People who dislike cars and want more public transit:
I sometimes prefer public transit to driving because I hate parking and navigation, and I can multitask on public transit. But I also prefer driving to public transit because public transit is loud, smelly, dirty, crowded, expensive, and slow, with no air conditioning or heating, uncomfortable seats or only standing room, delays and breakdowns, long wait times in general, no availability late at night, tunnels that plug my ears painfully, and other passengers being loud/rude/annoying, blaring music, scamming, panhandling, stealing things, fighting, spitting, urinating, harassing people (transphobia cw), and sometimes being actually threatening or dangerous.
What solutions have people come up with to these problems? (My experiences are mostly with BART, AC Transit, and Caltrain.)
Same question for my own followers.
My experiences of transit have been buses in [Redacted]; the underground in London, New Castle (UK), Frankfurt (Germany), and Washington DC; the Northern Rail (UK); Berlin’s buses; the BART and the Caltrain; and buses in Toronto, the Bay Area (USA), and North Bay (Ontario, Canada).
Those are listed from best to worst by my personal experiences of them. They’re mostly Subway > Overground train > Buses, except for [Redacted]’s weird capitalist buses. I’ve also preferred [Redacted] over Europe, and Europe over North America.
What makes some public transit systems better than others? And how would you make something like the BART more like that? And are they really a substitute for being able to insulate yourself and your family in a personal vehicle?
You’re not gonna like this, but…
A number of the problems stem from the culture of the population at large, its level of disorder, and its level of criminality. If you want Japan-tier respectful train passengers, you are going to have to take Japan-tier measures towards, essentially, the entire rest of society, and this will not be very Libertarian.
Which is fine by me since I’m not an atomic individualist and am fairly Statist and even Nationalist, but that isn’t where you are in the political spectrum.