If you look at places with nice public transit like Germany or Japan, they have much weaker freedom of speech and assembly laws so they can enforce the kind of rules private enterprises do in the USA. Americans, and I agree with them on this point, aren't going to weaken civil rights just because it would happen to make public transit more viable.
Private transport just has a lot of opportunities to deal with security or annoyance concerns you can't address with public transit. I don't think the opposition is so much to mass transit, just public transit, if the USA had something like the jeepnees they have in the philippines where I could pay $.25 to go across town and the bus driver can shove the assholes right off he bus, it'd be awesome.
In my experience (as an NYC resident) the people causing problems on the subway aren't just being assholes for the sake of it. They're homeless, have mental issues or frequently both. I suspect when you visit Germany or Japan you're seeing the effects of much more comprehensive social nets that actually care for these people rather than let them fall through the cracks and live on subway trains.
Expecting a police to be available to every transit disturbance, I agree, is not going to end with a functional outcome.
Private citizens generally can't trespass people on public property. You have to get a policeman and the policeman has to cite a specific policy or law they have violated.
The private system in this case is way more pragmatic since every driver that is already on the bus has bouncing rights.
> It applies to public transit specifically because people have freedom of speech to be assholes
My response to was to say I do not believe that is true at all. Passengers on public transit do not have freedom of speech to be assholes.
Personally I'm not so sure police in NYC can kick people out for 1st amendment protected activity, which was what I specifically referenced the asshole activity being under the umbrella of. That was your assertion, that while I contested how pragmatic it might be, I never stated whether I believed it was true or not.
If I'm reading this correctly, you're talking about panhandling as an example of asshole activity that you believe is protected by the 1st amendment. Specifically, in NYC, it was ruled that panhandling is not protected speech on public transportation, see Young v New York City Transit Authority.
Of course, if the passenger refuses to leave or stop, the driver can't physically force them to and must escalate to a police force. Although, I imagine that's similar in many other countries as well.
American society doesn't understand collectivism in any level, your country has been built upon individualism without much care for collective living, you just reap what you've sown.
You can basically buy a small motorcycle or scooter or fast e-bike on credit for the cost of maintaining a bus pass. It's only a rational choice for elderly or people with such mental or physical disabilities they can't maintain or operate similarly cheap alternatives. The end result is public transit gets dominated by hood rats, mentally ill, homeless, and a few elderly and people with disabilities, and due to the first amendment you can't stop the first couple classes from harassing the rest so as soon as a normal person gets their 50cc scooter or whatever similarly cheap other option fixed they go right back on that.
The ones using public transit are generally the ones with functional issues to the point they can't even get to that point of having a functional e scooter to crash.
The issue is not free speech, it's how your society educates people to be citizens.
Scandinavian countries for example score much higher on the individualism scale, yet you don't see as much of this behavior as you might in the United States.
Or is there more you want to quibble about on this topic?
It's fake niceness, it's the American way of being "polite", most times I interact with Americans it's pretty clear it's surface-level niceness, more like a theater than genuinely being it. To me it's quite grating and makes Americans feel untrustworthy.
> Scandinavian countries for example score much higher on the individualism scale, yet you don't see as much of this behavior as you might in the United States.
I live in Sweden and usually tell people that it's the most individualistic collectivisc place I've been to, people are individualistic in the sense of self-sufficiency but care about the collective if you are acting against it. In that sense we are much more collectivisc than the USA, whenever I've been in the US it's very clear that most aren't caring for the collective aspect at all.
>People love driving until they're stuck in traffic, or their kid dies in a fiery car crash after being ran into by a drunk driver, or they get a flat tire, or can't afford their monthly car payment.
The relative rates of these things are very, very different (as are the harms).
I mean, as a first approximation, about twice as many people die in car crashes than are murdered in the US every year so...
People love driving until they're stuck in traffic, or their kid dies in a fiery car crash after being ran into by a drunk driver, or they get a flat tire, or can't afford their monthly car payment.
To your point about society needing to be better, that applies generally and has nothing to do specifically with transit, walking around outside, or any other daily activities.
You can live in a big city, affordably, with a yard and even a garage and have public transit like a light rail or a bus system, or just damn sidewalks that go to places. These supposed trade-offs are non-existent except in extreme cases like New York City, which isn't what is generally being discussed.