not really possible for people to switch to transit en masse before the decades it takes us to build bus terminals and train tunnels have elapsed. No public transit system has the slack to absorb the Bay Bridge drive-alone traffic, let alone 101 or 280. People physically won’t fit into the vehicles. There are decade-scale projects to address that, and I support them, but I don’t expect to see their fruits during my working life. Anyone working now is going to be retired by the time a second Transbay Tube starts passenger service, assuming we vote to fund it right now.
Here [0] is an article to covers parts of this exact subject.
[0]: https://www.eastbaytimes.com/2013/08/09/building-the-bay-bri...
Instead, we got a less-safe, grandiose art piece for over $8 billion. $400 million more if you want a bike lane.
What makes you think European engineering companies are any better? Europe is just as littered with failed, bloated, late and vastly over budget infrastructure projects. Hell the small bridge down the road from my office was supposed to be closed for 4 month for some maintenance work, it's now been closed for 14 month and there is still no estimate for when it will be done.
The New York City subway was built in the era of Boss Tweed
Road damage is proportional to the 4th power of the vehicle weight. Normal cars effectively do nothing to roads. The damage comes from buses, fire trucks, UPS trucks, FedEx trucks, bucket trucks... and more trucks.
Switching all that to rail is completely unreasonable. Fire departments getting around on rail?
So we need the roads anyway, and cars don't wear them out. Cars do not impose a cost. As it is, car drivers are paying money to fix roads that are being damaged by buses.
What if we charged bus passengers the true cost of taking the bus? Each passenger on a bus is contributing to road damage. Each driver in a car doesn't cause damage.
How many lanes would we need if there were only trucks on the road? We build massive road capacity to subsidize car use.
So, on average, we don't really have more lanes than the minimum.
My fiance and I took the BART two stops to get to civic center to the Trump protests about 2 weeks ago.
We saw people selling meth/heroin/etc literally INSIDE the BART station in the public... No one cared. No police around.
This happened 2-3 times. We were on for TWO stops.
Seriously... BART needs to clean up their fucking act. I associate BART with homeless people, BO, trash, vomit, fights, and getting robbed.
BART trains and stations are like this on a regular basis; Muni has the same problems but not as bad. I've seen this kind of thing happen on Caltrain late at night also, but much less often. I have never, ever seen it happen in London or anywhere in Japan.
It's easy for people in the Bay Area to believe this is what all public transit is like, unless they have experienced better systems elsewhere. Why would they want to use it, or pay for it with their tax money? It's safer to take your own car, or an Uber.
I'm a big fan of public transit, especially trains, but it's just never going to be improved in the Bay Area if people don't feel safe.