First make public transportation as clean and safe as ride sharing, then you'll get demand. Nobody wants to sit next to people that smell like piss/weed/cigs/BO. If you were a Uber/Lyft driver that kind of thing would get you 1 star very quickly.
Have enough of your friends get robbed/raped/groped in public transit and spend enough time on transit with urine in the stations and blood stains on the seats, and you will come to understand that safety, security, and cleanliness also drive ridership.
I'm from Europe so not sure if that's a US thing but that's certainly not such a big topic over here. Yes, public transport can't be 100% safe, being in public never is. But rapes in public transport and blood stains on seats are so rare that I don't know a single person who avoids public transport because of it. It's always just convenience, sometimes price.
Yes, I'm also from Europe. Public transport in Europe is much safer than in some urban areas in the U.S., but that is often true in general for just walking down in the street in a place like Bern or Frankfurt than in New Orleans or Oakland (these are the two cities where I had friends assaulted on public transport).
That's why it's so shocking when these things happen and are accepted by people who actually resist reform because they view enforcing standards of cleanliness and safety as being "anti-poor" and suggest that even complaining about these issues is being classist instead of just advocating for basic human decency and higher quality public transport.
I'm not hearing any suggested reforms, I just hear complaining. Please, give me basic human decency and higher quality public transit. How do you get there?
BART has police, they're shockingly bad, even for police.
It's not the poor people you notice, it's the tweakers and homeless people shitting themselves you notice. And the criminals [1]. The poor people look just like any other person on a train so you can't tell they're poor in the first place. Maybe they have crappier shoes and a crappier phone but that's irrelevant because they behave like normal people.
Seriously, have you ever taken a BART train late at night where there was a guy tweaked out of his mind? Or sat in chairs that look like they were shit on 5 times and never properly cleaned? Why do you expect people to deal with that as if it's perfectly okay? Why do you expect people not to take alternative modes of transportation when that's what they have to deal with? This kind of anti-societal behavior is only accepted in the US, and nowhere else in the world.
Anecdotal evidence: I only rode on the BART once. When we disembarked, my girlfriend got a few feet ahead of me. A strange man turned around and started screaming at her and physically grabbed her shoulders. I heard her scream and ran at him and violently defended her.
My experience with the BART may have been unique, but from what I've read it probably is not.
yes I take bart late at night all the time and I don't care. Doesn't bother me.
and my point is that the ne'erdowells or whatever is correlative of poverty. the conditions present in the greater bay area are represented on bart and I guess if you're a cloistered tech bro and you've never been to oakland that's scary or something
And my friends were sexually assaulted and mugged at gunpoint, yet we do not assume that this is acceptable behavior or should be tolerated because of someone's income level.
Honestly, I don't understand people who try to normalize violence and argue on public forums that it's acceptable that public transit be an open sewer just because it gives them a faux edginess in liking "gritty" public spaces or sense of twisted moral superiority to those who do care about these things.
I really don’t think this is a rich or poor issue. It is possible to have public transportation that can transport rich or poor equally, while maintaining safety and cleanliness.
For example, public transportation that has locked “cabins” for people who want to feel additional security. For cleanliness, constant sanitization of seats and floors. Trash bins available on the train, with workers replacing them as needed during station time.
No one is kicking a poor person off MUNI but if a homeless person pees on the seat, it gets cleaned up immediately. People that feel unsafe can go into the cabin. Unarmed security guards can be placed at every station, not to hassle riders, but to give assistance to people that ask.
This is not some foreign concept — some Asian countries do this quite well.
What… I’ve had so many incredibly bad and sometimes downright scary situations due to being locked in close proximity to people out of their minds on drugs. Those experiences have absolutely decreased my willingness to take public transit. If you want to call that classism, then fine, but that doesn’t make the impact on ridership any less true.
