Mastodawn

Incidentally this point resonates with me a lot:

“while it may be uncomfortable…to share a subway car with people who are mentally ill and don’t have anywhere else to go, that’s a reason to improve housing and social services, not a problem inherent to public transit.”

Could also be written about the discomfort in sharing a sidewalk, bus bench… when we don’t meet people’s underlying needs it pushes us toward giving up on urban public space altogether.

oldfartjmb says FREE PALESTINE Jan 7, 2025

Scott, I think that you said that quite well. Indeed, we fail people with psychological problems so badly.

Cavyherd Jan 7, 2025

Well, I mean, eliminating public spaces has been an ambition of the zottarich* for decades anyway.

* Cf Cory Doctorow, per Walkaway. The .1%

Molly Cantrell-Kraig 🍷Jan 7, 2025

https://mastodon.social/@mckra1g/111439345653204114

Ayep.

WallOffTrump Jan 7, 2025

@scott
Which is fine with our would be dictators. The more time we spend indoors getting our information from their screens instead of from fellow citizens, the easier we are to manipulate.

@scott is this from 2017 😂

@enobacon it’s from yesterday

@scott well it doesn't seem to have mentioned bikes, so might as well have been written 20 years ago. We're not going to make transit work in the suburbs (most US cities) by wishing harder.

@enobacon depends on the suburb and subdivision, but I'm not sure it's completely hopeless, even there. But this is talking about cities.

@scott well if Portland is a "city", when I say suburbs, that's what I mean. We're not going to have a bus every five minutes to enough destinations that we can remain allergic to bikes.

@enobacon This is not either-or. You deserve both safe bike routes and buses every five minutes all over the city.

@scott one tail wags the dog while the other one costs a lot of money and doesn't get ridership when people can't bike to the station. Portland has supposedly been pro-bike and pro-transit / pro-gressive as cities go, and still just treats people like crap for choosing bikes even while the bus only comes every 30min (and also gets in your way while traveling at the same average speed as a bike.)

sanae

(SF)Jan 7, 2025

@enobacon @scott I'm very surprised you'd say that Portland is pro-transit, it seemed to have surprisingly little transit for a city of its size. I would definitely not use it as a reference point for what is possible

Clinton Anderson SwordForHire Jan 7, 2025

If only Canada felt the same way as this article

@ClintonAnderson with 40 million people in Canada I’m sure some of them do resonate with this article

Clinton Anderson SwordForHire Jan 7, 2025

@scott
Nowhere near enough unfortunately

hex Jan 7, 2025

@scott Yup, and related: Wanna keep fash from shooting people in your city? Make them ride a train to get in. They'll give up and go home rather than get in mass transit. Cars are easier to control than guns and transit is something you can actually do something about locally.

acb Jan 7, 2025

@scott The Right know this, which is why they’re systematically defunding public transport and replacing it with cockamamie schemes like Uber vouchers for low-income citizens and Tesla tunnels instead of subways, precisely because they don’t work and preempt anything that might