I'm a life-long New Yorker, born and raised. Even I gave up on the city and moved out, despite all the desire to live with low carbon-impact and live a moderate lifestyle w/o cars. At some point, the pain factor becomes too much. I'll give you some examples
- Approximately 5-6yrs ago the transit quality in the outer-boroughs (not Manhattan) became so bad that you could spend 2hrs hours switching multiple trains if you were going into Brooklyn. Trains would mysteriously not arrive, would run express, would claim they have arrived on official apps but the station was closed, etc. Then you think -- in 2hrs I could have commuted into the suburb and lived in a beautiful home for half the price and have a huge garden. And lots of people did exactly that.
- When metros didnt work, you'd Uber, but then punitive fees were added onto Uber rides to discourage that even. It was as if you'd be squeezed from every direction.
- For some minority groups (eg Asian women), crime became a huge problem. There wasnt much care from law enforcement (not to punish, but even just to be present at subway stations and cars). Many of my Asian friends moved out of the city for this reason. You'd see groups of 5-6 cops chatting together at the center of a station rather than be distributed across platforms across a station.
- Numerous metro steps had non-working elevators and non-working escalators, making travel with strollers dangerous or impossible. Good luck of you are on a wheelchair. Ridiculous ideas would be proposed where bicycles were somehow the magical solution to all...as if I could jump on a ride-share bicycle with two kids.
- Schooling was increasing byzantine. You could own a home but not be guaranteed a seat at your local public school. You had to use "connections" just to make it on the list, or your child would end up half way across the Borough at a different public school. You could have two kids zoned to the same public school, but end up in two different public schools, making school drops impossible. Test-driven systems were changed, making things even harder. "Leadership" based public school application systems were proposed, which is a euphemism for "rich people" get accepted.
Ultimately cities are competing against suburbs, and from what I saw in my particular case the city option failed. Even I couldnt stomach the pain anymore and I gave up.
> You could own a home but not be guaranteed a seat at your local public school. You had to use "connections" just to make it on the list, or your child would end up half way across the Borough at a different public school.
I suspect this is an attempt to distribute students between schools so you don't end up with one school made up of students all from a rich neighborhood and another with students all from a poorer neighborhood. That's how a lot of the US does things and the poorer families consistently get the short end of the stick.
In my experience this was multi-fold (and nothing to do with helping the poor)
- Housing would be built w/o appropriate ratios of schools being built in the same zone (poor city planning, and over reliance on connections vs rule of law)
- You could use connections to get to a well-rated public school w/o living in the zone, but at the expense of a local student being pushed out of zone. Note, this usually favors the rich/connected, not the poor.
- Application acceptances were at the discretion of the school w/o bright-line criteria, making favoritism a huge issue. Note, this usually favors the rich, not the poor. White the applications are straight-forward, NYC public school registrars could and would refuse to accept an application.
Ultimately, the causes do not matter -- all that matters is that the situation isnt palatable -- if you have 2 kids in two different school in two vastly different locations, and have no car, its close to impossible to drop the kids off with public transport and get to work on time.
I rely on remote work now. I go into the city 2x/wk. The school drop-offs are simple and live in a suburban township where local public school seating is guaranteed by law based on my lease/ownership address. No school registrar can mysteriously refuse to register me (havent faced that issue since i moved out of NYC), I dont need to lobby the local congress-preson to register my kids in school, nothing.
It "took a toll on NYC" but there wasnt really any real option provided by NYC.
I too walked or biked to school. But that was nearly twenty years ago.
I imagine the change comes from how sensitive people have become over leaving children alone under any circumstances. I.e. I don’t have kids myself, but according to a coworker who does, kids playing alone in the neighborhood would have been absolutely normal twenty years ago, but nowadays you might have Child Protection Services unleashed upon you, get accused of child neglect, and even have your kids taken away?
I recall someone did an experiment where they let their kid play at a playground, then took a seat on a bench where he could monitor his child, but still be far enough away to seem like the kid was alone. The goal was to see how fast some “Good Samaritan” would rush to the child in fear that he was being neglected. It didn’t take long.
I similarly walked to school myself when I was a child in the US (1980s.) We were also left home alone with the door locked while parents were at work/groceries (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latchkey_kid)
Today, this would be illegal where we live. From what I understand, it would also be enforced and child-services would get involved. It is hard to get an answer on what the cut-off age is when kids can be left alone, we have not received an answer from any place we've asked.
While I appreciate the spirit of the law, and while we're well off enough that we dont need to worry about things like this...I do feel kids are quite coddled these days.
> Approximately 5-6yrs ago the transit quality in the outer-boroughs (not Manhattan) became so bad that you could spend 2hrs hours switching multiple trains if you were going into Brooklyn. Trains would mysteriously not arrive, would run express, would claim they have arrived on official apps but the station was closed, etc. Then you think -- in 2hrs I could have commuted into the suburb and lived in a beautiful home for half the price and have a huge garden. And lots of people did exactly that.
You're talking about the "summer of hell" on the subways, which was over 5 years ago at this point[1]. I grew up in Manhattan and currently live in Brooklyn (in an "average" neighborhood for transit; neither accessible nor inaccessible), and transit has been fine for at least the past 3 years.
You can see the improvement in the MTA's own statistics[2]. This year so far has been slightly lower than 2021, but the overall trend is positive.
> Schooling was increasing byzantine. You could own a home but not be guaranteed a seat at your local public school. You had to use "connections" just to make it on the list, or your child would end up half way across the Borough at a different public school. You could have two kids zoned to the same public school, but end up in two different public schools, making school drops impossible. Test-driven systems were changed, making things even harder. "Leadership" based public school application systems were proposed, which is a euphemism for "rich people" get accepted.
I won't claim that this has gotten better or worse, but my perspective from going to public schools is that there's always been a degree of this.
The historical testing scheme is a way to ensure that rich people get access to the better NYC public schools: the standardized tests are laughably easy to prep for, and every UWS and UES'er of means for the past three generations has thrown money at tutors and test prep for their mediocre children.
w/r/t http://dashboard.mta.info/ -- I have a feeling that some of these are timed/theoretical/simulated rather than actual (or at least were at a point.) I literally took photos (need to find them) of cases where the dashboard would show subways arriving but the station/track/side was yellow-taped off.
The technique used to calculate APT/ATT (the underlying metrics for timeliness) are documented here (you have to click through a few folds)[1].
They don't appear to be simulated or theoretical: they're based on riders' swipes into the system. They do make certain ridership assumptions, however, because of the limited data (e.g. that customers use the same "corridor" during weekdays, and that the next swipe-in corresponds roughly to the last exit during weekdays). Those assumptions don't strike me as unreasonable, given the MTA's inability to collect exit data.
Edit: The page goes into detail on those restrictions as well. Interestingly, it sounds like OMNY gives them more precise timestamps, and thus has allowed them to improve the quality of the their metrics over the past ~2 years. The fact that they haven't swung substantially during OMNY's rollout indicates that there wasn't significant error in the previous data.
One of the challenges of "poor-er" people...e.g. those on local stops in outer-boroughs is the curse of express trains running past their stops. They are expected to switch again and come back to the stop where they should have stopped anyway. Subway metrics show the trains are operational, but they arent -- it is people adding 20-30+min to a commute because only half the station is operational.
Meanwhile the metrics (and exit counts) will show regular operation. Sharing dashboards like these suggest a working system when it isnt actually working that well.
That's a great point, and I agree: the subway doesn't do a uniformly good job of serving the city's population. There's a reason the wealthy areas are around the lines that they're around.
That being said: that's been true for 100 years. The claim (which I agree with!) that the subway experience is worse when poor doesn't have the temporal aspect that your original claim did (that subway performance has gotten worse recently.)
> as if I could jump on a ride-share bicycle with two kids.
So while this is rather tangential to the post in general, The cargo bike is the exact solution to this problem[0]. Just because your city is terrible at bicycle infrastructure doesn't mean it's a problem inherent to cities.
And honestly by your post it sounds like New York is just terrible about infrastructure in general.
I don't have kids myself, but having been a kid I've ridden a bakfiets on many occasions, never mind living near a primary school where a lot of kids get dropped off by bakfiets.
I'm sure where you live a bakfiets is a less viable option, but claiming that therefore using them anywhere is unrealistic is myopic.
Your misconceptions about reality and kids are sad and badly misinformed.
Bakfiets are quite common and extremely popular in the Netherlands, and people carry their kids around in them all over the place all the time. They even have transparent hoods and windshields for the rain. And the kids and parents absolutely love the delightful experience of safely biking all around the beautiful parks and ubiquitous well maintained bike paths of the city and countryside together.
And now they even have bakfiets eBikes with heavy duty powerful motors and stepless continuous variable planetary hubs with automatic transmissions (Enviolo Automatiq), which make them easy and effortless to ride. So you can stop at lights without shifting down, and they automatically shift down without pedaling and back up as you accelerate, so you can pay full attention to the road, other riders, and your kids, instead of worrying and hassling with shifting gears.
I have two Kogi eBikes with Enviolo automatic hubs (not cargo bikes with the heavy duty motors and hubs, but normal city and countryside bikes), and they really are as great as the reviews describe:
Review: Lovens cargo bike (with English subtitles!)
@3:23> After a week this cargo bike really feels like a second car. Maybe even my first car. Before every journey I thought: Can I take the cargo bike, or do I need the car? Often the cargo bike sufficed. My wife needed to take the kids to the other side of town. She was late going to the playground, took the cargo bike, and arrived well ahead of time. We had a day out with it, disposed of waste paper and went shopping. There's no problem with this big box. So how does it feel? This is the more expensive, automatic bike. And I'm very happy with that. Here you set the pedal frequency, the amount of revolutions per minute. Then the bike changes gear automatically, so you pedal the same frequency while picking up the pace. The speed is great. It rides very smoothly up to 25 km/h. But you can keep pedaling and reach 30 km/h with your own leg power without too much effort. [...]
Is Enviolo the best internally geared hub for eBikes?
@2:32> But another nice thing about this system is that you can shift it when you're stopped. And that's something that's pretty consistent throughout all internally geared hubs. This is considered an internally geared hub because the gears are on the inside, not on the outside, as you normally might find on a derailleur system.
>And in an urban environment, it's really helpful, because you come to a stop, and you can shift down, and you're ready to go!
>Because you might not necessarily remember to do it, or maybe in one of the common applications, like a cargo bike, you're worrying about the kids in the front, or your cargo that you're carrying, and you forgot to shift when you came to a light.
>You suddenly have to stop in an urban environment. You can easily shift down and get back into that lower gear and prepare yourself to start out again.
>And that's really helpful. So I think that's one of those things where people really appreciate it. Outside of that, I think that there's a lot of people that are just not so used to shifting gears specifically.
>The idea is that you can just twist it away from you to go into a lower gear and towards you to go into a higher gear. And the idea, because it's a continually variable transmission, you don't have steps to it.
>Normally a transmission on a car, like a five speed manual transmission, which I know maybe people in the States are not as comfortable or familiar with that sort of thing, but basically you shift into those five individual gears.
>Or on a bicycle you can shift seven, eight, nine, ten, they even go up to thirteen on a traditional derailleur, and some of them have even more than that, on the internal hub, like the Rollup. But it has a similar range as the traditional derailleur as far as the gears, now this one has 380%, but you basically have an infinite number of steps in between that.
>So as they say, for the Enviolo hub, it's an infinite number of gears. There's a couple ways of shifting the system. This one is a cable version on here, so you have two cables, and one cable will push it into a lower gear, and one cable will push it into a higher gear. And you shift it up on the handlebars.
>But you also have automatic versions, which can be fully automatic, and actually you don't have to shift it at all. You just program in what assistance level you want, and it's going to shift up or down.
Enviolo Stepless Shifting: A smart range of hubs for different riders needs.
>AUTOMATIQ: Why bother switching gears manually? The stepless automatic technology takes the ride experience to the next level with its ‘set it and forget it’ approach. Riders only need to set up the desired cadence, and the stepless automatic technology will adjust the enviolo system so they can always pedal at the same pace, even up or down hill.
>Integrated system: As part of the “integrated system”, the technology can be merged into the e-bike’s control unit. Simplifying the handlebar and the ride experience.
Even after the kids are big enough they get their own bikes to ride, the Bakfiets is also extremely useful for shopping, groceries, recycling, picnics, hauling cargo, and pets.
And most kids bike themselves to and from school, so swarms of frustrated helicopter parents don't need to all take time off work at once and all jam the streets at the same time twice every day to drop them off and pick them up from school.
And on top of that, the educational system and health care system in the Netherlands doesn't even suck, in fact are actually quite good, and as a result, the teen pregnancy rate is the lowest in Europe, and the teen suicide rate is much lower than the US, because they actually teach sex ed and accept people for who they are instead of shaming and brainwashing them into changing who they love and how they identify!
You should move to a better location or at least elect better leaders, if you live in such a drab dangerous car infested dystopian hellscape, that you think reality necessarily can't be any better than that. Don't your kid deserve better than that living in a world where people go out of their way to be hostile to bicyclists just to make a mean divisive political statement?
"It Tastes Like America" -MAGA Rednecks Rolling Coal On Bicyclists, Electric Cars, Pedestrians, Protesters, BlackLivesMatter, Trump Haters, Tree Huggers, Elderly, Children, Minorities.
You and your kids are really missing out of what parents and kids in the Netherlands and other less backwards countries than the US delightfully and safely experience every day, and you'll all be much healthier and happier, less angry and frustrated, with more exercise and fresh air and less pollution and stressful driving in jammed traffic in your life.
The Urban Arrow is a great example of a big cargo bike that can carry 4 small kids -- over 200 pounds -- in the box, with a sturdy roll cage, optional sun and rain canopies, rear rack, child seats, belt drive, that comes with the heavy duty automatic Enviolo hub and Bosch motor, that's available in the US.
>I've been really anticipating doing the review on this bike, but there's been a new version pending which is finally here. This is the new Urban Arrow Family UA4. This bike has always been very popular in our shop and it's just a good all around bike for carrying your kids and includes a bunch of different accessory options to fit your needs. Thanks for watching!
>We visited Nijmegen, the oldest city in the Netherlands, to ride with avid cargo bike advocate Jos Sluijsmans. Sluijsmans is an organizer of the International Cargo Bike Festival (https://cargobikefestival.com/), the Cargo Bike Expertise & Innovation Center and is a member of the Dutch Cycling Embassy. Join us as we chat about why cargo bikes have so much potential, how Sluijsmans got involved with cargo bike advocacy and stay for the bike-centric infrastructure and lovely views (yes, there are goats). A big thank you to Urban Arrow (https://urbanarrow.com/) for supporting this video.
You seem have written that I am misinformed what you have written is a bunch of nonsense and what sounds like leftist drivel about electing better leaders. No, the point is kids have meltdowns and do not behave in these idyllic ways as depicted in these cute pictures.
You're in denial of reality. Your leader Trump is the one who has childish melt-downs and infantile temper tantrums, throwing ketchup all over the walls and strangling secret service agents by the neck. And I'm so sorry about your actual children.
Trump tried to strangle Secret Service agent in attempt to reach Capitol on Jan. 6, aide testifies:
Yeah helmets when cycling are not a thing in the Netherlands. There's plenty of discussion about the pros and cons of that. Generally I figure it's not really more dangerous than walking.
This is a very accurate description of trying to live in San Francisco with kids. My family moved to a town outside of SF and all of those issues vanished.
The few people I know who stayed behind are fighting are fighting fiercely to fix some of these issues. I madly respect and admire them for it, but holy cow does it take a toll.
At some level I’ve accepted that cities in the US are really optimized for people who don’t have kids. There are definitely things I miss about living in a city, but overall I think the trade offs are worth it to get out of dodge.
The city governments cater to childless people, criminals, and the homeless, not necessarily in that order. They don’t give a shit about you and your kids and it shows in everything they do.
Totally OT, but TIL about Richard Scarry. Neither my childhood nor my childrens involved an encounter with that author's works significant enough for me to remember.
- Approximately 5-6yrs ago the transit quality in the outer-boroughs (not Manhattan) became so bad that you could spend 2hrs hours switching multiple trains if you were going into Brooklyn. Trains would mysteriously not arrive, would run express, would claim they have arrived on official apps but the station was closed, etc. Then you think -- in 2hrs I could have commuted into the suburb and lived in a beautiful home for half the price and have a huge garden. And lots of people did exactly that.
- When metros didnt work, you'd Uber, but then punitive fees were added onto Uber rides to discourage that even. It was as if you'd be squeezed from every direction.
- For some minority groups (eg Asian women), crime became a huge problem. There wasnt much care from law enforcement (not to punish, but even just to be present at subway stations and cars). Many of my Asian friends moved out of the city for this reason. You'd see groups of 5-6 cops chatting together at the center of a station rather than be distributed across platforms across a station.
- Numerous metro steps had non-working elevators and non-working escalators, making travel with strollers dangerous or impossible. Good luck of you are on a wheelchair. Ridiculous ideas would be proposed where bicycles were somehow the magical solution to all...as if I could jump on a ride-share bicycle with two kids.
- Schooling was increasing byzantine. You could own a home but not be guaranteed a seat at your local public school. You had to use "connections" just to make it on the list, or your child would end up half way across the Borough at a different public school. You could have two kids zoned to the same public school, but end up in two different public schools, making school drops impossible. Test-driven systems were changed, making things even harder. "Leadership" based public school application systems were proposed, which is a euphemism for "rich people" get accepted.
Ultimately cities are competing against suburbs, and from what I saw in my particular case the city option failed. Even I couldnt stomach the pain anymore and I gave up.