This is the Quality Contributions Roundup. It showcases interesting and well-written comments and posts from the period covered. If you want to get an idea of what this community is about or how we want you to participate, look no further (except the rules maybe--those might be important too).
As a reminder, you can nominate Quality Contributions by hitting the report button and selecting the "Actually A Quality Contribution!" option. Additionally, links to all of the roundups can be found in the wiki of /r/theThread which can be found here. For a list of other great community content, see here.
These are mostly chronologically ordered, but I have in some cases tried to cluster comments by topic so if there is something you are looking for (or trying to avoid), this might be helpful.
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Notes -
The pro-car post was not that good and deserving of quality contributions IMO. Really shows the biases of this place. Insane pro car legislature was a thing here long before cities became the dismal wrecks that they are today. I think honestly people also just need to grow a bit of a spine. I live in Baltimore where we have a limited public transit system that I sometimes use (I prefer to bike). There's always an unsavory character using it at the same time as me, but absolutely nothing has ever happened. Maybe this would not be true if I were an attractive young woman, but I doubt there are many users here who fit that description either. People need to learn to be a bit more inconvenienced and uncomfortable. Biking is always a suitable alternative in major eastern urban areas (Boston, NYC, and DC all have good bike infrastructure) if you really don't want to deal with public transit. I get that cars are convenient and make people feel powerful and in control, but they impose such a big negative externality on the rest of us non-car users (pollution, taxes, use of public space, not to mention the very large amount of deaths caused by accidents, far higher than that caused by urban villainy on public transit) that I have a lot of sympathy for NYC trying to price car use correctly. I get that this is not feasible in Texas or in most parts of California, but posters here are so car-brained that they can't get on board with the government trying to address the problem in place where it is actually feasible to fix it. Guys, the subway is not very dangerous during work hours, and the problems with it (congestion, speed) can all be fixed with investment.
It is not a problem and I'll vote whichever way prevents the government from ""fixing"" it.
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The problem, at least in major cities, is no that the public finds public transport “inconvenient”. They’re quite frankly unsafe for normal people to use. Full of homeless people, gang members, insane people, it’s just not something that is going to catch on as long as getting accosted on a train is a reasonable possibility. Europe has a wonderful train system that seems pretty easy to use. But tge biggest draw is that day or night, a person can get on a train and be sure that it will be safe and sanitary. And because it isn’t full of homeless and criminals, people don’t think about the trains as a pipe of such people coming to their area. In the USA, trains are limited to parts of the city that nobody wants to go to — in large part because property owns do not want to import those problems. In my area, it is confined only to a small portion of the city center. You can’t ride it to work because it doesn’t go to the county where most office workers live — and they absolutely do not want it to come anywhere near them.
Until subways and trains are as safe in America as they are in Europe or Korea, Theres just no there, there. You can’t build more because people paid a handsome some to get away from criminals, drug users, and homeless people and have no intention of allowing trains near them because they don’t want a pipeline for such people to come into their neighborhood. Car centric neighborhoods are in part a defense strategy — one way to keep criminals out is to require a car to get there. Poor people generally don’t have cars, homeless and druggies definitely don’t, so you can keep your area low crime be requiring a car for access.
I am pro car, and think the anti-car people are generally correct about the safety issue not being as big a deal. But I think they are utterly stupid about the convenience part. Most of my car rides to see friends/family are 20-60 minutes. With public transit, assuming 0 minutes wasted at transfers, those balloon to 60-200 minutes, often with a required taxi at at least one end of the trip. This is not merely about underfunding or city design, its about the fact that people don't live in segregated ethnic communities in America. As much as you might love it, your mom doesn't live 3 blocks away, and even if magically she did, your wife's mom almost certainly does not. Mass transit is exactly that, MASS. It can't operate niche routes such as "MaiqTheTrue's house to his sister's house", but you need to make that trip 10, 15, 20 times a year. And that is just one of many.
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Define "major." Living in the NC Triangle, I wouldn't be hanging around the main bus depots for safety/annoyance reasons, but primarily the bus system is kinda useless if you're not going on fairly limited routes or have hours to waste.
When I first moved here from a city with much better transit (SLC, also vastly more bikeable), I tried mapping it out- I could almost walk my commute as fast as the bus system was going to take.
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I want to chime in and say that, while you're not wrong for some people, that's not always the problem. For me in my 20s, living in a midsize American city, I felt plenty safe riding public transit. The real problem was it was just so damn inconvenient. Riding a bike was faster, especially if i needed a transfer. And of course it totally shut down at night.
But i do appreciate how bad the safety is in some places.
One of my least favorite memories from when I lived in Seattle was any time there were big events like hempfest and pride, bus transit slowed to a crawl. I worked close to the Space Needle, and lived near 26th and Madison, and the bus already took a slow 30 minutes or so on a good day. On days like when hempfest was going on it was literally faster to walk over Capitol Hill to get home, by a huge margin. Yet even on these days, cars were clearly traveling waaaay faster than the bus.
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What would you prefer to use all that precious public space for instead? Build public housing? Grow crops? Build public parks? Bike-only paths?
I also wonder just what % of lethal car accidents occur within city limits.
Bike lanes, denser cities, green space. If you could narrow most road ways to 1-2 lanes we could have bike lanes almost everywhere, larger sidewalks with more trees/green space. Parking lots could be turned into public parks or even businesses.
In 2022 there were 45 fatalities and 16k accidents in Baltimore city. That year there were 350 total traffic deaths in the whole state of Maryland. So 13%. The city makes up 8% of the total population of Maryland so the city is actually relatively more dangerous than the rest of the state for traffic deaths.
Isn't Baltimore also much more black than Maryland as a whole? Demographically they have many more traffic fatalities, so that might be the cause of all or most of your stat.
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Fair enough. But this raises a couple of issues.
Green space and sidewalks would swiftly get taken over by fentanyl junkies, mentally ill homeless and other bums. What would you prefer to be done about it then?
Should the new bike lanes/paths be designated as bikes-only? If yes, should bike use be restricted on other roads correspondingly? This is a rather thorny question.
Let me be clear re:crime. We need to crack down on anti-social behavior here in America. If new green spaces are immediately colonized by junkies and other bums then that indicates a problem with society that runs much deeper than public transit. Cars don't really solve this problem, they just confine it to the walkable areas of the city, which are usually also historically the most pleasant.
My vision is for protected bike lanes of 1/4 lane width on the side of most streets. There are so issues with this: mainly it presents a hazard when cars are turning right and cutting off bikes, but it seems better than the alternatives (median bike lane has the problem with both turns, single use trails don't make use of existing infrastructure).
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Why? The goal should be for public transport to be convenient, cheap and comfortable. Americans seem to be disillusioned about ever having non-shithole city centres. Is it seriously that hard to get rid of the problem people? Compared to redesigning a century of infrastructure and culture so as to force people to suffer inconveniences and discomfort? Grow a spine!
I remember being quite surprised by San Francisco, Vancouver and LA, how there were just loads of homeless occupying prominent places and shooting up in public. It's not normal outside North America. You're not supposed to see drug use in public.
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People need to get places outside of working hours.
I don't even disagree with what you are saying overall. But "you shouldn't be worried about public transit safety, the subway is not very dangerous from 9 AM to 5 PM" is not a very compelling rebuttal to someone who is concerned.
I was thinking more of 7:30-6:30 pm which is what the original post about congestion pricing in NYC was discussing. I don't doubt that people need to get other places during other times of day, but congestion pricing wouldn't affect this: it primarily would affect commuters during these hours which I would argue are very safe times of day for public transit use.
That doesn't solve the problem. For transit to work the way the anti car people want, it has to replace, not supplement. You not only need to get to work on time, without being stabbed, you need to be able to get your groceries home AFTER you got your kids home from school and put them to bed. You need to be able to visit grandma at noon on a Saturday. In practice, this only works not only if transport is safe, reliable, and frequent, it also needs to be cheap and ubiquitous. It is never cheap now, and it isn't sufficiently automated to be ubiquitous. I mean, you could get around the last part by making laws so only people with kin in a neighborhood can move to that neighborhood, whence removing most people's need to go from place to place in cars, but that will not be very popular with anyone, even the anti car people.
I think the anti-car people need to get realistic. I'm in favor of better transit options, bike lanes, zoning reform, congestion pricing, and all the other things the armchair urbanists like, but cars aren't going anywhere. To tie in to my recent Pittsburgh installment, all of the recent affordable housing developments that are obstensibly based in the New Urbanist style have made modifications that "recognize the relity of the automobile". When Allequippa Terrace converted to mixed-income in the early 2000s and pushed out the riff raff around 2010, they became a somewhat popular option for Pitt students, despite effectively being a housing project. One of the biggest reasons behind this is because it's one of the few places near campus where it's easy to have a car, and Pitt's campus is in the middle of the third-largest commercial district in the state, and is only behind Downtown as the neighborhood with the best transit connections in the city.
The especially amazing thing about this is that most students who live at Oak Hill walk to campus, which walk is much longer and sketchier than the walk from the student ghetto in Oakland itself. So people are nearly doubling the length of their daily walk, and putting themself outside the radius of walkable amenities, just to keep a car. To be fair, this isn't the only reason, since Oak Hill is also newer and nicer and quieter than anything in South Oakland, and still comparably priced, so that factors into it, but when people are asking on Reddit about whether it's safe to essentially live in the projects, one thing often brought up is that dealing with a small amount of sketchiness is worth it if only because you never have to worry about parking.
It would have been really easy for these dedicated urbanist types to talk about how they could fit more units in and give the neighborhood a more cohesive character if they just eliminated off-street parking or relegated it to areas where there was literally no better use of the land, and maybe charged people an appropriate fee for it, but even in a low-income area that would be a hard sell. You'd certainly get less interest from the working class people who need cars to get to work, and the development wouldn't look nearly as attractive to people willing to pay market rate. It would turn into another case of forcing social experiments on poor people who are only living there because they don't have a choice. Part of ending concentrated poverty is recognizing that people with options expect certain amenities and are willing to pay for them, and are willing to move elsewhere if you aren't offering them. Getting people who aren't poor to live in a former housing project that's not in a trendy area was going to be a hard sell to begin with. In a trendy neighborhood people might be willing to jump through hoops for the privilege of living there, but not in the Hill District.
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And then there are some of us who have been violently assaulted in front of our own homes by precisely these same unsavory characters.
Not that I'm saying that having or not having experienced this or that personal anecdote gives one special epistemic privilege when it comes to policymaking. I'm just saying that violent crime is in fact a real thing that people can have legitimate concerns about.
Perhaps you need to learn to be a bit more inconvenienced and uncomfortable?
I bike to and from work and the gym on busy streets. It's uncomfortable but I still do it because it's my best option. I have incidents with drivers cutting me off/parking in the bike lane almost every day. It is inconvenient and feels unsafe. Even if every driver was perfect and traffic was reduced 10x it would still be inconvenient and uncomfortable because I have to bike uphill at least in one direction. If the bike/public transit infrastructure was better there would be less cars on the road and the quality of life for everyone, including drivers, would improve.
I agree violent crime is real and a serious problem. Classmates have been mugged multiple times, and one was pistol-whipped outside her house. There are multiple homicides every week in the city. Yet most if not all of this independent of public transportation. Homicides aren't committed on buses or on the one light rail line in the city, they're local or in hit and runs in cars or motorized dirt bikes. Sure, some of these people MAY use public transit to get around and commit their crimes, but the majority of the unsavory people that repel people from public transit aren't actually dangerous.
I like reading car arguments, so I appreciate your input.
I live in a rural area and don't really have any public transport options. Cars are a must in rural areas. I've gotten in arguments with former college peers who were arguing that cars could be eliminated even in the countryside, which was a really bad take to me. However, I have to wonder. When I go grocery shopping, I typically have multiple pretty heavy bags. How do you handle grocery shopping on bikes, public transport, or on foot? Do you just take a ton of trips? What about if you were transporting something else heavy? I wanted to take a portable grill up to someone else's house to grill this weekend, but that kind of thing is only "portable" if you have a car, really.
Not directly the same, but I live with only a motorcycle for transportation and US public are generally surprised how much I can pack on. I shop at Costco and bring home about $300 worth of groceries. I've moved lumber for fencing. Hills would be killer on a pedal bike but the capacity I wouldn't imagine to be a problem.
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I walk to the grocery store and go about once a week. It's about 0.5 miles each way, so it's a bit of a workout on the way back.
If I really need to transport something heavy I'll Zipcar or mooch off of a friend. This kind of stuff is made much more practical by a car. I'm not a car abolitionist, they have their place and their uses and are obviously essential in rural areas. What I'm frustrated by is the desire for many to make the car into the one size fits all transportation model. The actual costs of car use should be internalized by the user: things like congestion pricing seem like a great way to do that. Congestion pricing is not going to affect the ease of me bringing my grill to a friends house, but it might make me change my commuting behavior.
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I think the issue is rather that the people usually targeted by armed and/or violent criminals are the ones using public transport who get attacked after getting off the vehicle and walking, because they make convenient targets.
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No.
I disgree with you on veganism, but I don't go around calling you "vegan-brained."
I was giving reasons why people feel the way they do about cars, and instead of engaging with them seriously, you're name-calling. You can make the argument that cars are net-bad, but that would be a serious discussion that engages seriously with the value differences (for instance, the core of my post -- that people are more concerned about intentional than accidental violence) between you and the "car-brained" rather than calling them names. There's a serious balance to be struck, and I'm sympathetic to the needs of people who would prefer not to drive a car particularly in cities, but there are real, serious concerns people have about the security of public transit. Your post amounts to calling car drivers big babies whose concerns are entirely in their head, and totally disregarding their values and interests, and that strikes me as quite similar to the ad hominem attacks you were upset about earlier. Just because people disagree with you doesn't make them biased -- or wrong. (Doesn't make them right, either.)
I'm actually robustly pro-public-transit, and even sympathetic to the aims of ultimately reducing cars in cities. I just believe that the safety concerns about our cities are more real than you do -- we have a factual and values disagreement, and we should be able to discuss them reasonably without one side accusing the other of being insane, or stupid. I'm not pro-car -- I'm anti-crime, and pro-autonomy. Perhaps I didn't communicate that effectively enough.
On the topic of this being an AAQC -- I would agree this wasn't really one of my better posts; I actually think my response to you was a much better reflection of my values than this one, though I believe the best motte posts are those that offer a take that reveals what a worldview looks like from the inside, as I believe this one does. It's definitely true that my AAQCs have leaned towards the moments where I'm more partisan, or firmly opinionated, and less where I'm diplomatic or synthesizing, which is a fair critique of the AAQC system.
I suspect the nomination pattern happens the way it does for for much the same reasons as the fact that Scott Alexander's fame is largely built on the foundation laid by posts he tagged "things I will regret writing." It may also, in some deep way, be related to the problem of "glazing" in LLMs. Synthesis is all well and good, but sometimes people just want a clearly stated, totally unapologetic position statement.
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I apologize for the name calling. It wasn't my intention, although it seems obvious when I read my post again that it's there. I'm often frustrated with people who are anti-public transit and/or biking (which you are not) for a failure to acknowledge the externalities they impose on non-car users, and rather prefer to think of the issue of one of individual choice rather than something that affects the whole community (my rights vs. what would be best for the community as a whole).
Let me try to engage more with what you said about why people don't want to use public transit. I think the disagreement centers on to what extent public transit is actually dangerous as compared to driving in a car versus merely uncomfortable. In 2024 there were 202 homicides in Baltimore (these statistics have been on a downward trend since 2020 which is also an encouraging sign). One of those occurred on public transit (a murder on a bus on Eutaw st.- not a terrible neighborhood in December of 2024). Compare this to 45 fatal traffic accidents in Baltimore in 2022. How does this stack up proportionally to use?
The 2024 ridership numbers for the MTA bus system were around 217,700 per weekday. Car ownership in the city averages around 1 per household, or one per every two people. The city had a population of 565,000 in 2024, so that's around 280,000 cars in the city proper. Let's assume all those cars are being used to drive to work/school every day. Of course we also have people coming in and out of baltimore/howard counties, but the MTA bus system goes there as well, so I feel like this is still a reasonable comparison. Our working numbers are 217,700 public transit trips and 280,000 car trips per day in the city. This means that driving in a car is around 43 times more likely to result in death than using public transit.
Of course there are other risks from public transit like mugging or assault that I would also characterize as violent crime. In the last year there were 33,507 crimes committed within the city of Baltimore. About 9k of these are characterized as violent crimes. Assuming all of these were aided and abetted or occurred on public transit, that's still only half the total crashes (16k) reported in the city in 2022.
The numbers just don't add up. Driving isn't a whole lot safer than even the absolute worst case scenarios for public transit in one of the worst cities in America for violent crime. Part of it may be that we don't have a super robust public transit system (although ridership is quite high on the bus system) and so people don't use public transit to commit crimes the way they might in NYC. I'd rather argue that people are not actually responding to the actual risks, but rather the perceived risks from frequent encounters with unsavory individuals, and the fear of a lack of control or agency when it comes to being a rider in a dangerous public transit situation (despite the fact that you can't really control other dangerous drivers either).
I'm all for cleaning up the streets and the bus system, but I think without massive levels of law enforcement crackdown that even the most conservative people in this country will not be able to stomach, the types of people that give a negative perception to public transit systems are always going to be there, despite most of these people being harmless. Violent crime is an issue at a 45 degree angle to public transit. Yes doing a Bekele and locking up or killing all the criminals will improve the perception of the bus/train system in most American cities, it won't stop poor, unsavory and less functional (but not criminal) people from using buses and trains, which is the fundamental issue I think most people actually have with public transit.
I hope this is a better critique that doesn't rely on name calling as much.
Four of the last seven times I tried to ride a city bus, a fight broke out.
Are you going to try and tell me that my distaste for riding a bus is unrelated to that violent crime?
It depends on the city. I agree that some transit authorities have problems with lawlessness and crime. But just because some transit systems have crime doesn't mean that all do. I've been riding Pittsburgh's transit system off and on all my life, and I never once experienced anything remotely untoward, even in bad areas. I've never heard anyone, including the most insulated suburbanites, express any apprehension whatsoever about using transit. And this is a system where anyone boarding an outbound bus or train pays upon egress, and that has a free zone, meaning bums can board pretty much without restriction, and we still don't have problems. I've used transit systems in New York, DC, and Chicago various times in the last 25 years, and my experience was no different, though it's been a while so this may have changed. I know that complaints about transit in New York are a relatively recent problem, and circa 2010 the idea that subways were dangerous was seen as a relic of the '80s.
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Just because something is wrong (or unproven, or partisan…) doesn’t mean it’s not Quality™.
I say this despite thinking “we can’t solve problem X until we’ve solved (harder) problem Y” converges on one of the most infamous pastimes of policy debate. Those college students probably wouldn’t win any points if their problem Y was right-coded, but there is a structure against which they may be graded.
IIRC college debate is structured such that it is possible to achieve reasonable amounts of success making dumb-in-not-progressive-coded-ways arguments(which might be right wing or might be utterly schizophrenic; I’ve heard of teams being reasonably successful by doing this with literal timecube), albeit usually not national championships. High school policy debate is cleanly divided into woke cesspits and a smaller and worse funded conservative Christian version but all of them are rolled into the same pool with different sections at the college level. M
There’s virtually no useful discussion going on in any of it but they do the same thing with everything, not just woke. There’s plenty of Rand, Mao, Gene Ray, uncle Ted, Baudrillard, Nietzsche and Heidegger, Ancient Aliens, uncritical Russian propaganda, etc shitting up the commons there too.
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