First make public transportation as clean and safe as ride sharing, then you'll get demand. Nobody wants to sit next to people that smell like piss/weed/cigs/BO. If you were a Uber/Lyft driver that kind of thing would get you 1 star very quickly.
Have enough of your friends get robbed/raped/groped in public transit and spend enough time on transit with urine in the stations and blood stains on the seats, and you will come to understand that safety, security, and cleanliness also drive ridership.
I'm from Europe so not sure if that's a US thing but that's certainly not such a big topic over here. Yes, public transport can't be 100% safe, being in public never is. But rapes in public transport and blood stains on seats are so rare that I don't know a single person who avoids public transport because of it. It's always just convenience, sometimes price.
Yes, I'm also from Europe. Public transport in Europe is much safer than in some urban areas in the U.S., but that is often true in general for just walking down in the street in a place like Bern or Frankfurt than in New Orleans or Oakland (these are the two cities where I had friends assaulted on public transport).
That's why it's so shocking when these things happen and are accepted by people who actually resist reform because they view enforcing standards of cleanliness and safety as being "anti-poor" and suggest that even complaining about these issues is being classist instead of just advocating for basic human decency and higher quality public transport.
I'm not hearing any suggested reforms, I just hear complaining. Please, give me basic human decency and higher quality public transit. How do you get there?
BART has police, they're shockingly bad, even for police.
It's not the poor people you notice, it's the tweakers and homeless people shitting themselves you notice. And the criminals [1]. The poor people look just like any other person on a train so you can't tell they're poor in the first place. Maybe they have crappier shoes and a crappier phone but that's irrelevant because they behave like normal people.
Seriously, have you ever taken a BART train late at night where there was a guy tweaked out of his mind? Or sat in chairs that look like they were shit on 5 times and never properly cleaned? Why do you expect people to deal with that as if it's perfectly okay? Why do you expect people not to take alternative modes of transportation when that's what they have to deal with? This kind of anti-societal behavior is only accepted in the US, and nowhere else in the world.
Anecdotal evidence: I only rode on the BART once. When we disembarked, my girlfriend got a few feet ahead of me. A strange man turned around and started screaming at her and physically grabbed her shoulders. I heard her scream and ran at him and violently defended her.
My experience with the BART may have been unique, but from what I've read it probably is not.
yes I take bart late at night all the time and I don't care. Doesn't bother me.
and my point is that the ne'erdowells or whatever is correlative of poverty. the conditions present in the greater bay area are represented on bart and I guess if you're a cloistered tech bro and you've never been to oakland that's scary or something
And my friends were sexually assaulted and mugged at gunpoint, yet we do not assume that this is acceptable behavior or should be tolerated because of someone's income level.
Honestly, I don't understand people who try to normalize violence and argue on public forums that it's acceptable that public transit be an open sewer just because it gives them a faux edginess in liking "gritty" public spaces or sense of twisted moral superiority to those who do care about these things.
I really don’t think this is a rich or poor issue. It is possible to have public transportation that can transport rich or poor equally, while maintaining safety and cleanliness.
For example, public transportation that has locked “cabins” for people who want to feel additional security. For cleanliness, constant sanitization of seats and floors. Trash bins available on the train, with workers replacing them as needed during station time.
No one is kicking a poor person off MUNI but if a homeless person pees on the seat, it gets cleaned up immediately. People that feel unsafe can go into the cabin. Unarmed security guards can be placed at every station, not to hassle riders, but to give assistance to people that ask.
This is not some foreign concept — some Asian countries do this quite well.
What… I’ve had so many incredibly bad and sometimes downright scary situations due to being locked in close proximity to people out of their minds on drugs. Those experiences have absolutely decreased my willingness to take public transit. If you want to call that classism, then fine, but that doesn’t make the impact on ridership any less true.
The economics of self driving cars will ensure a rise in public transit usage.
A few years ago, I was helping my friend consider options for saving money. On the table was if they needed to keep their car. Most of their commute was via public transit. However we looked at the number of transits for which public transit was not viable per month (visiting friends on the other side of the metro area, running to stores), multiplied by the cost of using a ride share service. Comparing this number to the car payment, auto insurance, gas, and maintenance, it was no contest: even a few trips amortized the cost of the car and made it worth it.
Every trip has a cost in dollars, time, and externalities (causing congestion, environmental impact, etc). People will tend towards being efficient with those costs, judged by their relative importance to them personally.
The thing is, owning a car is mostly a fixed dollar cost per month. Once you pass the point where owning one is worth it for a few trips, the cost of additional trips is far less, while the time savings remain high. The only time I consider public transportation is when parking is a problem, as all other things considered driving is preferable.
Once self driving cars reach a point where they are closer to the amortized cost of a trip when owning a car, the tradeoffs start to change. Those who use their cars for few, but necessary, trips will be the first to ditch owning. I suspect many multi-car families will downsize to a single car. Once you get rid of your car, and are using self-driving cars for the trips where they are necessary, the question for every trip becomes "public transit, or self driving?" Different trips will have different ways they play out. However lot of people who are currently eating the cost of owning a car and might as well drive anyways will suddenly be able to save a few bucks by using public transit instead.
The final magic of all this is that if you're going anywhere more than a few minutes away, there are many other people going from approximately where you are, to approximately where you're going. The big killer in public transit speed is time. Time going to a common pickup point, time waiting for it to arrive, time spent not going on a direct route, time spent stopping for others to get on or off. With a sufficiently well used self driving car network, it could easily join a few rides together at a point nearby, and have self driving cars ready and waiting at the point near your destination. Two quick transfers, and that's it. If the self driving car app says "45 minutes, $20, or 50 minutes for $10", lots of people would save that $10. For destinations such as downtown, airport, sport stadiums, there's even only one transfer. Given car pool lanes and such, transferring to an express bus might actually be faster than driving directly.
Groceries are probably my number one reason to keep a car. I can ride busses to and from grocery stores, but the inconvenience level of not only lugging tons of bags to/from but also dealing with your typical city life on the journey makes just using the car immensely more palateable. I've basically driven once every other week for the last year; for everything other than groceries, I walk or take transit.
However, there are a bunch of potential one-off situations that make owning the car (or at least having it on hand) important, too. For example, what can you do when you need an emergency vet visit? You're probably not going to be calling a rideshare or taking a bus for that. Those what-ifs are also a big reason I still have a car, even though I don't technically need one.
What about traveling to one-off destinations that may be a couple of hours away and not accessible by public transportation, like a trail head for a hike? Such trips just never happen in your scenario?
If someone does this say, every weekend all summer long, it's likely that keeping one car in the family will still be economical.
Once self driving cars remove the inconvenience of the last mile and difficulty of coordination, mixed modes of transport start to become really convenient. In your scenario, you might take a self driving cab from a suburb house to a small transfer station, transfer to an express bug/shuttle, which then takes you to a car rental. This hypothetical car rental wouldn't make much sense today, but consider a rental in a small mountain town, renting out off-road capable vehicles. From there you could go on your hike. Though this solution would be a little slower and less convenient than driving directly - on the larger scale for many people dealing with this 2 times a year would be better than the costs of owning a vehicle. Plus for many people it doesn't make sense to own a large rugged vehicle for driving in cramped downtown spaces - using the right vehicle for the job becomes an awesome option.
More popular trailheads for which the drive is fully paved won't be the first area serviced by self driving cars, but would be eventually.
The meta-point is this: Many people survive today just fine without owning a car at all, so it's reasonable to assume that self driving cars will expand the circle of people who's use cases will be fully covered by self driving cars. This will definitely not be everyone as soon as self driving cars come out.
As this circle grows, various niches of transportation will reach a critical mass and be developed. Another example is transportation between major cities. Currently you have inconvenient greyhound busses, or the rare train in the US. Then once you get to your destination you have to deal with transportation within that city. Today it's just easier to drive a few hours, assuming you already own a car.
Why can't that be covered by self-driving cars? There will definitely be some places that are truly unmapped and out of bounds for self-driving cars, but common hiking entrances and exits shouldn't be a problem.
There's got to be a way to make public transportation stop being the least attractive option in low to medium density urban settings.