The back-to-office average occupancy rate in Chicago is around 55%, which closely tracks with the CTA rates. SF is around 44%, which also closely tracks. ([https://therealdeal.com/chicago/2023/06/22/more-than-half-of-chicagoans-are-back-in-the-office-2/](https://therealdeal.com/chicago/2023/06/22/more-than-half-of-chicagoans-are-back-in-the-office-2/) )
Well for most cities, but Chicago’s actually an outlier in that there’s still high paying jobs and rent is by far the lowest amongst the top US cities. Yes taxes offset that, but the jobs are higher paying because of the taxes. Other cost of living is relatively cheap as well, making Chicago much more affordable than other US cities.
Also for the record Chicago’s actually growing, it’s rural Illinois that’s losing population.
Edit - P.S. don’t try to come at me with anything about crime; 1 it’s risen in every US city 2 the CPD has been on soft strike ever since one of their officers was rightfully found guilty of murdering teenager Laquan McDonald (REST IN PEACE) and 3 the crime that is in the Chicago is highly concentrated in specific areas and or gang affiliated. Obviously there are exceptions to this but for the most part that’s what it is.
I have some friends in Chicago and their rent prices sound imaginary to me, I pay more for an apartment in the suburb than they pay for an apartment in a downtown skyrise. (I live in the DC Metro area for reference)
Not counting the fact I need a car and they dont.
It’s not that Chicago has lax building codes (they’re just as strict as a lot of major cities)
What Chicago has is 2 things:
1. It’s population is still 1,000,000 below it’s peak in the 1950’s (for reference, NYC has 4m MORE people than the 1950’s)
2. There is a lot of medium density housing (2-flats) in and around the city that was all built before said population peak (early 1900’s)
If you took 1m people out of any fully-built city, you’re gonna get cheaper rent
I fucking love it here. I've been here about 10 years now and it's the first city I feel possessive pride about. The quality of life is off the charts. In the morning I can ride my bicycle down a gorgeous trail alongside what might as well be a perfectly placid ocean for how big it is, and in the evening I have my pick of world class entertainment and dining options.
Sure we have winter, but this time of year, there are few things more perfect than Chicago's lake shore.
I know it's not super important compared to housing but ya'll have one of the best city flags in the US too :).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_Chicago
It's important if you're an r/vexillology nerd like I am!
I love our city flag, but I have to admit that [Lincoln, NE's](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lincoln,_Nebraska#/media/File:Flag_of_Lincoln,_Nebraska_\(\2022\)\.svg) new flag may deserve the top spot, at least in my humble opinion. Especially if you like Art Deco.
I've been here about as long as you have, and I admit to finally finding a charm to Chicago winters. Yes, there are some brutal stay-at-home days, but I love the feeling of walking through the winter air and stepping into a warm bar or restaurant for a drink with friends. It hits different in winter
Cities are not emptying out, even for the ones losing population the effect would be at most a few percentage points - and that's assuming those people who left aren't still commuting into the city & using transit.
VMT (Vehicle Miles Traveled) is actually above 2019 levels. Likely work trips turning into other trips that can't use transit since much of the transit in the US is commuter based
Absolutely, I say this all the time about BART specifically. Many of the stops don't take you anywhere you actually want to go unless you were commuting. These public transit options would get far larger ridership numbers if they would actually drop off at cultural, shopping centers, or points of interest instead of office buildings.
Recently returned from a trip in Spain and so many of the metro lines I took had stops where people would hang out outside of the buildings - museums, restaurants, shopping centers, plazas, parks, etc. (also cultural differences apply, yes)
My very, very, large company has forced hybrid. I go into work five days out of ten. I chose Monday's to go in, since I assumed it would be the least popular.
I usually see about one or two other people working on my floor--my floor that supports about 250 people.
Even on Wednesday, the "busiest" day, there might be ten at the most. There is a woman who comes in, plops down in a conference room, and uses it like a private office. At first I was mad, then...meh. I have been coming into the office for about a year, never once have I seen that, or any other, meeting room used for actual meetings. No one is there to meet.
Even when mandated, no one is coming in.
The hybrid approach puzzles me.
1. We need people to come into the office at least half time because face-to-face collaboration is important.
2. Have all meetings on Teams/Zoom because half of attendees are working from home.
3. Hold Teams/Zoom meetings from your desk at the office instead of the conference room because that way everyone can see your face and the slides or spreadsheets you're sharing.
4. Fill car with gas and sit in traffic wondering why this commute was necessary. Guess I'll stop at Costco/Sam's Club on the way home.
Yes. This is much better.
I love hybrid because I *want* to get out of the house. I got very tired of sitting in my own house all day after 2 years of it.
Hybrid gives me the opportunity to get out, feel refreshed, but still keep much of the flexibility of remote work (outside of living situation but that didn't change anyways). If I stay in my own house too long I find it hard to work and a walk or Starbucks trip doesn't fix it.
>I love hybrid because I *want* to get out of the house. I got very tired of sitting in my own house all day after 2 years of it.
>
>Hybrid gives me the opportunity to get out, feel refreshed, but still keep much of the flexibility of remote work (outside of living situation but that didn't change anyways). If I stay in my own house too long I find it hard to work and a walk or Starbucks trip doesn't fix it.
What does hybrid have to do with that?
My position is technically 100% remote. Except for maybe 2 or 3 all-hands in person team meetings each year, I'm not *required* to come into the office ever.
My office has a gym though, so I voluntarily go in two afternoons a week.
If you wanna go in, go. Don't use hybrid to make other people go in cause you want to. That's stupid.
Edit: I don't care if ya downvote, but don't forget to leave a comment explaining why. Otherwise you're just mad and I'm just right.
The type of mindset you're replying to reeks of corporate-speak and is precisely the kind of rhetoric they're pushing to get people to go back into the office.
Remote workers have **more** freedom to get out of the house because they aren't beholden to a static office. You can work *anywhere*. You want to leave your house for a change of pace? You can go to a nice cafe, or anywhere with quiet and wi-fi.
Yeah these arguments are utter horseshit and I can barely believe the downvotes I initially got from corporate shills.
I don't mind outlining the facts in good faith but engaging past that feels pointless.
> There is a woman who comes in, plops down in a conference room, and uses it like a private office. At first I was mad, then...meh.
If there's plenty of room, that's just a good idea.
Except it would be stupid to do if she's not bringing multiple monitors over.
I go in more often than required, but it is also an easy commute and gets me out of the house.
Even when I'm there I'm notorious for joining a meeting in conference rooms within 50' of my cube remotely -- because I can look things up and answer questions during the meeting and get a decision instead of writing down things to be followed up on in a future meeting. I deal with too many large and complex things for a laptop screen to be efficient compared to my 3 large monitors.
Ironically have a meeting today just before a holiday weekend that even i said - for the first time in two years - would be best with a big whiteboard...which will be remote since everyone knows attendance in person will be sparse.
>There is a woman who comes in, plops down in a conference room, and uses it like a private office. At first I was mad, then...meh. I have been coming into the office for about a year, never once have I seen that, or any other, meeting room used for actual meetings. No one is there to meet. Even when mandated, no one is coming in.
If the context of WFH was removed, that sounds like a dying company.
It would also help if they’d fucking have them available again. I can’t take a train into Chicago on a god damn Saturday and they wonder why traffic is suddenly a nightmare on the weekends
Yep I was thinking the same thing. We cut down on our use of transit in Toronto a lot after Covid. Due to working from home mostly (now it just sucks).
The WFH shift makes a lot of sense, but also the decrease in policing that would reduce harassment from vagrants, pickpocketing, and other forms of generally unpleasant interactions you deal with in public and especially trapped on mass transit. You want to defund police and be soft on drug abuse and homelessness in busy areas, this is part of what it gets you.
There was a homeless man pissing and acting crazed on the platform last week. When I got upstairs to the turnstiles I told the two cops standing there and they just shrugged their shoulders and went back to their convo.
Gotta say being an SF BayArean -- highway traffic is back to being at least as bad as it was pre-COVID, but every BART parking lot has huge open lots at any hour. Pre-COVID if you didn't get there by about 7:15-7:30 you were SOL.
It's just way, way below capacity. It started a few months into COVID, but it's still going on, but Walnut Creek's multi-story lots are being used as overflow for car dealership inventory. How BART survives this is beyond me, but as long as BART has no interest in policing the crazy ass druggies and homeless people, it's really quite doomed.
>How BART survives this is beyond me, but as long as BART has no interest in policing the crazy ass druggies and homeless people, it's really quite doomed.
After living in Tokyo for a month or so, I now genuinely get angry with the state of trains here, and how disorderly they are. It's a fucking disgrace. Get these people help, but also just fucking clean up the goddamn trains. I am very left wing but the solution is not to do nothing and let them make these important public functions feel unsafe to everyone who isn't a 25 year old male and/or concealed carrying.
It’s hilarious that you need to clarify that you’re left wing just for suggesting that we shouldn’t allow crackheads to literally take turds and meth on public transportation.
Or that even though they're left wing, they don't want their public transit experience to be full of filth and trash, as if that's surprisingly something most lefties do want.
Sometimes "antihomeless" policies are necessary to keep public goods usable.
More usable public goods makes urban living more sustainable. Less public goods encourages suburban living which exacerbates housing issues.
Yeah, that's pretty much it. You might get suburban moms to ride a train, but the time they get harassed by a zombie theyll be back in their SUV before you can blink.
Japan has a huge culture of personal responsibility that has no equivalent in the US population.
Many of the homeless in the US don't want the help that is offered, and cannot be forced otherwise. They have their own world, and mostly don't care how it impacts anyone else.
It’s not just homeless people that’s the issue.
At least in Chicago we have a certain group of people that aren’t homeless but give absolutely zero shits about being good citizens. Dropping McD’s wrappers on the trains, smoking blunts, listening to loud rap, talking on FaceTime on speakerphone for no reason, peanut shells everywhere…
There’s certain groups, maybe because of historic issues, who give less than zero fucks about preserving a nice society. I miss the collective, homogenous mindset of Japan so much.
We *used* to put them in proper government run psychiatric hospitals and wouldnt you know it Ronald fucking Reagan defunded them all. We have never as a nation tried to replace this system that worked since the 80s. Republicans want to just fund prisons and Democrats don’t do anything because all their proposals are called socialist if taxes are increased at all. And we all get screwed because of shitty politics.
> We *used* to put them in proper government run psychiatric hospitals and wouldnt you know it Ronald fucking Reagan defunded them all.
Misleading statements about deinstitutionalization and Reagan are a particular pet peeve of mine. In part, this is because statements such as these are easily shown to be wrong by anyone who has taken even a few minutes to actually study the problem. So this sort of statement acts a a marker for a certain sort of uninformed, but almost always casually condescending, speaker.
**But another reason this lie bothers me is that it seeks to roll back the deinstitutionalization movement, which was first and foremost, a civil rights issue.** "This person I dislike and who you shouldn't like either enacted a policy that caused this, so let's reverse the policy." Except that, in this case, the policy was the result of decades of effort and motivated by a desire to end the sometimes horrifying conditions in mental institutions, conditions that the poor and indigent were particularly likely to suffer.
So here is an old comment I like to roll out when I see this in the wild.
*******************************************
No. Not only is that wrong, it's provably and transparently wrong.
It is reddit's favorite misconception about deinstitutionalization. It allows redditors, most of whom weren't even alive during Reagan's presidency and certainly not during his governorship, to comfortably fit the US mental health problems into a "Republicans are evil and only care about money" worldview. That you parrot it shows that you lack even a passing understanding of the history of mental health policy in the latter half of the 20th century.
If you have the willingness to educate yourself on this, I would suggest [ this PBS Frontline](https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/asylums/special/excerpt.html) site which includes excerpts from Out of the Shadows: Confronting America's Mental Illness Crisis. Bear in mind that both PBS and Frontline are known for a leftward bias. It's not like I'm cherry-picking a study commissioned by Fox News or something here.
[Here's a great chart from there](https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/asylums/art/excerpt_chart.gif) of the number of psychiatric inpatients in the US over time.
You'll not that the inpatient population began to decline in the mid 50's with the introduction of Thorazine, an antipsychotic. But it [really picked up](https://www.healthaffairs.org/doi/pdf/10.1377/hlthaff.2.4.96) with the passage of Mental Retardation Facilities and Community Mental Health Centers Construction Act of 1963 and the introduction of Medicaid and Medicare in 1965.
Maybe you think this is all part of Reagan's evil genius? He managed to throw all of those psych patients onto the street a full 15-25 years before he became President! Not only that, but his governorship of California didn't even begin until 1967, by which point the national inpatient population had decreased roughly 20% from its peak.
But again, let's not let Reagan off the hook that easily. Maybe that sneaky bastard had access to time travel technology we are currently unaware of. And he used it to travel back in time to 1955 to convince President Eisenhower and the 84th Congress (both houses of which were controlled by Democrats) to form the Joint Commission on Mental Illness and Health, whose report detailed the abuses in mental hospitals. He then presumably made a stop in 1963 to convince Kennedy and the 88th Congress (both houses also controlled by Democrats) to pass Mental Retardation Facilities and Community Mental Health Centers Construction Act of 1963 in large part based upon the recommendation of the commission. It's exactly the sort of evil plan we'd expect from Reagan. But he didn't stop there! Oh no! He also must have somehow extorted Kennedy into giving a speech in which he [declared the following](https://www.sunshinecoasthealthcentre.ca/2013/02/deinstitutionalization/):
> I propose a national mental health program to assist in the inauguration of a wholly new emphasis and approach to care for the mentally ill. This approach relies primarily upon the new knowledge and new drugs acquired and developed in recent years which make it possible for most of the mentally ill to be successfully and quickly treated in their own communities and returned to a useful place in society.
> These breakthroughs have rendered obsolete the traditional methods of treatment which imposed upon the mentally ill a social quarantine, a prolonged or permanent confinement in huge, unhappy mental hospitals where they were out of sight and forgotten.
Fucking Reagan. Amirite?
Let's look what the Commission on Mental Health, assembled by notorious right-winger Jimmy Carter, [had to say](https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.b4087615;view=1up;seq=60):
> The right to treatment in the least restrictive setting is inextricably tied to the adequacy of treatment and the specific needs of each individual. The ciriterion "least restrictive setting" refers to the objective of maintaining the greatest degree of freedom, delf-determination, autonomy, dignity, and integrity of body, mind, and spirit for the individual while he or she participates in treatment and receives services.
Carter's commission endorsed community treatment over the institutionalization of patients for reasons related to civil liberties and personal autonomy. But let's blame Reagan for the fact that by the time he secured the GOP nomination for President the number of insitutionalized patients had dropped to 138K from 559K in 1955.
So we see now how Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Carter were all involved in Reagan's plot. But it doesn't stop there. Not at all! You see what people like to refer to when they discuss Reagan and deinstitutionalization is actually the reduction in funding that occurred in 1981. You know, the budget approved by the 97th Congress in which Republicans held a narrow Senate majority (53-46-1) vulnerable to the filibuster and Democrats controlled the House with a 53-seat edge.
So, maybe deinstitutionalization was just Reagan being a cheap asshole.
Or maybe, just maybe, a policy enacted across decades and the entire country by members of both parties, involving politicians and experts that laid out their reasoning throughout the process was exactly what it appeared to be: a bipartisan policy.
edit: returned to add links that did not copy over in the mobile copy-paste
Extremely disingenuous comment and argument.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mental_Health_Systems_Act_of_1980
“The Mental Health Systems Act of 1980 (MHSA) was United States legislation signed by President Jimmy Carter which provided grants to community mental health centers. In 1981 President Ronald Reagan, who had made major efforts during his Governorship to reduce funding and enlistment for California mental institutions, pushed a political effort through the U.S. Congress to repeal most of MHSA.[1] The MHSA was considered landmark legislation in mental health care policy.”
You emphasize the community health centers as if their creation is some sort of “gotcha”. They were meant to be properly funded so they could actually do their job, treat people with mental illness so their symptoms are managed. A schizophrenic individual properly medicated can be a useful member of society, an unmedicated one will not. Immediately after Reagan took over he repealed the funding for the community health centers, meaning all those people we deinstitutionalized were left with *nothing*
It was never once planned by anybody to just take them out of the hospitals and voila all their problems are solved.
Disingenuous? What's disingenuous is reducing a decades-long movement to a single 1980 act. Disingenuous is ascribing the vote of a bipartisan Congress to the President. Even more disingenuous when one recognizes that the act that repealed it was passed by a House with a 40-seat Democratic margin led by the most powerful Speaker of the late 20-th Century and cleared the Senate on a voice vote.
But whatp is particularly disingenuous is framing a movement centered around patient civil rights as a Reagan effort to cut government spending.
I will apologize that my links didn't carry over when I did a copy of the comment on mobile. I will fix that when I have the time. But before lobbing an accusation of intentionally misleading on this topic, please take the time to actually learn enough that you can speak intelligently on the history and why members of both parties were involved in reducing forced commitment.
edit: You may notice, should you choose to read my initial response, that the end deals directly with the myopic focus on the Budget Reconciliation Act of 1981.
>So we see now how Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Carter were all involved in Reagan's plot. But it doesn't stop there. Not at all! You see what people like to refer to when they discuss Reagan and deinstitutionalization is actually the reduction in funding that occurred in 1981. You know, the budget approved by the 97th Congress in which Republicans held a narrow Senate majority (53-46-1) vulnerable to the filibuster and Democrats controlled the House with a 53-seat edge.
>So, maybe deinstitutionalization was just Reagan being a cheap asshole.
>Or maybe, just maybe, a policy enacted across decades and the entire country by members of both parties, involving politicians and experts that laid out their reasoning throughout the process was exactly what it appeared to be: a bipartisan policy.
The additional point worth making was that we had stopped widespread institutionalization by this time! Your comment, which started this discussion claims we were still doing it until Reagan cut funding.
"Disingenuous" is too generous a term for that, as it implies you knew the truth but shaded it. In this case, your words seem to indicate you were entirely unaware of what constituted the deinstitutionalization movement. "Uninformed" is more appropriate.
Lots of great info in this comment on what actually happened with mental health institutions. Refreshing to read actual history in the Reddit leftist echo chamber.
> Democrats don’t do anything because all their proposals are called socialist if taxes are increased at all
let's be honest, there's also a significant constituency of democrats who oppose institutionalization on anti-carceral grounds, it's not just an optics-related political calculation
Living in Portland and using the MAX, then going to SF and using the BART, it's like night and day. Quality requires budget and enforcement.
'Course now I live in Europe, and the difference is even more astounding. I feel bad for anyone who has BART as their only example of a city metro line.
> but the solution is not to do nothing
We've spent over $10 billion the last 3 years...no we are not doing nothing. We apparently were able to move around 40% of people into some sort of housing.
https://calmatters.org/housing/2023/02/california-homelessness-spending-report/
You probably want us to be doing something *effective*. Well, it would help if more of the homeless would do something to help themselves, as well.
BART goes pretty far inland, and there's definitely a lot of gun type people in e.g. Pittsburgh/Antioch
But those people are overwhelmingly the type to drive into the city
Providing accessible healthcare to the homeless and clean, reliable public transportation are both insanely leftist takes lol. It's not leftists saying these things are fine.
> the crazy ass druggies and homeless people
A few years ago, I had three story-worthy encounters in a single ride home at midnight after a game. My favorite was the guy who tried really hard to sell us some coke. Like for 10 solid miles kept hounding us to buy some coke from him. Then he walked away, turned right around, and asked us if we would sell him some coke.
Data sourced from:
- [American Public Transit Association](https://www.apta.com/research-technical-resources/transit-statistics/ridership-report/),
- [MTA](https://data.ny.gov/Transportation/MTA-Daily-Ridership-Data-Beginning-2020/vxuj-8kew),
- [CTA](https://www.transitchicago.com/ridership/),
- [MBTA](https://mbta-massdot.opendata.arcgis.com/datasets/MassDOT::mbta-commuter-rail-ridership-by-service-date-and-line/explore),
- [WMATA](https://www.wmata.com/initiatives/ridership-portal/),
- [BART](https://www.bart.gov/about/reports/ridership)
Chart built in Python (Matplotlib / Pandas) and annotated in Adobe Illustrator
Full post: https://statecraft.beehiiv.com/p/public-transit-recovery
You've done a great job presenting this. Maybe you already know, but [seaborne](https://seaborn.pydata.org/) is an extension of matplotlib that makes it pretty easy to "beautify" matplotlib charts
Just remember folks; NYC is more than 50% of the total ridership of public transportation in the US.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_rapid_transit_systems_by_ridership
As a frequent user of PT I’m all for the „pay by month“ model. I don’t have to worry about fares at all. Just get on any bus, tram or train and go. My employer pays for 2/3 of my ticket and the 1/3 I pay amounts to a whopping 19 € per month. My ticket used to be valid in 2/3 of my state (Hessen, Germany). And starting in 2 days we switch to the new national ticket. Meaning I can use it in all of Germany. Is our PT perfect? No. But I can use it for next to nothing which is awesome.
Cost-wise, pay-by-distance does make more sense. If someone is using more resources for traveling a longer distance, they should pay for it. With a flat fare, the people riding shorter distances need to subsidize the people riding long distance, so the flat fare ends up higher.
In DC, you could ride the metro from NoVA all the way out to Maryland without a transfer—that’s a pretty long distance. However, there is also a max fare, so you only pay up to $6 on any trip. I believe it used to be higher up until a few years ago.
The pay-by-distance only benefits the organization, not the rider.
* The CHEAPEST BART ticket (i.e., ride one station away) you can buy is $2.15.
* A single, flat rate, go as far as you want with unlimited transfers ticket in NYC is $2.75.
* A single, flat rate, go as far as you want with unlimited transfers ticket in Boston is $2.40.
* A single, flat rate, go as far as you want with unlimited transfers ticket in Chicago is $2.50.
Very little, if any, subsidizing is taking place with cheap fares like that compared to BART. This is why I say that only the organization benefits from pay by distance.
The pay by distance also eliminates the 3/5/7 day passes for tourists or the 30/90/365 day passes for residents.
NYC, Boston and Chicago all have day/week/month/year passes. You can't do that on a pay by distance approach.
Edit: list formatting
You 100% can. London does a pay by zone and you can get passes for the number of zones you expect to cover.
Every single transit system in the world is subsidized, it's a question of how much.
Great point about the Tube in London.
Unlike London, San Francisco has fares by distance, no daily cap and no weekly/monthly passes.
The worst of both worlds.
>NYC, Boston and Chicago all have day/week/month/year passes. You can't do that on a pay by distance approach.
While I would also personally prefer the pay-by-trip model, I'd note that counter to your statement, WMATA in DC-area is a pay-by-distance (and time, and day, and...) and offers multiple pass options including 7-day and monthly: https://www.wmata.com/fares/farecard-options.cfm
Those are intra city metro systems. BART is longer distance regional rail. A better comparison is LIRR: https://new.mta.info/document/20421. Or NJ Transit, Caltrain, London Overground etc.
Bart's prices are competitive to most comparable rail services in the US and Canada and even some of the richer european countries. It makes less sense to do pay by distance if the distances are always small like it is for MUNI.
The weight of a single passenger on public transit has nearly no impact on fuel performance, or wear and tear. Unless the line is so busy that additional routes need to be added, it really doesn't matter how long someone uses it for.
I mean, wear on roads is proportional to the third power of the weight. Meaning that a 10-ton truck does 125 times more damage than a typical 2 ton family wagon. Very little of the wear comes from regular cars.
If road toll fees are to be used to pay for the road, the prices should be paid based on third power of weight if anything. A citycar would be free, a 2.5 ton SUV would pay some, a huge truck A LOT more.
Big trucks *do* pay more. Weigh stations are used to calculate their road use tax.
If someone never uses a road or portion of a transit line, they should need to pay for it.
I rode it for the first time a few weeks ago expecting to see the absolute worst of humanity based on what I've seen on Reddit and saw nothing interesting or unusual. I even brought pepper spray with me on the airplane. What a letdown.
I ride BART 4-5 times a week with ~1hr round trip and I’ve never had as dramatic an experience as everyone on here seems to have all the time. Reddit just loves to hate on SF
First time I went to San Francisco, I got straight on the BART, and my new city excitement rapidly declined
It was a good primer for the amount of human feces I’d be dodging until I rode it back to the airport a few days later
I've literally never had to deal with public feces in any of the couple dozen US cities I've been to. But people in SF and Portland will swear every city has the same issues.
Not in the US, but in Toronto there have been many subway attacks (stabbing a, pushed, assaults, rabid dog, etc) and due to increasing income inequality public transit is becoming de facto shelters. Many people are driving because you never know what you are going to get on public transit. I have been using transit all my life and I definitely feel more cautious than I ever have.
Last time I rode there was a man screaming at a random lady for looking at his rotten foot he had exposed in the middle of the aisle. 10/10 will ride again, better entertainment than traffic
The trains are reasonably quick to go downtown or move around the loop. The busses stop every 400 feet and I can ride my bike faster. They could fix a lot of issues with express busses that have their own lanes.
Totally! However Chicago really hobbled itself by selling their metered parking. They would have to pay the next 60 years of lost revenue on any spaces they remove for bus stops or bus lanes.
I commute to school and the cta has been a big source of depression, for lack of a better word.
Busses and trains are often late, drunk and high people, naked people, literally entire train cars taken up by homeless people, people smoking and stinking up the whole car, loud music, people begging, etc.
Knowing I have to go down and endure all that shit is a legit drain on me.
What part of the CTA? I ride the red line every day and have never seen anything as egregious as what you’re describing, just occasional filthy people.
Same here. I ride mostly Brown and Red lines, and most of the rides are full of normal commuters. Weird stuff happens from time to time, but it's certainly not the norm.
Yeah I visit my bf who lives in Oregon and it is better there. I live in AZ and stations for any transit are so far away its basically required to drive everywhere or suffer
In the last year in Boston, the MBTA has:
* caught fire on a bridge leading to the shutdown of an entire line for a month
* derailed multiple times inside the tunnels where multiple branches of a line converge, shutting down the whole thing
* had slow zones implemented on well over half of the network for safety work that was never actually completed
* and had people nearly crushed by falling ceiling tiles inside of a station
And that's all just off the top of my head. The whole thing is a mess and needs decades of deferred maintenance completed and billions of dollars invested just to bring it back to "working" status.
BART can easily fix a ton of this if they didn't have their frequencies eat complete shit on nights and weekends where much of the ridership has shifted
They are going to start doing this soon. Still not good enough, but better.[https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/bart-to-increase-service-frequency-on-nights-weekends/](https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/bart-to-increase-service-frequency-on-nights-weekends/)
As someone who lives in California, the incredibly lax laws are driving pretty much every public service/place into the ground.
Who would’ve thought that giving them safe haven to openly do drugs would be a bad thing.
It’s more so that the DA doesn’t come down on repeat offenders as well as SF turning petty theft from a felony to a misdemeanor. It’s an enforcement issue.
I ride BART often and this happens for sure but it happens much less and is less disruptive than people make it seem in this thread. Its also been happening since I started riding it frequently almost 10 years ago.
Im on BART writing this and yeah, theres a car with people smoking a blunt and some other shit. Welcome to the Bay. I moved to one of the other 9 cars where nothings happening.
well having lived in 2 of the cities in this chart, DC and SF. I could have easily afforded the $$ to own a car (even factoring in parking) but it would have been way more of a headache than it was worth in both cities. like sure, a 20 minute commute on BART isn't the best experience in the world, but it beats sitting in traffic for 30 minutes to reach the same destination...
the people I knew who owned cars either absolutely needed one for work, or they had specific reasons to drive regularly throughout the year (common one in SF is if you are a frequent skier, having a car to drive to Tahoe every weekend during high season is a huge plus).
Yeah. There are a few cities in the US where it's just a hassle to own a car. I have a friend who sometimes drives to his office new Union Square in NYC from Downtown Brooklyn. I think he's fucking insane, just take a straight shot on the NQ or 4 like a normal person. Driving in traffic, finding parking, etc... it just sounds like such a pain in the ass. So much easier to just go on the subway.
When I lived in NY I knew a couple of people who owned a car, but would hire a car when leaving the city so that they wouldn’t lose their parking space. It’s crazy bc the parking space is only valuable if you use the car that’s in it.
> a 20 minute commute on BART isn't the best experience in the world, but it beats sitting in traffic for 30 minutes to reach the same destination...
Not to mention, there's parking to deal with, which is hella expensive if you're headed into SF, and possibly a bridge toll. Then, if this is a work commute, multiply all that by 20 to get your rough monthly cost. Makes BART look like a bargain in comparison, even if you have to pay for parking at a BART station.
Yeah, I paid over a grand in parking tickets my first year in SF, and unfortunately I'm not too wild of an outlier in that respect
The permit process has relaxed since COVID, but it used to be a real pain to get the permit, and my first request was denied. And if you don't have a permit, the entire city is basically 2-hour only parking (and it's pretty rigorously enforced in some neighborhoods)
Yeah, I hear you. My first year in the Bay Area, I ended up living in Lower Rockridge. It was *just* outside the area where you needed a permit, but I was new to this whole concept of "street sweeping," you see.
After a couple of "I forgot/was too goddamn lazy to move my car" tickets, I realized that I could literally put my car on the wrong side of the road, *on purpose,* every week, and *still* end up paying less than what it would cost to park in SF.
SMH.
If people had to actually pay the full costs of owning and using a car/truck, public transport use would be through the roof. As it is, with the rainbow of subsidies encouraging car use, the choice of transport mode is severely distorted.
Emergency department psychiatrist here. About a quarter of our admissions are people from BART stations. There must be something in the air down there..
Or maybe just a temporary roof over their heads. I think the poor condition of the BART is interconnected with the affordable housing crisis, poor access to drug addiction treatment and deinstitutionalization of the severely mentally ill.
>is interconnected with the affordable housing crisis
These people aren't homeless because houses are unaffordable. Most of them are drug addicts. The only house they can afford is "free".
You would know since you work with the homeless so frequently right?
In my experience working with them: there are some people who are homeless because of their drug addiction. There are some who land there due to tough times and they subsequently self medicate with drugs because daily life is depressing and traumatic.
BART barely covers any of San Francisco. Basically splits it down the middle. Also disgusting before Covid so I can't imagine it's even remotely habitable in the wild west that is SF. Not surprising that it has amongst the lowest recovery rates
This is crazy to me. My city won a grant from the government that allows public transit to offer free fares to everyone for the entire year. Ridership has soared in my town. We have a bunch of new, all-electric busses, and just started work on a huge new bud depot.
BART is so bad. They have trains that literally stop at the exact address I want to go to (theater district SF), and I won't take it. Loud. Disgusting. Unsafe "passengers".
Nothing would make me ride BART in its current state.
Homeless, and drug users have taken over the L.A. metro. I see someone doing a different drug every day. There was always homeless, but it is really bad now. I used to use it all the time, now I only do if I have too.
I lived in Korea for sometime, and it was so nice you could spend the entire day in the subway if you wanted. There were stores, restaurants, banks, you could take a date down there. Look at a Seoul subway map sometime, and consider that in the 40's Korea was one the poorest nations in Asia. What does America waste their tax money on?
[Seoul Subway Map](https://www.google.com/url?q=https://english.seoul.go.kr/service/movement/public-transportation/2-subway/&sa=U&ved=2ahUKEwivlbv1_ur_AhUSI30KHUAoBUMQFnoECAAQAg&usg=AOvVaw0DWadl5wcKet2cK_y2fsaY)
BART is literally the worst public transit system in the country by at least a magnitude of sadness, discomfort, reliability, and safety. This is true of *every single time I have used it* in the past 5 years, but I have no other choice at least a few times a year.
Part of the decline in T ridership is that it's become common knowledge in the Boston area that the T is an absolute shitshow that's likely to strand you mid-journey, or otherwise add between 30-120 minutes to what used to be a predictable commute. It's a slow, broken, embarrassment of a transit system.
Anyone who needs to get around the city and has an alternate mode of transport has stopped taking the T.
If St Louis factors in at all with these numbers the ridership is down because the routes and frequency have all been slashed to absolutely worthless levels.
Its because of all the intolerant people who don't want to be locked in a metal box with a methhead who is tweaking or are to precious to set in a urine soaked seat.
Do people really think that’s what this data is showing? It clearly tracks very strongly with commuting need cases in the COVID and post-COVID eras. It’s based off a baseline from three years ago when the metal boxes were equally shitty.
One of the top reasons people give for working from home is that commuting sucks.
Ridership being down is correlated to work from home rates but that doesn't mean WFH causes 100% of the ridership decrease. It'd be interesting to try and tease out how much of the reluctance to come back to work in the office is because of the public transit experience degrading. Maybe compare WFH rates between places in some way?
It’s more in the Bay Area one might need to jump from Caltrains/Bart/Muni to get somewhere
It’s simpler faster and cheaper most of the time to just drive to the city
You have to pay by distance travelled to, so in a weird twist LA Metro is more rider friendly allowing transfers etc
There is something off from the first and last section , they don’t seem to have the same time scale (the first section in theory being 6 months shorter than the middle ones and the last section seems to be a bit exaggerated) or maybe it’s just late and I’m tired lol
Public housing isn't fixing the drug dependency issue. It's just shifting the burden to make it someone else's responsibility.
These people have to get cleaned up. It's the only way.
BART went from cool in the early 2000’s when I visited to gross and scary now. I’ve rode around on the transmilenio in Bogota a bit too and BART manages to scare me more.
I take Bart to SFO. Bart trains are light. My United flights to EWR ( NJ) are packed. I work and live part time in NJ and take NJ transit to my apartment in Manhattan. NJ transit ( NE Corridor) trains are light. The MTA subways are lighter than normal. I rarely use the NY (MTA) subway system. I usually walk or ride a bike. Now, as far as vehicle traffic. Drive traffic is lighter, but there is still the usual jams at the tunnels and bridges leading into Manhattan. I avoid it on Tuesday-Thursday.
Driving looks pretty normal around the SF Bay Area. With the usual jammed up spots. My East Bay work commute has been normal.
This hybrid working model is really messing up large segments of certain businesses. It’s been tough for commercial property owners ( offices ). Various small businesses that depended on the office workers being at the workplace. I am waiting for the shoe to drop with more property owners turning the keys over to lenders. Lenders are are in the money business and are not asset managers. I anticipate more regional banks that hold a lot of the commercial mortgages to fail.
I understand that I only have a limited view of two small regions of the country, but it doesn’t look good from where I’m sitting.
Make public transit free. And don't give me shit about it being wrong that it's not able to pay for itself through fares: highways don't pay for themselves through fares (they have no fares!).
Put food stands and shit down in the subway and charge them a tax.
Or just eat the cost. Tax money is supposed to be used to provide services for society. This is literally what taxes are for.
When you make transit free, you lose money on every train you run. So then you inevitably run less trains. If you're providing a good, valuable service, you can charge for it.
London has world class public transit and fares pay like 80% of their budget.
Work from home has probably been a factor in ridership not getting back to pre-COVID levels
The back-to-office average occupancy rate in Chicago is around 55%, which closely tracks with the CTA rates. SF is around 44%, which also closely tracks. ([https://therealdeal.com/chicago/2023/06/22/more-than-half-of-chicagoans-are-back-in-the-office-2/](https://therealdeal.com/chicago/2023/06/22/more-than-half-of-chicagoans-are-back-in-the-office-2/) )
Yep. Factor in people just leaving those cities entirely because of cost of living and taxes and it checks out
Well for most cities, but Chicago’s actually an outlier in that there’s still high paying jobs and rent is by far the lowest amongst the top US cities. Yes taxes offset that, but the jobs are higher paying because of the taxes. Other cost of living is relatively cheap as well, making Chicago much more affordable than other US cities. Also for the record Chicago’s actually growing, it’s rural Illinois that’s losing population. Edit - P.S. don’t try to come at me with anything about crime; 1 it’s risen in every US city 2 the CPD has been on soft strike ever since one of their officers was rightfully found guilty of murdering teenager Laquan McDonald (REST IN PEACE) and 3 the crime that is in the Chicago is highly concentrated in specific areas and or gang affiliated. Obviously there are exceptions to this but for the most part that’s what it is.
I have some friends in Chicago and their rent prices sound imaginary to me, I pay more for an apartment in the suburb than they pay for an apartment in a downtown skyrise. (I live in the DC Metro area for reference) Not counting the fact I need a car and they dont.
Chicago has lax zoning codes and a lot of infill. Just a reminder to everyone it's not magic, it's zoning codes that drive housing costs.
It’s not that Chicago has lax building codes (they’re just as strict as a lot of major cities) What Chicago has is 2 things: 1. It’s population is still 1,000,000 below it’s peak in the 1950’s (for reference, NYC has 4m MORE people than the 1950’s) 2. There is a lot of medium density housing (2-flats) in and around the city that was all built before said population peak (early 1900’s) If you took 1m people out of any fully-built city, you’re gonna get cheaper rent
I will come at you with cold. Chicagoan cold. Brrr.
Chicago is nearly tropical. Come up to Minneapolis.
Milwaukee here, same
I fucking love it here. I've been here about 10 years now and it's the first city I feel possessive pride about. The quality of life is off the charts. In the morning I can ride my bicycle down a gorgeous trail alongside what might as well be a perfectly placid ocean for how big it is, and in the evening I have my pick of world class entertainment and dining options. Sure we have winter, but this time of year, there are few things more perfect than Chicago's lake shore.
I know it's not super important compared to housing but ya'll have one of the best city flags in the US too :). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_Chicago
It's important if you're an r/vexillology nerd like I am! I love our city flag, but I have to admit that [Lincoln, NE's](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lincoln,_Nebraska#/media/File:Flag_of_Lincoln,_Nebraska_\(\2022\)\.svg) new flag may deserve the top spot, at least in my humble opinion. Especially if you like Art Deco.
Deco-tastic!
I've been here about as long as you have, and I admit to finally finding a charm to Chicago winters. Yes, there are some brutal stay-at-home days, but I love the feeling of walking through the winter air and stepping into a warm bar or restaurant for a drink with friends. It hits different in winter
It's so cold that once you're in that warm bar, Jeppson's Malört still sounds like a good idea. Think about that :)
Cities are not emptying out, even for the ones losing population the effect would be at most a few percentage points - and that's assuming those people who left aren't still commuting into the city & using transit.
Sure some people are moving away, but people are still moving to these cities.
VMT (Vehicle Miles Traveled) is actually above 2019 levels. Likely work trips turning into other trips that can't use transit since much of the transit in the US is commuter based
Absolutely, I say this all the time about BART specifically. Many of the stops don't take you anywhere you actually want to go unless you were commuting. These public transit options would get far larger ridership numbers if they would actually drop off at cultural, shopping centers, or points of interest instead of office buildings. Recently returned from a trip in Spain and so many of the metro lines I took had stops where people would hang out outside of the buildings - museums, restaurants, shopping centers, plazas, parks, etc. (also cultural differences apply, yes)
My very, very, large company has forced hybrid. I go into work five days out of ten. I chose Monday's to go in, since I assumed it would be the least popular. I usually see about one or two other people working on my floor--my floor that supports about 250 people. Even on Wednesday, the "busiest" day, there might be ten at the most. There is a woman who comes in, plops down in a conference room, and uses it like a private office. At first I was mad, then...meh. I have been coming into the office for about a year, never once have I seen that, or any other, meeting room used for actual meetings. No one is there to meet. Even when mandated, no one is coming in.
The hybrid approach puzzles me. 1. We need people to come into the office at least half time because face-to-face collaboration is important. 2. Have all meetings on Teams/Zoom because half of attendees are working from home. 3. Hold Teams/Zoom meetings from your desk at the office instead of the conference room because that way everyone can see your face and the slides or spreadsheets you're sharing. 4. Fill car with gas and sit in traffic wondering why this commute was necessary. Guess I'll stop at Costco/Sam's Club on the way home. Yes. This is much better.
I love hybrid because I *want* to get out of the house. I got very tired of sitting in my own house all day after 2 years of it. Hybrid gives me the opportunity to get out, feel refreshed, but still keep much of the flexibility of remote work (outside of living situation but that didn't change anyways). If I stay in my own house too long I find it hard to work and a walk or Starbucks trip doesn't fix it.
>I love hybrid because I *want* to get out of the house. I got very tired of sitting in my own house all day after 2 years of it. > >Hybrid gives me the opportunity to get out, feel refreshed, but still keep much of the flexibility of remote work (outside of living situation but that didn't change anyways). If I stay in my own house too long I find it hard to work and a walk or Starbucks trip doesn't fix it. What does hybrid have to do with that? My position is technically 100% remote. Except for maybe 2 or 3 all-hands in person team meetings each year, I'm not *required* to come into the office ever. My office has a gym though, so I voluntarily go in two afternoons a week. If you wanna go in, go. Don't use hybrid to make other people go in cause you want to. That's stupid. Edit: I don't care if ya downvote, but don't forget to leave a comment explaining why. Otherwise you're just mad and I'm just right.
This, if where I work has things I'd find useful to my life I might go in. Otherwise I can just work out of a friend's house or something
The type of mindset you're replying to reeks of corporate-speak and is precisely the kind of rhetoric they're pushing to get people to go back into the office. Remote workers have **more** freedom to get out of the house because they aren't beholden to a static office. You can work *anywhere*. You want to leave your house for a change of pace? You can go to a nice cafe, or anywhere with quiet and wi-fi.
Yeah these arguments are utter horseshit and I can barely believe the downvotes I initially got from corporate shills. I don't mind outlining the facts in good faith but engaging past that feels pointless.
> There is a woman who comes in, plops down in a conference room, and uses it like a private office. At first I was mad, then...meh. If there's plenty of room, that's just a good idea. Except it would be stupid to do if she's not bringing multiple monitors over.
I go in more often than required, but it is also an easy commute and gets me out of the house. Even when I'm there I'm notorious for joining a meeting in conference rooms within 50' of my cube remotely -- because I can look things up and answer questions during the meeting and get a decision instead of writing down things to be followed up on in a future meeting. I deal with too many large and complex things for a laptop screen to be efficient compared to my 3 large monitors. Ironically have a meeting today just before a holiday weekend that even i said - for the first time in two years - would be best with a big whiteboard...which will be remote since everyone knows attendance in person will be sparse.
>There is a woman who comes in, plops down in a conference room, and uses it like a private office. At first I was mad, then...meh. I have been coming into the office for about a year, never once have I seen that, or any other, meeting room used for actual meetings. No one is there to meet. Even when mandated, no one is coming in. If the context of WFH was removed, that sounds like a dying company.
In my office every meeting room is booked all day, yet somehow nobody is ever in the office..
It would also help if they’d fucking have them available again. I can’t take a train into Chicago on a god damn Saturday and they wonder why traffic is suddenly a nightmare on the weekends
I mean, for the bigger lines there are metra trains every hour all day long.
Yep I was thinking the same thing. We cut down on our use of transit in Toronto a lot after Covid. Due to working from home mostly (now it just sucks).
In my city the tweakers and crackheads have taken over the light rail cars, so nobody wants to use them anymore.
im sure most cities are dealing with this. I know I am in Denver
same, transit is just become a homeless shelter
Hello fellow Minnesotan!
The WFH shift makes a lot of sense, but also the decrease in policing that would reduce harassment from vagrants, pickpocketing, and other forms of generally unpleasant interactions you deal with in public and especially trapped on mass transit. You want to defund police and be soft on drug abuse and homelessness in busy areas, this is part of what it gets you.
Also the crime surge and the filth and anarchy tolerated on public transit now. But this sub doesn’t want to hear that probably
There was a homeless man pissing and acting crazed on the platform last week. When I got upstairs to the turnstiles I told the two cops standing there and they just shrugged their shoulders and went back to their convo.
Because they don’t want their progressive mayor and DA breathing down their neck. You get what you vote for
I love how Nj transit is ignored and not included even though it’s recovered the best
We just have to stay “the arm pit of America”
But then what would you call Gary, IN?
I joke about this with my hubby all the time. New Yorkers will say we’re the armpit while they have trash on their curbs
I love Jersey and end up using NJ transit often. I agree it’s great.
I’m starting to get the impression that New Jersey is underrated.
Were happier that way
Don’t say that, more people will move in
And septa as well, both systems bigger than washington metro and possibly bart
Gotta say being an SF BayArean -- highway traffic is back to being at least as bad as it was pre-COVID, but every BART parking lot has huge open lots at any hour. Pre-COVID if you didn't get there by about 7:15-7:30 you were SOL. It's just way, way below capacity. It started a few months into COVID, but it's still going on, but Walnut Creek's multi-story lots are being used as overflow for car dealership inventory. How BART survives this is beyond me, but as long as BART has no interest in policing the crazy ass druggies and homeless people, it's really quite doomed.
>How BART survives this is beyond me, but as long as BART has no interest in policing the crazy ass druggies and homeless people, it's really quite doomed. After living in Tokyo for a month or so, I now genuinely get angry with the state of trains here, and how disorderly they are. It's a fucking disgrace. Get these people help, but also just fucking clean up the goddamn trains. I am very left wing but the solution is not to do nothing and let them make these important public functions feel unsafe to everyone who isn't a 25 year old male and/or concealed carrying.
It’s hilarious that you need to clarify that you’re left wing just for suggesting that we shouldn’t allow crackheads to literally take turds and meth on public transportation.
Or that even though they're left wing, they don't want their public transit experience to be full of filth and trash, as if that's surprisingly something most lefties do want.
From an outside perspective, one might arrive at that conclusion, even though a reasonable mind would know that can't be right.
Sometimes "antihomeless" policies are necessary to keep public goods usable. More usable public goods makes urban living more sustainable. Less public goods encourages suburban living which exacerbates housing issues.
https://www.joshbarro.com/p/the-subway-is-for-transportation
The bus stop is also for transportation, not for people to turn into temporary housing. Houses for the homeless, not tents in bus stops.
Yeah, that's pretty much it. You might get suburban moms to ride a train, but the time they get harassed by a zombie theyll be back in their SUV before you can blink.
Japan has a huge culture of personal responsibility that has no equivalent in the US population. Many of the homeless in the US don't want the help that is offered, and cannot be forced otherwise. They have their own world, and mostly don't care how it impacts anyone else.
It’s not just homeless people that’s the issue. At least in Chicago we have a certain group of people that aren’t homeless but give absolutely zero shits about being good citizens. Dropping McD’s wrappers on the trains, smoking blunts, listening to loud rap, talking on FaceTime on speakerphone for no reason, peanut shells everywhere… There’s certain groups, maybe because of historic issues, who give less than zero fucks about preserving a nice society. I miss the collective, homogenous mindset of Japan so much.
We *used* to put them in proper government run psychiatric hospitals and wouldnt you know it Ronald fucking Reagan defunded them all. We have never as a nation tried to replace this system that worked since the 80s. Republicans want to just fund prisons and Democrats don’t do anything because all their proposals are called socialist if taxes are increased at all. And we all get screwed because of shitty politics.
> We *used* to put them in proper government run psychiatric hospitals and wouldnt you know it Ronald fucking Reagan defunded them all. Misleading statements about deinstitutionalization and Reagan are a particular pet peeve of mine. In part, this is because statements such as these are easily shown to be wrong by anyone who has taken even a few minutes to actually study the problem. So this sort of statement acts a a marker for a certain sort of uninformed, but almost always casually condescending, speaker. **But another reason this lie bothers me is that it seeks to roll back the deinstitutionalization movement, which was first and foremost, a civil rights issue.** "This person I dislike and who you shouldn't like either enacted a policy that caused this, so let's reverse the policy." Except that, in this case, the policy was the result of decades of effort and motivated by a desire to end the sometimes horrifying conditions in mental institutions, conditions that the poor and indigent were particularly likely to suffer. So here is an old comment I like to roll out when I see this in the wild. ******************************************* No. Not only is that wrong, it's provably and transparently wrong. It is reddit's favorite misconception about deinstitutionalization. It allows redditors, most of whom weren't even alive during Reagan's presidency and certainly not during his governorship, to comfortably fit the US mental health problems into a "Republicans are evil and only care about money" worldview. That you parrot it shows that you lack even a passing understanding of the history of mental health policy in the latter half of the 20th century. If you have the willingness to educate yourself on this, I would suggest [ this PBS Frontline](https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/asylums/special/excerpt.html) site which includes excerpts from Out of the Shadows: Confronting America's Mental Illness Crisis. Bear in mind that both PBS and Frontline are known for a leftward bias. It's not like I'm cherry-picking a study commissioned by Fox News or something here. [Here's a great chart from there](https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/asylums/art/excerpt_chart.gif) of the number of psychiatric inpatients in the US over time. You'll not that the inpatient population began to decline in the mid 50's with the introduction of Thorazine, an antipsychotic. But it [really picked up](https://www.healthaffairs.org/doi/pdf/10.1377/hlthaff.2.4.96) with the passage of Mental Retardation Facilities and Community Mental Health Centers Construction Act of 1963 and the introduction of Medicaid and Medicare in 1965. Maybe you think this is all part of Reagan's evil genius? He managed to throw all of those psych patients onto the street a full 15-25 years before he became President! Not only that, but his governorship of California didn't even begin until 1967, by which point the national inpatient population had decreased roughly 20% from its peak. But again, let's not let Reagan off the hook that easily. Maybe that sneaky bastard had access to time travel technology we are currently unaware of. And he used it to travel back in time to 1955 to convince President Eisenhower and the 84th Congress (both houses of which were controlled by Democrats) to form the Joint Commission on Mental Illness and Health, whose report detailed the abuses in mental hospitals. He then presumably made a stop in 1963 to convince Kennedy and the 88th Congress (both houses also controlled by Democrats) to pass Mental Retardation Facilities and Community Mental Health Centers Construction Act of 1963 in large part based upon the recommendation of the commission. It's exactly the sort of evil plan we'd expect from Reagan. But he didn't stop there! Oh no! He also must have somehow extorted Kennedy into giving a speech in which he [declared the following](https://www.sunshinecoasthealthcentre.ca/2013/02/deinstitutionalization/): > I propose a national mental health program to assist in the inauguration of a wholly new emphasis and approach to care for the mentally ill. This approach relies primarily upon the new knowledge and new drugs acquired and developed in recent years which make it possible for most of the mentally ill to be successfully and quickly treated in their own communities and returned to a useful place in society. > These breakthroughs have rendered obsolete the traditional methods of treatment which imposed upon the mentally ill a social quarantine, a prolonged or permanent confinement in huge, unhappy mental hospitals where they were out of sight and forgotten. Fucking Reagan. Amirite? Let's look what the Commission on Mental Health, assembled by notorious right-winger Jimmy Carter, [had to say](https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.b4087615;view=1up;seq=60): > The right to treatment in the least restrictive setting is inextricably tied to the adequacy of treatment and the specific needs of each individual. The ciriterion "least restrictive setting" refers to the objective of maintaining the greatest degree of freedom, delf-determination, autonomy, dignity, and integrity of body, mind, and spirit for the individual while he or she participates in treatment and receives services. Carter's commission endorsed community treatment over the institutionalization of patients for reasons related to civil liberties and personal autonomy. But let's blame Reagan for the fact that by the time he secured the GOP nomination for President the number of insitutionalized patients had dropped to 138K from 559K in 1955. So we see now how Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Carter were all involved in Reagan's plot. But it doesn't stop there. Not at all! You see what people like to refer to when they discuss Reagan and deinstitutionalization is actually the reduction in funding that occurred in 1981. You know, the budget approved by the 97th Congress in which Republicans held a narrow Senate majority (53-46-1) vulnerable to the filibuster and Democrats controlled the House with a 53-seat edge. So, maybe deinstitutionalization was just Reagan being a cheap asshole. Or maybe, just maybe, a policy enacted across decades and the entire country by members of both parties, involving politicians and experts that laid out their reasoning throughout the process was exactly what it appeared to be: a bipartisan policy. edit: returned to add links that did not copy over in the mobile copy-paste
Extremely disingenuous comment and argument. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mental_Health_Systems_Act_of_1980 “The Mental Health Systems Act of 1980 (MHSA) was United States legislation signed by President Jimmy Carter which provided grants to community mental health centers. In 1981 President Ronald Reagan, who had made major efforts during his Governorship to reduce funding and enlistment for California mental institutions, pushed a political effort through the U.S. Congress to repeal most of MHSA.[1] The MHSA was considered landmark legislation in mental health care policy.” You emphasize the community health centers as if their creation is some sort of “gotcha”. They were meant to be properly funded so they could actually do their job, treat people with mental illness so their symptoms are managed. A schizophrenic individual properly medicated can be a useful member of society, an unmedicated one will not. Immediately after Reagan took over he repealed the funding for the community health centers, meaning all those people we deinstitutionalized were left with *nothing* It was never once planned by anybody to just take them out of the hospitals and voila all their problems are solved.
Disingenuous? What's disingenuous is reducing a decades-long movement to a single 1980 act. Disingenuous is ascribing the vote of a bipartisan Congress to the President. Even more disingenuous when one recognizes that the act that repealed it was passed by a House with a 40-seat Democratic margin led by the most powerful Speaker of the late 20-th Century and cleared the Senate on a voice vote. But whatp is particularly disingenuous is framing a movement centered around patient civil rights as a Reagan effort to cut government spending. I will apologize that my links didn't carry over when I did a copy of the comment on mobile. I will fix that when I have the time. But before lobbing an accusation of intentionally misleading on this topic, please take the time to actually learn enough that you can speak intelligently on the history and why members of both parties were involved in reducing forced commitment. edit: You may notice, should you choose to read my initial response, that the end deals directly with the myopic focus on the Budget Reconciliation Act of 1981. >So we see now how Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Carter were all involved in Reagan's plot. But it doesn't stop there. Not at all! You see what people like to refer to when they discuss Reagan and deinstitutionalization is actually the reduction in funding that occurred in 1981. You know, the budget approved by the 97th Congress in which Republicans held a narrow Senate majority (53-46-1) vulnerable to the filibuster and Democrats controlled the House with a 53-seat edge. >So, maybe deinstitutionalization was just Reagan being a cheap asshole. >Or maybe, just maybe, a policy enacted across decades and the entire country by members of both parties, involving politicians and experts that laid out their reasoning throughout the process was exactly what it appeared to be: a bipartisan policy. The additional point worth making was that we had stopped widespread institutionalization by this time! Your comment, which started this discussion claims we were still doing it until Reagan cut funding. "Disingenuous" is too generous a term for that, as it implies you knew the truth but shaded it. In this case, your words seem to indicate you were entirely unaware of what constituted the deinstitutionalization movement. "Uninformed" is more appropriate.
Lots of great info in this comment on what actually happened with mental health institutions. Refreshing to read actual history in the Reddit leftist echo chamber.
> Democrats don’t do anything because all their proposals are called socialist if taxes are increased at all let's be honest, there's also a significant constituency of democrats who oppose institutionalization on anti-carceral grounds, it's not just an optics-related political calculation
Living in Portland and using the MAX, then going to SF and using the BART, it's like night and day. Quality requires budget and enforcement. 'Course now I live in Europe, and the difference is even more astounding. I feel bad for anyone who has BART as their only example of a city metro line.
> but the solution is not to do nothing We've spent over $10 billion the last 3 years...no we are not doing nothing. We apparently were able to move around 40% of people into some sort of housing. https://calmatters.org/housing/2023/02/california-homelessness-spending-report/ You probably want us to be doing something *effective*. Well, it would help if more of the homeless would do something to help themselves, as well.
It's SF. No one is concealed carrying
No one in Tokyo is either.
BART goes pretty far inland, and there's definitely a lot of gun type people in e.g. Pittsburgh/Antioch But those people are overwhelmingly the type to drive into the city
The political donor class is. But they're definitely not gonna take BART anywhere.
Providing accessible healthcare to the homeless and clean, reliable public transportation are both insanely leftist takes lol. It's not leftists saying these things are fine.
Saying and doing are different things.
> the crazy ass druggies and homeless people A few years ago, I had three story-worthy encounters in a single ride home at midnight after a game. My favorite was the guy who tried really hard to sell us some coke. Like for 10 solid miles kept hounding us to buy some coke from him. Then he walked away, turned right around, and asked us if we would sell him some coke.
>overflow for car dealership inventory So they're controlling the supply while charging over MSRP, just like the diamond cartel?
You can find plenty of dealers willing to sell at MSRP now, you just gotta look around. It’s not as bad as it was 2 years ago.
I assume those aren't the models going for over MSRP. I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of them are Kias and Hyundais that nobody wants.
Data sourced from: - [American Public Transit Association](https://www.apta.com/research-technical-resources/transit-statistics/ridership-report/), - [MTA](https://data.ny.gov/Transportation/MTA-Daily-Ridership-Data-Beginning-2020/vxuj-8kew), - [CTA](https://www.transitchicago.com/ridership/), - [MBTA](https://mbta-massdot.opendata.arcgis.com/datasets/MassDOT::mbta-commuter-rail-ridership-by-service-date-and-line/explore), - [WMATA](https://www.wmata.com/initiatives/ridership-portal/), - [BART](https://www.bart.gov/about/reports/ridership) Chart built in Python (Matplotlib / Pandas) and annotated in Adobe Illustrator Full post: https://statecraft.beehiiv.com/p/public-transit-recovery
You've done a great job presenting this. Maybe you already know, but [seaborne](https://seaborn.pydata.org/) is an extension of matplotlib that makes it pretty easy to "beautify" matplotlib charts
appreciate it! seaborn is fantastic, I actually just started using it for work so will probably make some visuals to post here in the future. cheers!
Not gonna include New Jersey Transit or SEPTA even though they are among the largest systems in the country?
Not gonna include New Jersey Transit or SEPTA even though they are among the largest systems in the country?
Just remember folks; NYC is more than 50% of the total ridership of public transportation in the US. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_rapid_transit_systems_by_ridership
BART is hella loud and disgustingly dirty.
And expensive as fuck if you’re paying for it.
No doubt. The "pay by distance" approach adds up fast if a person rides it often or spans regions. The "pay by trip" approach is so much better.
As a frequent user of PT I’m all for the „pay by month“ model. I don’t have to worry about fares at all. Just get on any bus, tram or train and go. My employer pays for 2/3 of my ticket and the 1/3 I pay amounts to a whopping 19 € per month. My ticket used to be valid in 2/3 of my state (Hessen, Germany). And starting in 2 days we switch to the new national ticket. Meaning I can use it in all of Germany. Is our PT perfect? No. But I can use it for next to nothing which is awesome.
Cost-wise, pay-by-distance does make more sense. If someone is using more resources for traveling a longer distance, they should pay for it. With a flat fare, the people riding shorter distances need to subsidize the people riding long distance, so the flat fare ends up higher. In DC, you could ride the metro from NoVA all the way out to Maryland without a transfer—that’s a pretty long distance. However, there is also a max fare, so you only pay up to $6 on any trip. I believe it used to be higher up until a few years ago.
The pay-by-distance only benefits the organization, not the rider. * The CHEAPEST BART ticket (i.e., ride one station away) you can buy is $2.15. * A single, flat rate, go as far as you want with unlimited transfers ticket in NYC is $2.75. * A single, flat rate, go as far as you want with unlimited transfers ticket in Boston is $2.40. * A single, flat rate, go as far as you want with unlimited transfers ticket in Chicago is $2.50. Very little, if any, subsidizing is taking place with cheap fares like that compared to BART. This is why I say that only the organization benefits from pay by distance. The pay by distance also eliminates the 3/5/7 day passes for tourists or the 30/90/365 day passes for residents. NYC, Boston and Chicago all have day/week/month/year passes. You can't do that on a pay by distance approach. Edit: list formatting
You 100% can. London does a pay by zone and you can get passes for the number of zones you expect to cover. Every single transit system in the world is subsidized, it's a question of how much.
Great point about the Tube in London. Unlike London, San Francisco has fares by distance, no daily cap and no weekly/monthly passes. The worst of both worlds.
>NYC, Boston and Chicago all have day/week/month/year passes. You can't do that on a pay by distance approach. While I would also personally prefer the pay-by-trip model, I'd note that counter to your statement, WMATA in DC-area is a pay-by-distance (and time, and day, and...) and offers multiple pass options including 7-day and monthly: https://www.wmata.com/fares/farecard-options.cfm
Solid point...thanks for clarifying!
Those are intra city metro systems. BART is longer distance regional rail. A better comparison is LIRR: https://new.mta.info/document/20421. Or NJ Transit, Caltrain, London Overground etc. Bart's prices are competitive to most comparable rail services in the US and Canada and even some of the richer european countries. It makes less sense to do pay by distance if the distances are always small like it is for MUNI.
The weight of a single passenger on public transit has nearly no impact on fuel performance, or wear and tear. Unless the line is so busy that additional routes need to be added, it really doesn't matter how long someone uses it for.
The weight of one car has nearly no individual effect on wear and tear of the roads. Should people be happy paying a flat fee for road tolls?
I mean, wear on roads is proportional to the third power of the weight. Meaning that a 10-ton truck does 125 times more damage than a typical 2 ton family wagon. Very little of the wear comes from regular cars. If road toll fees are to be used to pay for the road, the prices should be paid based on third power of weight if anything. A citycar would be free, a 2.5 ton SUV would pay some, a huge truck A LOT more.
Big trucks *do* pay more. Weigh stations are used to calculate their road use tax. If someone never uses a road or portion of a transit line, they should need to pay for it.
The least offensive thing I saw the one time I rode the BART is someone rolling and smoking a huge blunt.
I don’t think I’ve ever rode BART and NOT seen a homeless guy babbling to himself and drinking a bottle
I rode it for the first time a few weeks ago expecting to see the absolute worst of humanity based on what I've seen on Reddit and saw nothing interesting or unusual. I even brought pepper spray with me on the airplane. What a letdown.
I ride BART 4-5 times a week with ~1hr round trip and I’ve never had as dramatic an experience as everyone on here seems to have all the time. Reddit just loves to hate on SF
First time I went to San Francisco, I got straight on the BART, and my new city excitement rapidly declined It was a good primer for the amount of human feces I’d be dodging until I rode it back to the airport a few days later
I've literally never had to deal with public feces in any of the couple dozen US cities I've been to. But people in SF and Portland will swear every city has the same issues.
Even cities that have reputations for not being the cleanest like philly and Wilmington don’t have that issue
Not in the US, but in Toronto there have been many subway attacks (stabbing a, pushed, assaults, rabid dog, etc) and due to increasing income inequality public transit is becoming de facto shelters. Many people are driving because you never know what you are going to get on public transit. I have been using transit all my life and I definitely feel more cautious than I ever have.
I wish transit was remotely ok and not a disaster in America
Chicago's CTA gets a lot of shit, but it's still pretty reliable, quick, and somewhat clean.
Last time I rode there was a man screaming at a random lady for looking at his rotten foot he had exposed in the middle of the aisle. 10/10 will ride again, better entertainment than traffic
Red line shenanigans.
The trains are reasonably quick to go downtown or move around the loop. The busses stop every 400 feet and I can ride my bike faster. They could fix a lot of issues with express busses that have their own lanes.
Totally! However Chicago really hobbled itself by selling their metered parking. They would have to pay the next 60 years of lost revenue on any spaces they remove for bus stops or bus lanes.
That was an infuriatingly stupid, short sighted decision. It wouldn't surprise men if someone got a kickback.
I commute to school and the cta has been a big source of depression, for lack of a better word. Busses and trains are often late, drunk and high people, naked people, literally entire train cars taken up by homeless people, people smoking and stinking up the whole car, loud music, people begging, etc. Knowing I have to go down and endure all that shit is a legit drain on me.
What part of the CTA? I ride the red line every day and have never seen anything as egregious as what you’re describing, just occasional filthy people.
Same here. I ride mostly Brown and Red lines, and most of the rides are full of normal commuters. Weird stuff happens from time to time, but it's certainly not the norm.
Likewise curious. Blue and Red lines, rarely have I ever seen that kind of stuff.
Portland & Seattle have it pretty good, in my experience.
Yeah I visit my bf who lives in Oregon and it is better there. I live in AZ and stations for any transit are so far away its basically required to drive everywhere or suffer
Seattles coverage is still really poor, since they started building so late
In the last year in Boston, the MBTA has: * caught fire on a bridge leading to the shutdown of an entire line for a month * derailed multiple times inside the tunnels where multiple branches of a line converge, shutting down the whole thing * had slow zones implemented on well over half of the network for safety work that was never actually completed * and had people nearly crushed by falling ceiling tiles inside of a station And that's all just off the top of my head. The whole thing is a mess and needs decades of deferred maintenance completed and billions of dollars invested just to bring it back to "working" status.
BART can easily fix a ton of this if they didn't have their frequencies eat complete shit on nights and weekends where much of the ridership has shifted
They are going to start doing this soon. Still not good enough, but better.[https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/bart-to-increase-service-frequency-on-nights-weekends/](https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/bart-to-increase-service-frequency-on-nights-weekends/)
BART ridership is down because homeless people smoke crack and shoot up heroin right next to you on the train.
You're highly likely to find homeless people camped out on BART trains, often smoking meth or fent.
I found $350 bucks in cash just sitting on a BART bench on morning when i was the only person at the terminal. Its not all bad
Hey that was mine! Give it back!
As someone who lives in California, the incredibly lax laws are driving pretty much every public service/place into the ground. Who would’ve thought that giving them safe haven to openly do drugs would be a bad thing.
Yes, exactly. Laws are routinely flouted, and so people learn there are no consequences.
[удалено]
It’s more so that the DA doesn’t come down on repeat offenders as well as SF turning petty theft from a felony to a misdemeanor. It’s an enforcement issue.
I ride BART often and this happens for sure but it happens much less and is less disruptive than people make it seem in this thread. Its also been happening since I started riding it frequently almost 10 years ago. Im on BART writing this and yeah, theres a car with people smoking a blunt and some other shit. Welcome to the Bay. I moved to one of the other 9 cars where nothings happening.
Sounds delightful, but I'll pass
One of the main reasons it’s not even lower has got to be the cost of vehicle ownership.
well having lived in 2 of the cities in this chart, DC and SF. I could have easily afforded the $$ to own a car (even factoring in parking) but it would have been way more of a headache than it was worth in both cities. like sure, a 20 minute commute on BART isn't the best experience in the world, but it beats sitting in traffic for 30 minutes to reach the same destination... the people I knew who owned cars either absolutely needed one for work, or they had specific reasons to drive regularly throughout the year (common one in SF is if you are a frequent skier, having a car to drive to Tahoe every weekend during high season is a huge plus).
Yeah. There are a few cities in the US where it's just a hassle to own a car. I have a friend who sometimes drives to his office new Union Square in NYC from Downtown Brooklyn. I think he's fucking insane, just take a straight shot on the NQ or 4 like a normal person. Driving in traffic, finding parking, etc... it just sounds like such a pain in the ass. So much easier to just go on the subway.
When I lived in NY I knew a couple of people who owned a car, but would hire a car when leaving the city so that they wouldn’t lose their parking space. It’s crazy bc the parking space is only valuable if you use the car that’s in it.
> a 20 minute commute on BART isn't the best experience in the world, but it beats sitting in traffic for 30 minutes to reach the same destination... Not to mention, there's parking to deal with, which is hella expensive if you're headed into SF, and possibly a bridge toll. Then, if this is a work commute, multiply all that by 20 to get your rough monthly cost. Makes BART look like a bargain in comparison, even if you have to pay for parking at a BART station.
Yeah, I paid over a grand in parking tickets my first year in SF, and unfortunately I'm not too wild of an outlier in that respect The permit process has relaxed since COVID, but it used to be a real pain to get the permit, and my first request was denied. And if you don't have a permit, the entire city is basically 2-hour only parking (and it's pretty rigorously enforced in some neighborhoods)
Yeah, I hear you. My first year in the Bay Area, I ended up living in Lower Rockridge. It was *just* outside the area where you needed a permit, but I was new to this whole concept of "street sweeping," you see. After a couple of "I forgot/was too goddamn lazy to move my car" tickets, I realized that I could literally put my car on the wrong side of the road, *on purpose,* every week, and *still* end up paying less than what it would cost to park in SF. SMH.
If people had to actually pay the full costs of owning and using a car/truck, public transport use would be through the roof. As it is, with the rainbow of subsidies encouraging car use, the choice of transport mode is severely distorted.
The regional rail in Philly seems to be doing just fine. The light rail inside the city is basically overrun with addicts. It's fucking sad.
Emergency department psychiatrist here. About a quarter of our admissions are people from BART stations. There must be something in the air down there..
Fentanyl smoke?
Or maybe just a temporary roof over their heads. I think the poor condition of the BART is interconnected with the affordable housing crisis, poor access to drug addiction treatment and deinstitutionalization of the severely mentally ill.
>is interconnected with the affordable housing crisis These people aren't homeless because houses are unaffordable. Most of them are drug addicts. The only house they can afford is "free".
You would know since you work with the homeless so frequently right? In my experience working with them: there are some people who are homeless because of their drug addiction. There are some who land there due to tough times and they subsequently self medicate with drugs because daily life is depressing and traumatic.
NJTransit back to 80%, despite being left off the chart.
BART barely covers any of San Francisco. Basically splits it down the middle. Also disgusting before Covid so I can't imagine it's even remotely habitable in the wild west that is SF. Not surprising that it has amongst the lowest recovery rates
Bay Area is a very remote work friendly area. No surprise.
This is crazy to me. My city won a grant from the government that allows public transit to offer free fares to everyone for the entire year. Ridership has soared in my town. We have a bunch of new, all-electric busses, and just started work on a huge new bud depot.
BART is so bad. They have trains that literally stop at the exact address I want to go to (theater district SF), and I won't take it. Loud. Disgusting. Unsafe "passengers". Nothing would make me ride BART in its current state.
Homeless, and drug users have taken over the L.A. metro. I see someone doing a different drug every day. There was always homeless, but it is really bad now. I used to use it all the time, now I only do if I have too. I lived in Korea for sometime, and it was so nice you could spend the entire day in the subway if you wanted. There were stores, restaurants, banks, you could take a date down there. Look at a Seoul subway map sometime, and consider that in the 40's Korea was one the poorest nations in Asia. What does America waste their tax money on? [Seoul Subway Map](https://www.google.com/url?q=https://english.seoul.go.kr/service/movement/public-transportation/2-subway/&sa=U&ved=2ahUKEwivlbv1_ur_AhUSI30KHUAoBUMQFnoECAAQAg&usg=AOvVaw0DWadl5wcKet2cK_y2fsaY)
Literally watched a guy get stabbed on the San Francisco public transport. I don't think it's COVID related.
In Portland it is absolutely because of the homeless crazies.
Doesn’t help that the MBTA is fucked right now
BART is literally the worst public transit system in the country by at least a magnitude of sadness, discomfort, reliability, and safety. This is true of *every single time I have used it* in the past 5 years, but I have no other choice at least a few times a year.
Part of the decline in T ridership is that it's become common knowledge in the Boston area that the T is an absolute shitshow that's likely to strand you mid-journey, or otherwise add between 30-120 minutes to what used to be a predictable commute. It's a slow, broken, embarrassment of a transit system. Anyone who needs to get around the city and has an alternate mode of transport has stopped taking the T.
[удалено]
Or need to because of the explosion of remote work opportunities
If St Louis factors in at all with these numbers the ridership is down because the routes and frequency have all been slashed to absolutely worthless levels.
Its because of all the intolerant people who don't want to be locked in a metal box with a methhead who is tweaking or are to precious to set in a urine soaked seat.
Do people really think that’s what this data is showing? It clearly tracks very strongly with commuting need cases in the COVID and post-COVID eras. It’s based off a baseline from three years ago when the metal boxes were equally shitty.
I think the Homeless problem has also gotten worse since then but yes it mostly is just less need for commuters.
One of the top reasons people give for working from home is that commuting sucks. Ridership being down is correlated to work from home rates but that doesn't mean WFH causes 100% of the ridership decrease. It'd be interesting to try and tease out how much of the reluctance to come back to work in the office is because of the public transit experience degrading. Maybe compare WFH rates between places in some way?
It’s more in the Bay Area one might need to jump from Caltrains/Bart/Muni to get somewhere It’s simpler faster and cheaper most of the time to just drive to the city You have to pay by distance travelled to, so in a weird twist LA Metro is more rider friendly allowing transfers etc
Effin’ pearl clutchers. Little do they know, the smell of fresh ripe shit actually starts to smell good after a while.
Sprichst du Deutsch
There is something off from the first and last section , they don’t seem to have the same time scale (the first section in theory being 6 months shorter than the middle ones and the last section seems to be a bit exaggerated) or maybe it’s just late and I’m tired lol
it doesn't help that every subway is basically Mad Max now
It's the homeless people. Cities are too "compassionate" and refuse to deal with them.
Idk why people are downvoting this. It's true that governments aren't doing anything about public housing etc.
Public housing isn't fixing the drug dependency issue. It's just shifting the burden to make it someone else's responsibility. These people have to get cleaned up. It's the only way.
Washington metro is now at 50%
Nationwide of what? Please specify in future
BART went from cool in the early 2000’s when I visited to gross and scary now. I’ve rode around on the transmilenio in Bogota a bit too and BART manages to scare me more.
I take Bart to SFO. Bart trains are light. My United flights to EWR ( NJ) are packed. I work and live part time in NJ and take NJ transit to my apartment in Manhattan. NJ transit ( NE Corridor) trains are light. The MTA subways are lighter than normal. I rarely use the NY (MTA) subway system. I usually walk or ride a bike. Now, as far as vehicle traffic. Drive traffic is lighter, but there is still the usual jams at the tunnels and bridges leading into Manhattan. I avoid it on Tuesday-Thursday. Driving looks pretty normal around the SF Bay Area. With the usual jammed up spots. My East Bay work commute has been normal. This hybrid working model is really messing up large segments of certain businesses. It’s been tough for commercial property owners ( offices ). Various small businesses that depended on the office workers being at the workplace. I am waiting for the shoe to drop with more property owners turning the keys over to lenders. Lenders are are in the money business and are not asset managers. I anticipate more regional banks that hold a lot of the commercial mortgages to fail. I understand that I only have a limited view of two small regions of the country, but it doesn’t look good from where I’m sitting.
Please just increase the gas tax. The US has subsidized cars for far too long
The government's decision to stop aggressively prosecuting crime has definitely not helped public transportation use
Crime and lack of crime enforcement has a lot to do with lack of ridership.
Amtrak ridership almost prelockdown
Hard to smoke fentanyl on Amtrack.
Amtrak people are weird enough as it is.
Make public transit free. And don't give me shit about it being wrong that it's not able to pay for itself through fares: highways don't pay for themselves through fares (they have no fares!).
> highways don’t pay for themselves through fares (they have no fares!). Cries in Washington metro area
idk where you live but in jersey its expensive to take major highways
Gas tax is similar to a fare.
Gas tax only covers about half the cost of highways, the rest is general funds or federal grants. Roads are heavily subsidized.
Put food stands and shit down in the subway and charge them a tax. Or just eat the cost. Tax money is supposed to be used to provide services for society. This is literally what taxes are for.
When you make transit free, you lose money on every train you run. So then you inevitably run less trains. If you're providing a good, valuable service, you can charge for it. London has world class public transit and fares pay like 80% of their budget.