The Public Mass Transit Thread (merged)

Baldwin · Intermediate Crude Joined: Feb 05, 2007 Posts: 552

In my suburb of NYC, it's a paradox. Most whites who work in NYC proper take the LIRR (Long Island Railroad). The LIRR is the white man's mass transit. It's a bit more expensive. The bus/subway has those white collar whites who aren't at the top of the corporate ladder in addition to everyone else.
Most would rather drive, but parking and congestion is a nightmare in NYC.
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EarthGamePlayer

As soon as you say, "I'm not racist, but....", you answer the question.
I realize the your fear of being a minority is genuine, but I caution that this is where racism and hate come from.

Think how it feels to be a person of color who spends every day being a minority in a sea of white people. You only had to do it for a few hours.
Anyway, yes public transit in North America is seen as low class. It's kept that way on purpose - It would be hard to sell cars if you could ride on a really fast, clean, safe, frequent, and inexpensive public transportation system.

Denny · Last edited by Denny on Sat Nov 24, 2007 10:45 pm; edited 1 time in total

EarthGamePlayer

Thanks for being honest. Not many people are. I believe that racism lives in us all. It's the big person who can admit to it.

Most places in the world have better public transportation than the N. America. My favorite subway system is in Mexico city - clean, fast, quiet, and really cheap. We are years and years behind.

billg

I've logged tons of hours on both Amtrak and Greyhound as I travel a fair amount and I haven't owned a car for the last ten years.
Both Amtrak and Greyhound are plagued by shoddy service. Everytime I travel Amtrak on long trips I tag on a couple hours to the estimated time of arrival. Greyhound seems to be better about staying on schedule but during busy times of year it can be a big nightmare also.

Your experience on public buses will probably be heavily influenced by the cities you are traveling through. For instance, going thru Detroit, DC, St. Louis or Richmond can be an unpleasant experience, whereas going thru the higher per capita income cities is a better experience.

Personally, I think that the issue of misbehaving passengers has more to do with income/education level than racial profile. It just so happens that minorities have less income and less education. For whatever reason, I'm not so bothered by it. I've never been bullied by anybody because I'm white. (probably the most frightening experience in my life has been being in the presence of well-off white people with alcohol issues).

What's going to happen in the US is that soon nobody will be able to afford air travel, and buses and Amtrak will be the only options for public transport. However, my suspicion is that the lower income classes won't take so kindly to being denied the privilege of transport that they once had. So unless the bus stations are heavily guarded, it won't be so easy to travel across the country by bus even if you have $$$.

Maybe, then Greyhound will have to shift its routes to avoid areas of unrest. But, I'm not sure how that will work because most of the people Greyhound employs are lower income minorities themselves.
Interesting thread...
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Peepers · Heavy Crude Joined: Jan 01, 2005 Posts: 213

In too much of the USA, mass transit is seen as the transportation equivalent of a soup kitchen, homeless shelter, or whatever other metaphor you can conjure of the social safety net.
But that safety net applies to the energy-starved too, and public transportation as something all but the richest will need when The crap Hits The Fan.

In the city I live in, Cleveland, transit service is pretty extensive in and near the core city, but is very scant beyond the inner-ring suburbs. Cleveland is not unique in the USA in this regard. Two things may happen is oil prices continue to rise and shortages occur (and these may not be either/or situations):
1. People move to the cities to have greater access to transit.
2. Transit is expanded to the suburbs.

The second option sounds great except that the suburbs are not designed in a way for transit to serve it effectively. Suburbs are designed for the auto-dependent. Transit is most effective when there are walkable settings, population density and where land uses are mixed, preferably on top of each other. Two-thirds of all riders on a given transit vehicle walk to transit stops (the rest connect from other transit vehicles, cars, trains, intercity buses, planes, etc.). So if you live on a low-density residential-only cul-de-sac that's 2,000 feet from the nearest bus stop, one mile from one area that's exclusively retail with huge lots where parking is "free" (not really, because everyone -- including those who arrived at the store by bus, bike or on foot -- pay for building and maintaining the parking lot when they buy something at the store or if they live in the same community and pay taxes to support more storm-water drainage systems), two miles from an office or light industrial area, and several miles from the nearest post office, hospital or other basic services -- and none of these can be served in linear manner by transit, how is MASS transit supposed to effectively service these areas?
Fact is, it can't.
So either the land uses in these suburban areas has to be adjusted to reflect new realities in a post-peak oil world or they will succumb to the fate which James Howard Kunstler predicts.

The redesign of the suburbs, if they are to survive, will be as essential to transit's effectiveness there as what America's oil and auto barons said in the 1930s was needed for cars to be used most effectively.
Consider Shell Oil Co.'s City of Tomorrow which it unveiled in 1937. It showed a city laced with expressways fanning out to a low-density urban hinterland.

That was followed in 1939 by General Motors' Futurama exhibit at the New York World's Fair. It was held the same weekend Hitler invaded Poland -- only World War II postponed the transformative urban visions of Shell, GM and others of the car/oil culture.
And why did these barons seek this?
"If Americans are to have the full use of cars, then cities have to be remade."
-- Paul Hoffman, president of the Studebaker Corp., one of the nation's largest car manufacturers when he uttered this in 1939.

emersonbiggins

Windmills

There is most certainly a stigma against mass transit in every place that it's practical to socially enforce. In America, if you don't drive a car in car-accessible area, you're consider a loser. You're a bum. There must be something wrong with you. Only poor people that are too dumb, drunk, or drug-addicted, or have been arrested too many times and can't get a decent job...only they don't have cars. Dating without a car is almost pointless. The chics will hate you. You'll never get laid. Those images are in the advertising constantly. They're ingrained in secondary school culture. "Gee, dad, I can't wait to get (laid) a car!" The car is a major emblem of socio-sexual status. If you don't drive a car, you'd better get used to explaining why you don't have one. Either that, or exhcange your friends for ones that don't care. Mainstream is car ownership. You're viewed as either a pathetic loser or a left-wing tree-hugging nutjob if you don't have a car. That message is pounded away constantly in the mass media.

I'm a bit surprised that you even have to ask the question. I'm surprised that this aspect of our culture hasn't spread across the border to a greater extent.

Baldwin · Intermediate Crude Joined: Feb 05, 2007 Posts: 552

billg

vision-master

Kingcoal

What happened to mass transit in the US is similar to what happened to the inner cities. In fact both declined in tandem. The GM/Rockefeller alliance with friends in Congress pushed through the inter-state highway system. At the same time, a real estate developer by the name of Bill Levitt was realizing his dream of the suburban community. Levitt bought cheap property just outside the city and built huge housing developments full of low cost, simple, but nice single family houses. Most of these houses were very simple, Cape Cod's, usually with no basement. They poured a slab and built a wood frame house on it. The federal government even stepped in to help out, because these houses, being only $8,000 or so, qualified for FHA, VA, no money down loans. Instead of saving for years in a cramped apartment, families could instead by a home in a nice neighborhood with a roomy lawn.

Levittown, PA and Levittown, NY became fantastically successful. These cheap houses on cheap land became cheap house on expensive land. From a politicians point of view, it was a win win. These developments "created wealth" (appreciation) and perhaps most importantly, created demand. Demand for household goods, home improvements and yes, you guessed it; cars. Demand = jobs. The paradigm of the suburb as an economic driver was in place and these suburbs began to require more cars. Hell, you could take the money you saved, but didn't need because of the FHA loan and buy a new car with it!

There you have it. Public transit stood in the way of "progress." Actually it stood in the way of "economic development." It's kind of like the current "outsourcing," out of the country trend. Before the automobile, the cities were big and powerful. The big cities, like New York, were king makers. They ran the country. People who lived in the "suburbs" were country bumpkins with little money to spend and little political power. The cities were and still are largely controlled by labor unions. Real estate was expensive, taxes were high and investors began searching for a better bang for their buck and Bill Levitt created the template. As middle class people fled the cities, so did the businesses. Why not? Taxes were cheaper, land was cheaper, crime was almost non existent. Sounds like a no brainier to me.

Had the suburbs been designed from the ground up around public transit systems, then maybe we wouldn't be in this situation, but then why the hell would they have done that? Cars were part of the sell, the lure of the suburbs. No more waiting around for busses which were late a lot of the time. (It didn't help that GM bought out the trolley and bus companies and then starved them of capital, but that’s a side story.) Since dads job now was also in the suburb, mom could make the daily trip of dropping him off and picking him up and drive home and have the car all day for groceries, shopping, driving the kids around. This was all done without having to expose her kids to the seediness of the city people.

We are on the third or forth generation of suburbs in the Northeast. The first suburbs have been abandoned in favor of the further out suburbs. All this does is strengthen the importance of the automobile. Whereas, before suburbanization, when companies were in the cities, now they are all over the place. Public transit requires some sort of centralized planning, zoning, which groups companies together along with the same sort of planning for communities. Cities had that, suburbs don't. The suburbs were and still are based on decentralization. They are based on buying cheap property and turning it into expensive property, everything else be damned. It's all just a big jobs program/money machine. It's economic expansion; it's a big reason why the US has such a big GDP.

It's inefficient, extremely inefficient, but it's modern America. It's all most people alive today know. Of course you need a car, what planet are you from? Of course in any community you have those of challenged economic status. For them, we'll have some buses and those buses will be infrequent and often late, but who cares, their poor, where do they have to get to in a hurry?
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Andrew_S · Intermediate Crude Joined: Jan 09, 2005 Posts: 683

Nice description, Kingcoal. But in terms of racial demographics, isn't this in association with White flight?

I see racial incompatibility, sequestered in recent decades by cars, suburbs, etc., coming to the fore as car use becomes less possible for even the (mostly White, suburban) middle classes.

Denny

Kingcoal, your lesson in history brings out a lot of the rationale for the current day mass transit drought in America. But, what stops us going forward from here?
Let's compare two cities that I am familiar with, being Miami and Copenhagen, Dissimilar in population, climate and a lot of other things. Especially traffic congestion. Its no fun to drive into Miami, and due to congestion, its not good to be biker there either. Copenhagen is calm, a great city for biking and strolling.

Copenhagen, with 1.4 million in its metro area has a new subway system, finished in 2002, much of it underground, (the Metro) of about 13 miles, plus has five radial "S Tog" commuter rail lines, extending outward about 15 miles each to suburbs, and a cross system of similar length. Thus, overall a dedicated mass transit of 103 miles. Copenhagen's metro area has a lot of leafy suburban residential areas, and, like much of America, these are the preferred residential districts. Both the S Tog and the Metro offer well maintained, clean and spacious seating. The ridership is generally orderly and pick up after themselves, and I believe there is video surveillance inside the cars.

Miami, with a metro population of about 5 million, has three forms of dedicated mass transit: the suburban "trirail", just one line running northward about 24 miles to Pompano (it actually runs further north than that, but lets say Broward is the extent of Miami's metro area) , a 22 mile overhead rapid transit system, and a 13 mile dedicated busway running southward. So, that is a total of 59 miles. Not much more than half that of Copenhagen, for a population of 3.5 times as much.

Even Toronto, also part of North America, seems to have a much more developed mass transit than Miami, with a similar metro population. Toronto has a 42 mile subway system and 128 miles of suburban commuter rail (GO Transit) within the metro area, on 7 lines radiating outward from the downtown, for a total of 170 miles. But, Toronto is very traffic congested, and a "2020" area transport plan is expected to cost $17 billion for new light rail lines and dedicated busways to alleviate this. Yet, what could be different in terms of economics, suburbanization and the like between Toronto and Miami? Not much.

Many say the root problem for mass transit in America is low population density. Metro Copenhagen has a population density of 807 per square kilometer, per Wikipedia, and this is denser than Metro Miami, but not dramatically, Metro Miami is about 500 per square km.
Copenhagen spent about 1 billon euro on the Metro, and is now pondering an extension, downtown, which will cost about 2 billion euro. See Wikipedia: Copenhagen Metro

It is mind boggling that Miami cannot have the same level of public transit that a northern European city now enjoys, or even a northern American city. As I wrote before, it would seem within financial reach as Miami has some great affluence, beyond that of Copenhagen or Toronto. For sure, a lot has to be done to bring many American cities up to snuff for the future of tight energy supplies. But, these may well offer an even more important value, being an improvement in the urban and suburban lifestyles. My question is whether or not mass transit suffers in most American cities by the attitude that transit is for the have nots . Not many taxpayers are going to vote for bond propositions for services they do not plan to use. One thing that could help the appeal of mass transit would be better enforcement of rules regarding noise and litter.
Somebody wrote about my post that I am the oddball here, to consider mass transit over the car, but I think compared to other developed countries, most American cities are the real oddballs.

JohnLudi

There is less of a stigma in Chicago as the demographic of this city ranges from dirt poor to filthy rich and no one likes to drive downtown if they can at all avoid it. The CTA tends to be about as diverse a group of humans as one could imagine. A lot of monied yuppie types take the Metra from the burbs as the gridlock is horrific on a good day.

I took the day job I have partly because it was only a mile from the apartment I'm renting. Dumped my car about 9 months ago and have not missed it at all...aside from the prompting to buy another one by certain people in my life, I have no inclination to get a new one...though I may have to as an eventual bug-out/business vehicle.

Most of the people I work with drive in from the burbs...they may only live 20 miles out, but that 20 miles can take 1 1/2 hours during rush hour.

Now, when I lived in Detroit the few times I took the bus I felt like I was running the gauntlet...and I grew up IN the city...in a crappy neighborhood. There are a fair amount of people that practically LIVE on public transportation...and a fair amount of them are nuts and/or predatory. Some cities you really have to be on your guard as busses and trains can be a great place to have a captive audience to scream about Jesus or the invisible insects that keep crawling under your skin...and they can also be an excellent way to "case" the suburban and unwary. Alway watch who gets off on your stop with you.

Depending on the bus or the line I'm on (as well as time of day), I usually wear a pair of shades or (if it's too dark) a look on my face that says "if you even LOOK at me, I will eat your f**king kidneys".

That usually works...
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