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.
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 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.
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