Please go stand at the base of an escalator into Civic Center Station on a warm summer day when it hasn't rained for a while, and take some deep breaths.
I refuse to be ashamed of my desire to avoid inhaling other people's piss and shit on a daily basis.
This country isn't ready for public space. We have too much work to do, to care for the people who will reliably show up to public space they have access to and turn them into urine-soaked, beggar-laden wasteland, before we can reasonably be indignant at the desire to avoid spending time in public space.
Like public bathrooms, for one thing. What must SF spend on its (futile) attempts to keep stations clean? Surely that could fund one public bathroom somewhere in the city to redirect some of the mess.
San Francisco is almost unique in this. Of the entire set of cities in the world I have seen, none have a problem like this on a comparable scale. Perhaps it's more useful to ask what led to this situation in this one city, and look for constructive things to do to remedy it. It's certainly possible to have open, public transit that is clean and functional.
Walk around Berlin right now and count how many "screening" checkpoints their are in the train stations. Spoiler: there aren't even doors on all the entrances. Somehow, as if by magic, trains are clean and run on time. The strongest smell is from the food vendors in the attached mall.
Civil services are possible.
And they certainly don't require any draconian "screening" processes.
Transit policy can't create the Berlin transit system.
Germany got it by building the constellation of welfare, social services, healthcare, eduction, labor laws, and tenant protection that keeps people's lives on track (or puts them back) long before they've fallen to the point of shitting into subway escalators.
The American electorate is quite far from even wanting these things. It's going to be a long climb to get them implemented and working. We will not be preventing destitution anytime soon, and the shit on the streets of temperate, tolerant cities like SF is going to get far, far worse before it gets better.
I don't pretend to have a solution to your problems, i merely point a problem in your solution.
Also the fact that your society grows a divide such that basic health concerns can't be solved démocratically sounds like a root cause to your piss problem.
So when are you flying to Austin? I'd like to, among other things take you on a trip to 7th and Red River, and provide you with an oral history of (also among other things) CapMetro, Metrorail and the numerous mass transit solutions shot down by the voters who THEMSELVES called for a referendum vote on options for mass transit.
TWICE.
Or we can go to a little town called Spartanburg South Carolina. Or I could tell you the tale of Indianapolis' almost hilariously doomed transit improvement efforts in the 90's (hilariously in the way it happened, not that it happened so much all).
My point: SF isn't unique in this regard. Not by a long shot. Their problems may be exacerbated by many other compounding factors comparatively with other cities...but I agree with the comment you've replied to: here are built in logic ladders constructed over years of subtle social conditioning and assumptions made about the cross section of mass transit and public service that make for some interesting outcomes at the municipal level.
I concede then. It's not unique (and indeed, Austin is absent from my experiences).
I like the way you phrase this though: "logic ladders" of "years of social conditioning and assumptions". There are a lot of odd assumptions about mass transit and public service floating around.
> Walk around Berlin right now and count how many "screening" checkpoints their are in the train stations. Spoiler: there aren't even doors on all the entrances. Somehow, as if by magic, trains are clean and run on time. The strongest smell is from the food vendors in the attached mall.
"Cinematography is bleak and dreary, depicting a dilapidated, working-class Berlin with rundown structures and dirty, blighted backdrops. Modern Berlin is very different and most of the landmarks from the movie (the station, the Bülow street stalls, the Sound discothèque) have either been demolished or completely remodeled."
"Most of the extras at the railway station and at the Sound club were actual junkies, prostitutes and low-lifes rounded up by producers just for the crowd scenes. In the scene where Christiane runs through the alleys of the station to find Babsi, the camera lingers on several terminal junkies leaning against the walls of the underpass. In a 2011 interview, Thomas Haustein, who plays Detlev and was still in school at the time, recalls how terrified he felt being surrounded by all those real-life addicts, but that he was able to successfully copy their behaviour for his character."
I was at the Zoologischer Garten station last night.
Not much to say except frankly it's far cleaner than the SF trains the GP is talking about. (I was also in SF civic center station less than two months ago, and thus feel qualified to make this statement as a first person observer.)
Berlin certainly has its own aesthetic. Berliners seem to take graffiti incredibly seriously, for example (lettering three stories high on the top floors of a 15 story building? "Sure, why not" is apparently the thinking). But hordes of junkies? Do I feel in danger? Absolutely not.
Sure. Most places of earth, you can say that about. But let's make sure we're anchoring things well and not moving the goalposts: the comment I was responding to claims that "most" of the people in the area are "actual junkies". To that, I say "no" and "bullocks".
Yea, Berlin was different in 1981 during the cold war where it was, for all intents and purposes, completely landlocked within East Germany and was economically stagnant.
The DB, while not my favorite train system in the world, runs extremely well.
You (quite reasonably) don't want homeless people to piss in public, and you recognize that they don't have anywhere else to piss. I'm not clear why "therefore, give them a better place to piss" isn't your first demand, instead a distant second after "therefore, illegalize homeless people." (Which you know very well is the only possible result of banning people from public spaces who don't have any access to private spaces.)
I am not suggesting that we exclude the homeless from public space, but that we allow everyone else to continue using modes that provide more separation from our broken society while society gets its house in order.
Apartheid is specifically a policy of racial segregation, which has nothing to do with this.
I do advocate a system of segregation from other people's urine, not exactly a protected class (who opposes the use of toilets?), and from each other more generally... what are apartments for, after all, if not to keep us apart? I'm proud to say that I voted in this election for as much apart-ness (i.e. as many apartments) as possible. In fact, since I consider this to be a step towards ending homelessness (by building enough housing for everyone) you could say I am even an agent of the eradication of an entire social group!
EDIT: Yeah, that's a bit flippant. But I do believe people are entitled to choose the company they keep. That applies at rest: everyone should be able to have their own apartment, a space where they decide who gets to come in and who doesn't. It also applies in transit: personal vehicles are best (though bicycles, motorcycles, and scooters are probably better than cars, at least in the Bay Area, because the climate is hospitable and space is at a premium). On public transit, we have an obligation to minimize unwanted interaction: uninvited conversation, physical contact, eye contact, and phone speaker music are all (rightly) taboo. Public transit systems should strive to provide everyone with a forward facing seat so that they are not touching or staring at anyone else.
When people do not follow these rules, and instead insert their presence loudly (i.e. by smell), I do think it's better to go around the problem by taking other forms of transportation, than to muddle through and develop resentment, or grow supportive of police violence to shove the problem away (I've been catching myself sympathizing with this). Abandoning public transit seems like the least shitty approach to the people who make it intolerable.
Apartheid is a top-down system, where segregation is mandated. What he is suggesting is the bottom-up approach, where people can segregate themselves if they want to.
Although in practice this still produces segregation on a large scale, as in e.g. "white flight" in US. But then again, attempts to counter such things by forcing people together - like forced busing - didn't exactly work well.
SF has public bathrooms[0]. SF public places still often stink (and yes, in vicinity of those too). And by stink I mean eye-watering. And apparently the public ones share the problem[1].
In EU, you have to pay to enter a public bathroom. But as return, the bathroom is kept clean (or at least that is the idea).
I read a story the other day how restaurants allowed free bathroom usage to tourists in Germany. This was paid by city council, and allows for a more pleasant stay of tourists. So they like to come and/or return. Word of mouth works.
The links say there are 25 of these restrooms in a city of over 850,000 people. That's about 1 per 34,000 people. They are described in the second link as being unreliable and gross, and people are suggested to avoid them in favor of private restrooms. This is not functionally different from not having public restrooms.
I believe that in California, businesses are required by law to allow people to use restrooms, but they try to avoid compliance and do whatever they can to keep homeless people away.
I don't think it's a fair calculation. SF is not uniform, neither is population, neither are locations of people that need public bathrooms. So just dividing number of citizens in the whole city to number of public bathrooms makes little sense. Center where population traffic is stronger and where there are usually more people needing those services should have more, while remote purely residential neighborhoods may not need them at all.
> I believe that in California, businesses are required by law to allow people to use restrooms,
They do, and I myself used them many times, but for a person who is looking, as said in parallel thread, "sketchy" and may have some trouble expressing themselves, it may be a different story. The reluctance of the establishments is also understandable - if the person makes a mess there, somebody will have to clean up, and odds are nobody but the person behind the counter getting minimum wage is there to do it. So, their reluctance to allow somebody who, in their opinion, is likely to make a mess to use their facilities is not hard to understand, IMHO.
Please go stand at the base of an escalator into Civic Center Station on a warm summer day when it hasn't rained for a while, and take some deep breaths.
I refuse to be ashamed of my desire to avoid inhaling other people's piss and shit on a daily basis.
This country isn't ready for public space. We have too much work to do, to care for the people who will reliably show up to public space they have access to and turn them into urine-soaked, beggar-laden wasteland, before we can reasonably be indignant at the desire to avoid spending time in public space.
Like public bathrooms, for one thing. What must SF spend on its (futile) attempts to keep stations clean? Surely that could fund one public bathroom somewhere in the city to redirect some of the mess.