Also, the bicycle is much less costly for the society, indeed its positive effects on our health actually contribute to less expenses for the NHS, this effects would be huge if adopted massively.
The car instead has a negative effect on our health and the infrastructure is much more costly and require much more maintenance, the pollution it creates has negative effects on our health too.
> Its fuel and thereby range is not determined by your financial status, only your health.
Big assumption that health is more easily procured than gas or electricity. The quest for good health is expensive in time and money too and for many people is limited by genetics or bad luck. You can't trade labor for health either and health declines with age limiting mobility.
This touches on how we organize as a society. I know many who travel 20 miles (32 km) or more for work each day. That doesn’t work on a bicycle. Especially during the cold months.
It is certainly USA-centric, and some of its assertions do not hold for some of us in the USA (ex: I contribute a wildly disproportionate amount to road upkeep relative to my usage of same compared to average), but I think you (and others) are missing the article's point regarding "egalitarian", since they're referring to economic opportunities rather than merely transportation.
I can drift back in time just 20 years and point out that an automobile is the only reason I was able to pursue the career opportunities I did at that time. A bicycle is not fast enough to cover the distances. Mass transit didn't exist or was not available in times that matched those opportunities. Walking didn't work. Etc.
You 'could' take it cross country but that depends on your health and financial status...which means you won't because it's incredibly impractical for the vast majority of people.
femto nitpick, health is a subtle point and a big IF, if your health plummet, no more bike transportation and sudden reliance on public transportation and/or car (or maybe short flat trips in sweet weather)
a car, as bad and costly as it is, shields you from that.
You argue in qualitative terms, while the article supports its point on quantitative data.
> you can technically take it cross country
And "technically" anyone could take mass transit, yet he shows that (at least in the US) they do not. In the end what matters for public policy is what people and up actually doing, not what they theoretically could do.
Too old, fat, physically disabled people, etc. can have a job and turn that job into petrol to feed their cars. OTOH they can't drive a bicycle. That's not very egalitarian.
Nothing which costs that much and excludes so many people can honestly be called egalitarian – especially since it comes at the cost of removing so much public space from any other use.
The intellectual dishonesty here is especially staggering:
> Horses, intercity trains, streetcars, you name it, were always used mainly by the relatively wealthy and were inaccessible to the poor, especially in cities.
In addition to being flat up wrong about streetcars, note how he mixes things like horses which have always been expensive and intercity trains (which serve a different purpose) without mentioning things like buses or bicycles which poor people heavily depend on.
Later, he puts access to a car as a sign of egalitarianism without asking whether that’s a sign of preference or necessity. Someone who looks at percentage of income paid and the difficulty of maintaining employment without a car would come to very different conclusions. That is, of course, if the goal was to learn rather than to find support for the position they started with.
> The claim that “accessible public transportation” can produce greater equality ignores the fact that mass transit, whether private or public, has generally been used mainly by an elite. In 2019, the median income of people who commuted by transit to work was significantly higher than the median income of people who commuted by any other method. More people who commuted by transit in 2019 earned over $65,000 a year than those who earned under $25,000.
Might have something to do with the fact that there is not much public transport in the US and most can be found in very large cities. Since city dwellers have a higher income on average this is not the least bit surprising.
The conclusion of the article is build on this argument and quickly falls apart in Europe. The argument not even true for the US because it is warped by cities like New York City.
> Might have something to do with the fact that there is not much public transport in the US and most can be found in very large cities
Around the world, is there much public transit out of cities? And maybe public transit itself is a red herring. Maybe the right question would be on non-car transit?
> The claim that “accessible public transportation” can produce greater equality ignores the fact that mass transit, whether private or public, has generally been used mainly by an elite.
skips over a public transport history of the US that has seen the elite (eg Koch brothers) work to sink any public transport effort specifically to increase the per capita use of fossil fuels (and their profits), and planners using infrastructure projects to divide vibrant neighbourhoods and push out those determined as poor, unwanted, etc.
The use of "elite" to describe people using public transit is absurd at face value, but makes perfect sense when you understand "elite" as coded language for anyone living in a city, tinged with a connotation of contempt and awash with political undertone.
insanely expensive light-rail projects when buses can provide as good or better transportation for far less money
Haha. Insanely expensive, I don't doubt, but as good as or better service? Spotted the person who hasn't relied on public transport for more than a month of their life. Compared to light rail, buses are miserable.
I’ve looked at this a lot and the only thing that matters is dedicated right of way… because that’s how you can stick to a timetable which is very important to mass transit. BRT projects are supposed to do dedicated pavement for the buses which can make them competitive. However, for many projects that’s the first thing that goes to save costs.
One only has to visit a less wealthy country (just cross the border to Mexico) where the fallacy of the article is evident when the average person’s salary is not enough to buy even a clunker and keep it running (fuel is damn expensive). And public transportation is used massively due to it being the only other option to getting around. “ mass transit, whether private or public, has generally been used mainly by an elite.” Please what? Has this person ever actually used public transportation? Just get your head out of your iPad and look around. And that’s just one example. I even doubt this holds generally true in the US.
This article is the author’s commentary about the lived experience of US residents. It’s incoherent to allege it’s fallacious because the lived experience in some other country isn’t the same.
I don't agree with their logic here:
"the fact that mass transit, whether private or public, has generally been used mainly by an elite. In 2019, the median income of people who commuted by transit to work was significantly higher than the median income of people who commuted by any other method."
The fact is that people in cities are more likely to use public transit, and living near cities correlates strongly with income. But within metropolitan areas, transit is much more egalitarian (by their metric) than private car ownership.
Maybe the author has it backwards. Correlation causation etc. Could it be that access to public transport, or better infrastructure in general, gives people the opportunity to earn better wages?
I definitely appreciate reading points of view very different than my own, but—even aside from the US-centricity pointed out by other commentors—it seems to me that the author has got some things obviously wrong, most principally the relation between wealth and access to public transport:
It is pretty clear that most US residents do not have meaningful access to public transport at all, and even fewer have access to high-quality transport (i.e. clean, safe and pleasant vehicles with turn-up-and-go frequency within a short walk). Those that do are naturally concentrated in just a few major (and mainly older) cities—NYC, SF, Boston, Chicago, Washington and the like—which are also some of the most expensive places to live. Even within those cities, housing near transport routes tends to be more valued and thus more expensive. So yes: the people who have the best access to transit tend to be those who have higher incomes. (This is true in Europe too, albeit not so markedly since even less-well-off areas tend to have at least a decent basic service.)
The US, having built itself into a configuration that makes public transport mostly non-viable, can't easily fix this. In that context it probably _does_ make sense to try to provide basic automobiles to those who can't afford them. But don't pretend that this is anything other than a band-aid on the gaping wound that is poor decisions about land-use.
1. It oversimplifies too many things. That includes public transit availability, costs, etc
2. It’s US centric. The numbers are based on U.S. numbers. Far too many people think other places are like the U.S.
Where I live public transit doesn’t go where low income folks live and work. While there are exceptions, that’s the rule. So, low income earners often have cars that are at least 10 years old to get where they need to go
> mass transit, whether private or public, has generally been used mainly by an elite.
So does this article really apply outside of the US, RU, and other such places with vast swathes of low-density not-so-economically-integrated populations?
Same in the UK, even highly populated areas (e.g. surrounding London). Trains are very expensive compared to cars. There are discount schemes for some groups (e.g. student/pensioner), but it's really for the wealthy only.
I’d be curious to see some of those aggregate statistics broken out.
The idea that the average income of mass transit users is higher than that of drivers (pre-pandemic) is counter intuitive.
It’s most likely an artifact of the fact that salaries in NYC are high and the bulk of mass transit commuting was in/to/from NYC. I’d be curious to see the same statistics NYC-only and ex-NYC.
> The idea that the average income of mass transit users is higher than that of drivers (pre-pandemic) is counter intuitive.
I don’t know about NYC but here in DC you’ll see the same argument made. The demographics of commuter rail and long-distance subway trips are more affluent because that’s who can live in those suburbs (federal government commuters also get subsidies which are appealing compared to the traffic), while bus ridership had a lot more poor and especially elderly people. Trying to come up with one policy for the average of all 3 systems is going to be misleading in every direction.
O’Toole as usual has an agenda to find a way to make every positive thing about transit seem bad.
It’s clear here in that he uses average US-wide incomes to segment the population in urban areas. NYC has the highest transit ridership: if you make $65,000 a year, you might not be making rent. If you make $25,000 a year, you’re not able to afford to live anywhere near transit, and would be making less than minimum wage in new york state.
all you need to do is compare the cost to take transit to the cost to drive a car to see the weakness in his argument.
While I generally don't support this view, in my corner of the world there's an unexpected advantage of having access to cars, namely they give one leverage when picking where to live.
Around here the middle class can't afford real estate - not in 2022 at least. The credit advisor working for a housing development company who I met the other day told me that 75% of their clients pay cash, because the pool of those who are eligible for a mortgage is so small nowadays.
Housing close to public transport gets expensive really quick. Meanwhile if you have a car you can live in the middle of buttfuck nowhere and actually have the credit score for the property because it costs half of anything close to civilisation.
Of course there are fuel costs and whatnot, but you can work with/around that. There's no going around not having the credit score for a even a one-bedroom apartment in the city.
Here's a collection of European countries where there's no consistent trend in urbanization vs the Netherlands, which apparently are turning into a collection of cities:
> > The claim that “accessible public transportation” can produce greater equality ignores the fact that mass transit, whether private or public, has generally been used mainly by an elite.
Yes, the elites of poor countries around the world, places with a GDP per capita a 10th of the US one :-))))
One of the first thing poor countries to improve the lives of their wretched (thing people almost starving) is to add bus, tram and train lines so these poor people can go farther away from home to get decent paying jobs.
Guns are unironically considered egalitarian by American conservatives; the argument is that the 2nd Amendment levels the playing field for individual citizens vs. the government.
More and more automobiles is the perfect antidote to a society who's wealth has been built on exclusionary zoning.
It's useless trying to plan any desirable alternative to the status quo in the form of mass transit when everyone sees their home as a get-rich-while-doing-nothing investment ponzi scheme rather than a commodity to be consumed:
[+] [-] INTPenis|3 years ago|reply
It requires much less maintenance overhead, no license at all to drive, and you can technically take it cross country if you want.
Its fuel and thereby range is not determined by your financial status, only your health.
[+] [-] Mildlypolite|3 years ago|reply
The car instead has a negative effect on our health and the infrastructure is much more costly and require much more maintenance, the pollution it creates has negative effects on our health too.
[+] [-] voidfunc|3 years ago|reply
Big assumption that health is more easily procured than gas or electricity. The quest for good health is expensive in time and money too and for many people is limited by genetics or bad luck. You can't trade labor for health either and health declines with age limiting mobility.
[+] [-] mfer|3 years ago|reply
It’s larger than a transportation issue
[+] [-] closewith|3 years ago|reply
While I generally agree with you, surely this is not an egalitarian property of cycling.
[+] [-] ergonaught|3 years ago|reply
I can drift back in time just 20 years and point out that an automobile is the only reason I was able to pursue the career opportunities I did at that time. A bicycle is not fast enough to cover the distances. Mass transit didn't exist or was not available in times that matched those opportunities. Walking didn't work. Etc.
[+] [-] AuthorizedCust|3 years ago|reply
The lived experience of the vast majority of US citizens is an illegitimate viewpoint? Whose viewpoints deserve a seat at the table?
[+] [-] willnonya|3 years ago|reply
You 'could' take it cross country but that depends on your health and financial status...which means you won't because it's incredibly impractical for the vast majority of people.
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] agumonkey|3 years ago|reply
a car, as bad and costly as it is, shields you from that.
end of femto nitpick
[+] [-] jcarrano|3 years ago|reply
> you can technically take it cross country
And "technically" anyone could take mass transit, yet he shows that (at least in the US) they do not. In the end what matters for public policy is what people and up actually doing, not what they theoretically could do.
[+] [-] zqfuz|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kybernetyk|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] acdha|3 years ago|reply
The intellectual dishonesty here is especially staggering:
> Horses, intercity trains, streetcars, you name it, were always used mainly by the relatively wealthy and were inaccessible to the poor, especially in cities.
In addition to being flat up wrong about streetcars, note how he mixes things like horses which have always been expensive and intercity trains (which serve a different purpose) without mentioning things like buses or bicycles which poor people heavily depend on.
Later, he puts access to a car as a sign of egalitarianism without asking whether that’s a sign of preference or necessity. Someone who looks at percentage of income paid and the difficulty of maintaining employment without a car would come to very different conclusions. That is, of course, if the goal was to learn rather than to find support for the position they started with.
[+] [-] AuthorizedCust|3 years ago|reply
But sky high costs of dense urban living is egalitarian?
[+] [-] foepys|3 years ago|reply
Might have something to do with the fact that there is not much public transport in the US and most can be found in very large cities. Since city dwellers have a higher income on average this is not the least bit surprising.
The conclusion of the article is build on this argument and quickly falls apart in Europe. The argument not even true for the US because it is warped by cities like New York City.
[+] [-] AuthorizedCust|3 years ago|reply
Around the world, is there much public transit out of cities? And maybe public transit itself is a red herring. Maybe the right question would be on non-car transit?
[+] [-] defrost|3 years ago|reply
> The claim that “accessible public transportation” can produce greater equality ignores the fact that mass transit, whether private or public, has generally been used mainly by an elite.
skips over a public transport history of the US that has seen the elite (eg Koch brothers) work to sink any public transport effort specifically to increase the per capita use of fossil fuels (and their profits), and planners using infrastructure projects to divide vibrant neighbourhoods and push out those determined as poor, unwanted, etc.
[+] [-] IIAOPSW|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AuthorizedCust|3 years ago|reply
The lived experience of the vast majority of US citizens is an illegitimate viewpoint? Whose viewpoints deserve a seat at the table?
[+] [-] morsch|3 years ago|reply
Haha. Insanely expensive, I don't doubt, but as good as or better service? Spotted the person who hasn't relied on public transport for more than a month of their life. Compared to light rail, buses are miserable.
[+] [-] toddmorey|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AuthorizedCust|3 years ago|reply
I’ve been on gross light rail cars and great buses. Both have their pros and cons, but buses are not “miserable” because bus.
[+] [-] aqme28|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] loloquwowndueo|3 years ago|reply
One only has to visit a less wealthy country (just cross the border to Mexico) where the fallacy of the article is evident when the average person’s salary is not enough to buy even a clunker and keep it running (fuel is damn expensive). And public transportation is used massively due to it being the only other option to getting around. “ mass transit, whether private or public, has generally been used mainly by an elite.” Please what? Has this person ever actually used public transportation? Just get your head out of your iPad and look around. And that’s just one example. I even doubt this holds generally true in the US.
[+] [-] AuthorizedCust|3 years ago|reply
This article is the author’s commentary about the lived experience of US residents. It’s incoherent to allege it’s fallacious because the lived experience in some other country isn’t the same.
[+] [-] aqme28|3 years ago|reply
The fact is that people in cities are more likely to use public transit, and living near cities correlates strongly with income. But within metropolitan areas, transit is much more egalitarian (by their metric) than private car ownership.
[+] [-] _Algernon_|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] willyt|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cpcallen|3 years ago|reply
It is pretty clear that most US residents do not have meaningful access to public transport at all, and even fewer have access to high-quality transport (i.e. clean, safe and pleasant vehicles with turn-up-and-go frequency within a short walk). Those that do are naturally concentrated in just a few major (and mainly older) cities—NYC, SF, Boston, Chicago, Washington and the like—which are also some of the most expensive places to live. Even within those cities, housing near transport routes tends to be more valued and thus more expensive. So yes: the people who have the best access to transit tend to be those who have higher incomes. (This is true in Europe too, albeit not so markedly since even less-well-off areas tend to have at least a decent basic service.)
The US, having built itself into a configuration that makes public transport mostly non-viable, can't easily fix this. In that context it probably _does_ make sense to try to provide basic automobiles to those who can't afford them. But don't pretend that this is anything other than a band-aid on the gaping wound that is poor decisions about land-use.
[+] [-] AuthorizedCust|3 years ago|reply
False. Buses are almost universally viable in urban environments.
[+] [-] mfer|3 years ago|reply
1. It oversimplifies too many things. That includes public transit availability, costs, etc
2. It’s US centric. The numbers are based on U.S. numbers. Far too many people think other places are like the U.S.
Where I live public transit doesn’t go where low income folks live and work. While there are exceptions, that’s the rule. So, low income earners often have cars that are at least 10 years old to get where they need to go
[+] [-] 082349872349872|3 years ago|reply
So does this article really apply outside of the US, RU, and other such places with vast swathes of low-density not-so-economically-integrated populations?
[+] [-] drdunce|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aqme28|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JackFr|3 years ago|reply
The idea that the average income of mass transit users is higher than that of drivers (pre-pandemic) is counter intuitive.
It’s most likely an artifact of the fact that salaries in NYC are high and the bulk of mass transit commuting was in/to/from NYC. I’d be curious to see the same statistics NYC-only and ex-NYC.
I don’t have the data but could likely be https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson%27s_paradox
[+] [-] acdha|3 years ago|reply
I don’t know about NYC but here in DC you’ll see the same argument made. The demographics of commuter rail and long-distance subway trips are more affluent because that’s who can live in those suburbs (federal government commuters also get subsidies which are appealing compared to the traffic), while bus ridership had a lot more poor and especially elderly people. Trying to come up with one policy for the average of all 3 systems is going to be misleading in every direction.
[+] [-] snhly|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] twobitshifter|3 years ago|reply
It’s clear here in that he uses average US-wide incomes to segment the population in urban areas. NYC has the highest transit ridership: if you make $65,000 a year, you might not be making rent. If you make $25,000 a year, you’re not able to afford to live anywhere near transit, and would be making less than minimum wage in new york state.
all you need to do is compare the cost to take transit to the cost to drive a car to see the weakness in his argument.
[+] [-] Tade0|3 years ago|reply
Around here the middle class can't afford real estate - not in 2022 at least. The credit advisor working for a housing development company who I met the other day told me that 75% of their clients pay cash, because the pool of those who are eligible for a mortgage is so small nowadays.
Housing close to public transport gets expensive really quick. Meanwhile if you have a car you can live in the middle of buttfuck nowhere and actually have the credit score for the property because it costs half of anything close to civilisation.
Of course there are fuel costs and whatnot, but you can work with/around that. There's no going around not having the credit score for a even a one-bedroom apartment in the city.
Here's a collection of European countries where there's no consistent trend in urbanization vs the Netherlands, which apparently are turning into a collection of cities:
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.URB.TOTL.IN.ZS?end=2...
I know for a fact that where I live the decrease is caused by people moving to the suburbs - it's a widely talked about topic.
[+] [-] oblio|3 years ago|reply
Yes, the elites of poor countries around the world, places with a GDP per capita a 10th of the US one :-))))
One of the first thing poor countries to improve the lives of their wretched (thing people almost starving) is to add bus, tram and train lines so these poor people can go farther away from home to get decent paying jobs.
[+] [-] furyg3|3 years ago|reply
"Guns are very egalitarian devices! Everybody has at least one and uses it regularly!"
[+] [-] mbg721|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hackrnusr|3 years ago|reply
Why are so few of these posted to hacker news?
More and more automobiles is the perfect antidote to a society who's wealth has been built on exclusionary zoning.
It's useless trying to plan any desirable alternative to the status quo in the form of mass transit when everyone sees their home as a get-rich-while-doing-nothing investment ponzi scheme rather than a commodity to be consumed:
https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2022/12/home...
[+] [-] stardenburden|3 years ago|reply
I suspect this isn't the case in many other American cities, because
a. Transit is a luxury good, raising prices and gentrifying an area
b. Transit is the easiest to build to close places (from the CBD), which are often rich
c. Poorer communities just aren't a priority for most cities, at least not until recently.
Anecdotally, in Europe the modal split is probably more even.
[1] https://pedestrianobservations.com/2018/11/11/meme-weeding-l...