I think when most people use "safe" in this context, they mean "comfortable" or "psychologically comfortable". Nobody enjoys sitting beside someone tweaking and shitting themselves, even if it's perfectly safe.

Well, even so, while most drivers don't mind driving, there is a significant minority who are actually kind of freaked out by driving -- big overlap with people who have experienced a serious wreck. I've met a few people like that.

And besides the ones who are so anxious about driving that the rest of us know about it, there's probably a lot of people who have mild anxiety about driving but just suppress it, get through it, and/or minimize unnecessary driving, because you can't avoid driving where they live.

And, considering the risks, it's not an irrational fear. Perhaps it's us who don't mind driving and are acclimated to it who are the strange ones.

Heck, I do find myself feeling this way sometimes. I've been driving long enough to be pretty comfortable, but I do notice feeling a lot more comfortable on safer feeling roads, eg with slower speeds, frequented by less hurried drivers. I think everyone does, to some degree, otherwise complaining about the crazy drivers from the next state over wouldn't be such a universal pastime in America :)

We pretend the risk and the associated rational anxiety of driving doesn't exist because driving is so commonplace, but it's there and it's pretty big.

Exactly.

I don't ever mind public transport. I have used public transport in multiple areas of the planet.

There are two quips:

1. You have to be there in someone else's time. You can't have 5 or 10 or 30 minutes if something comes up.

2. What you say. I don't want to rub my body with people who are wearing dirty clothes, smell, and has god-knows-what liquid on their clothes who might choose to cough without using their hands. (This has happened to me) So, I avoid public transport where there is this kind of intermingling. Fine with me where there are upper classes or similar in transport and it is enforced strictly.

Do you avoid elevators?

This isn’t a fair comparison, and you have to be arguing in bad faith to say this.

I have never seen someone pull out a gun, tweak out and rip out the hair of the girl sitting in front of them, or shit themselves, on an elevator. I have seen all of these on public transport in Seattle.

From another city, my younger brother was on the L in Chicago when a gun went off. Someone shot into the ceiling, no one got hurt, but holy hell idk if I could ride after that.

I still like the light rail in Seattle and am a massive supporter of public transport, but I understand people who won’t take it because of the psychological threats.

I've never seen any of that on any public transport anywhere in the world. I've been in an elevator when someone's thrown up though.

Majority of elevators I take tend to be open to the public -- car parks being a big one.

Elevators tend to be restricted to a specific group of people (inhabitants, customers, employees, etc.) in a way that public transport is not. If an elevator smells like urine, has suspicious stains or trash, chances are I'd look for an alternative. But it just so happens that the elevators I come across tend to be clean, unlike the public transport.

And I say this as someone who still takes public transport a lot, but it's increasingly less comfortable.

Not GP, but I certainly don't look forward to them. They are also much shorter duration experiences, and I can probably count one one hand the number of times I have shared an elevator with someone tweaking or shitting themselves, vs. the every day experience of seeing that on the bus.

Maybe not explicitly when traveling but when picking a place to live, sure.

There's security at the gates- much before the elevators.

> 1. You have to be there in someone else's time. You can't have 5 or 10 or 30 minutes if something comes up.

There's this cool thing you can do in the 21st century where if you go into Google maps, or Apple maps, or any other map app, you can check how long it takes to get to your destination

> 2. What you say. I don't want to rub my body with people who are wearing dirty clothes, smell, and has god-knows-what liquid on their clothes who might choose to cough without using their hands. (This has happened to me) So, I avoid public transport where there is this kind of intermingling. Fine with me where there are upper classes or similar in transport and it is enforced strictly.

Oh no! How will the upper class in every other society that uses public transit deal.

There is something to be said about fare enforcement, the homeless, and societal norms, but this certainly isn't it.

You can't get mad at someone and think that will get them to agree with you. lol.

If the rail comes every 15 minutes, you know you can plan to be a little early. Not hard at all.

True for subway. But not for longer distance/inter-city.

Maybe, I took an IC to get to school and it went from a village to a city center, so its possible, otherwise light rail the the norm. I figured out that if I got off at a certain stop, I could shave 15 minutes off my commute by switching to light rail from the IC. That took a couple tries to get timed out right to make the transfer.

Psychological safety matters just as much as physical safety. If you think that you won’t see some shit on public transit I welcome you to come to LA and take the red line for a day.

Having spent 6 months in NYC over the past year, you see shit on the subway lines all of the time, but normal people use it all the time.

I think the latter is the important thing. It's not normalized as a viable means of transport in the land of the automobile.

BART's (the Bay's commuter rail) problem is that post-covid there aren't enough normal people to dilute the deranged ones. I've got a couple friends in SF, so I'll occasionally ride BART into the city for a night out on the town. Problem 1. is that the hours on BART don't really allow for that. Last call is 2 hours after the last train, so either I'm calling it short or crashing on a couch. This heightens number 2: There's not a lot of people using BART like that, so when I'm riding maybe 1 in 5 of my fellow passengers are noticeably up to something strange, whether it be actively smoking bud cannabis on the train (I'm no prude, smoking on the platform or using a pen or something I would find odd but not in a "I can't trust this person because they're clearly willingly to completely ignore the social contract" sort of way), leaving all their clothes save a baseball cap and a hypodermic needle tucked behind their ear on the platform, vandalizing the train car with a sharpie (including scribbling over the cameras, which was my cue to find a different car), or merely reeking due to not having bathed in far too long.

If it was closer to 1 in 100 people on the train displaying unusual behavior, it'd be a far less unnerving experience.

Buddy if you want to convince people to use public transit, saying a little shit is normal is not the way to do it

btw I live in Tokyo and moved here explicitly because of public transit.

That wasn’t the message - it’s the presence of having normal people. Public transport is just as popular in NYC as it is in Tokyo despite the shit.

Just got back from 3.5 months in Europe (17 cities), and yes it’s vastly better there, far more clean and sane. Still, coming back to NYC I’m not not taking the subway despite spending nearly my whole life in SoCal. It’s easily the better option over owning a car if you’re in Manhattan/Brooklyn.

I see where you're coming from, but the "normal people" leave because of these incidents. If you want everyday people riding the train, you gotta make sure that the poorest people in society aren't so miserable that they're unpleasant to be around.

I've never heard someone give the subway as a reason for leaving NYC. They leave because they're priced out of what they consider acceptable housing, the weather, or issues with the city itself. But never the subway.

Yeah of course, but there's also the people that got sick of the subway and bought a car, right? Hopefully they could buy a bicycle instead but with theft being what it is and how dangerous the streets are there's even less people willing to do that...

Yeah, but it doesn’t feel like public transit is safe. That’s important.

Public transit in other countries feels nice. In the US, you feel poor. Design, maybe, matters?

> Someone skipping fare

This, obviously, isn't what raises fear in people. "Safer" for some statistics, like a car crash, but also much less safe for things like getting stabbed, spit on, confronted. Sure, it's somewhat rare on public transport, but they're exactly zero in my car, at freeway speeds.

I may never get stabbed in my car, but I will get brake-checked, cut off, buzzed, rammed, and shot at [0]. Driving is stressful and I dread every getting on the highway.

[0]: https://everytownresearch.org/reports-of-road-rage-shootings...

You can still get shot on a train.

Everytown is definitely a biased source to use

What's funny is over-policing public transit would probably take only a fraction of the resources that private transportation does.

> two stabbings, one slit throat, and a page full of fights, in my area, over the last two years

That's basically nothing next to car accidents. Car accident injuries can be pretty gruesome. Maybe the fundamental change that is needed is awareness of the risks of driving and the yearly death/mutilation toll in each community. (And the awareness that bigger and bigger SUVs with higher and higher bumpers is a zero-sum game.)

Sure, but when family is in the car, I drive in the slow lane, to help protect them. When family is on the metro, wtf am I supposed to do, beyond maybe a pocket knife on my belt? I took my family on the metro exactly once, and never again, after a younger one almost stepped on a syringe, and a homeless guy was rambling about hiding in a dumpster.

If you're a guy taking a ride, sure. Otherwise, get real.

Surely you can do something to give yourself an illusion of control on the metro just like you do on the freeway.

I can assure you, I don't place used needles, or feces, in my car, which are the statistically significant threats that I've faced.

> things like getting stabbed, spit on, confronted

Also how much fentanyl and methamphetamine smoke do you inhale/touch everyday in your car? Compared to public transit

https://www.washington.edu/news/2023/09/07/uw-assessment-fin...

>> Researchers detected methamphetamine in 98% of surface samples and 100% of air samples, while fentanyl was detected in 46% of surface and 25% of air samples.

I think people mean a more irrational feeling of safety, rather than hard statistics. They don't want to see or be near those antisocial behaviors when they're taking transportation. Old people seem to suffer from this irrational feeling more than younger.

"Irrational" is a strange way to describe it. People don't go around memorizing statistics of how likely someone who is exhibiting one kind of antisocial behavior (being obviously high, defecating in public, etc.) would be to engage in another kind of antisocial behavior (committing physical violence upon another person). And especially when the cost of making the wrong judgment is high, it's entirely rational to want to avoid it entirely.

> Old people seem to suffer from this irrational feeling more than younger.

Old people generally have more to lose. Young people, especially young males, are well known to think of themselves as invincible.

> People don't go around memorizing statistics of how likely someone who is exhibiting one kind of antisocial behavior (being obviously high, defecating in public, etc.) would be to engage in another kind of antisocial behavior (committing physical violence upon another person)

So you're saying people don't do a rational analysis of the risks... but calling it "irrational" is strange? Lots of human behavior is irrational. It doesn't have to be unusual to call it irrational.

Overestimating the risks of one choice and therefore not getting the benefits of it, and incurring the higher risks of alternatives instead (for the elderly, being socially isolated at home or driving with impaired abilities) is the kind of irrationality that people would benefit from correcting, through education and changing social assumptions.

> So you're saying people don't do a rational analysis of the risks... but calling it "irrational" is strange?

GP's wording implied that rational people take public transit because they've done the risk-benefit analysis, and irrational people don't. I'm not sure if there's actual evidence behind such a risk-benefit analysis.

> people would benefit from correcting, through education and changing social assumptions.

If the goal is to attract more people to use public transit, it would be vastly more effective to police the occurrence of antisocial behavior on it, instead of telling people that it's actually OK, the chance of stepping on a puddle of piss or being shouted at incoherently or being pushed onto an oncoming train is much lower than they think, and is lower than the chance of being injured in a car crash while driving to work. Whether or not that is true (and I wouldn't mind seeing some cold, hard data on it), most people will prefer to roll the dice with their car.

In other words: if you're a social architect keen on implementing your vision of a flourishing public transit system, it would be irrational not to account for people's loss aversion, whether or not that loss aversion itself is irrational.

How many places have public transit systems used by older people, and how many have accomplished this by policing the antisocial behavior away? It seems like it is at least as easy to get older people to use public transit where they might see people with mental illness and addiction than it is to keep mental illness and addiction off of public transit. In countries that value civil liberties it is probably easier. As you observed, fear is driven by perceptions and rare incidents of violence covered in the media, not by statistics, and you can't pull somebody out of a bus or a subway car because they contribute to somebody's fear. You can arrest and remove a person who shits on the floor or threatens somebody, but for every one person like that, there are twenty people who are obviously in bad shape, obviously suffering, and look like they might do something alarming at any moment. You can't arrest and remove those people. You can get people to ride public transit despite the odds of seeing people like that.

People also (rightly or not) feel they can influence the outcome when driving much more than they can on transit (note this doesn't really apply to planes because planes are mass transit that so obviously beat driving after a certain distance).

And they might be right, something like 30% of traffic fatalities involve alcohol, so you can avoid driving after drinking and avoid times when others are drink driving, and improve your odds.

>I think people mean a more irrational feeling of safety, rather than hard statistics

Also, the generic statistics of the probability of getting in an accident might not accurately apply to me. I might be a particularly good or bad driver. Totally anecdotal, but of my 28 years of driving, both of my small accidents occurred in the first two years.

>They don't want to see or be near those antisocial behaviors when they're taking transportation

I guess I think wanting to avoid seeing antisocial behavior is rational. It almost seems like that is the exact response expected in order to define the behavior as antisocial in the first place. :')

>Old people seem to suffer from this irrational feeling more than younger.

Older people are also more vulnerable. What might come across to me as just annoying or gross could be cause for more legitimate caution to a more vulnerable person. In my mind, when someone is acting particularly antisocially in public, there does seem to be a rise in my expectation (although slightly) that this person could do something violent.

That’s a dishonest comparison. Skipping fare not same as a drug addled person hassling commuters.

I think it's important with discussions like these to include the city or area, and time period.

I can say for sure that the subway in DC was better and safer than cars for the most part, when I was there many moons ago -

However if you look at the people who are riding the bus in my current city, or at the times when I was in Vegas.. and I've heard the NY subway at night is nothing like the DC subway..

These discussions can have all people right and all people wrong when they are discussing how they view their apples to others oranges.