It's funny how the urban design forcing poor people to pay car insurance and auto loan, just to survive, is fine; yet charging a hundred or so to use the highly valuable space in the city is outrageous.
Concern about public order is fair. But instead of fighting for the privilege to avoid it cheaply, why not fight to actually fix it. Triple the prison population, or whatever your solution is.
Japan has a 99% conviction rate, and still has 56% of women reporting having been groped on transit.
This cannot be solved. To force women on transit is to flip a coin whether they will be assaulted. You’re not going to beat a car culture with that strategy.
I heavily doubt that New York City has the appetite for incarceration that would be necessary, for even a remote chance, to turn public transit into a merely neutral option versus a car.
What about bikes? I thought they were great too, until someone was careless with their dog and left me bleeding and weighing the probabilities of serious disease. Just like that, the dream was dead and I realized we will never escape car culture.
Cars are bad. The alternatives are too flawed and dangerous in their own ways, to have any serious chance at unseating the incumbent.
Japan is not NY and arguments based on sociatal/cultural behavior don't apply universally. Do you personally use these scary subway systems in the US that you have so many stats about?
Interesting; instead of trying to answer my statistical objection, you are now forcing me to provide anecdotal evidence; to then most likely reject it for being anecdotal evidence. Pass.
As for “it doesn’t apply universally,” that’s not an argument because almost nothing applies universally - not even a sunrise and sunset, if you’re at the North Pole. My point can still be valid in almost all metro areas.
Finally, let’s say I did use these systems (and, sometimes, I do use public transit). I’m a man, you are 90% likely here to be a man, we’re not the ones getting groped, therefore our personal opinions on the likelihood are obviously irrelevant. You should be asking your wife and your 15 year old daughter to ride for a year and rate their comfort level.
Now think real carefully why you had to jump all the way over to Japan in order to be able to make your point at all. Cherry picking at its finest. Japan is very culturally different from the West and such issues are tightly tied to that culture.
> What about bikes? I thought they were great too, until someone was careless with their dog and left me bleeding and weighing the probabilities of serious disease.
You know you can trip, fall, hit your head and die on the spot anytime you walk anywhere right? A piano can randomly fall on your head too. Nothing is 100% safe; it's unfortunate you had an accident, but that's just anecdotal evidence, which is worthless.
I can't find any source online that says felony assaults on the subway are up 9% this year. Even the Post, which is typically inclined towards hyping crime rates, reports that felony assault rates are flat this year[1]. The same source claims that major offenses have dropped 18% YoY so far.
As with so many other things about NYC, salacious stories are given a funhouse mirror effect: you wouldn't want to fill your car's gas tank next to someone who has a victim in their trunk, but that person isn't being given national news coverage like the corpse abuser was.
This Post article doesn't provide a source. Mine claims the NYPD as a source but doesn't link it either, though. It seems like only one of these can be correct: there would have to be a very large spike in felony assaults in a single month for the number to go up by 9% YoY.
The Times article doesn't mention this year's stats. Last year's were definitely worse, so it's not surprising they mention that.
The fun question of course is, are you actually safer on the road, or does it just feel safer? Which is more likely, a subway assault or a dangerous road-rage incident? There's tons of examples of road rage incidents in NYC where people have guns pulled on them or worse. But that isn't a particular visceral fear folks have (and you shouldn't!), but the likelihood of you getting shot on the subway is about the same, if not lower, than being shot elsewhere.
