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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 27, 2023

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The problem I have is that my supposed brothers-in-arms on the transit crusade seem to think it's optional that transit actually be safe, clean, and enjoyable; this has been hashed and rehashed before so to put it simply my views are that if you want transit to work, you cannot tolerate anti-social behaviour on it.

I've noticed this attitude too. One of the usual responses always seems to be to point out that, statistically, cars kill more people, so like you should just take transit anyway. This ignores aspects like the feeling of control you have in a car and that humans aren't perfectly rational who abide by statistics all the time (otherwise we would all have been signed up for cryonics by now), but also, pointing out something is worse doesn't make that thing better (whataboutism).

And it's just frustrating to me, because one of the reasons why transit is so much better in, say, Japan, is that anti-social behavior isn't tolerated on it. The worst they have is women being groped when people are packed tightly together, and that only happens because other people can't see who's doing the groping. Meanwhile in North America you have, well, murders taking place on it (despite all the "eyes on the street"). I've never really seen urbanists acknowledge this point.

Edit: It looks like Not Just Bikes acknowledges crime enough to the point where he acknowledges that he deliberately doesn't acknowledge it. Oh well.

The assailant was a homeless man who was out on probation for multiple charges, including most recently a sexual assault two weeks prior, and had previously been issued weapons bans and ordered to take mental health counselling.

This seems to be a common theme. All the police bodycam footage I watch nowadays has descriptions like "...the suspect had 5 warrants out for him after being released on $500 bond". All that has to be done here is to simply keep the guy in jail until he's convicted (or exonerated; this country abides by innocent until proven guilty), but there's been a wave of soft-on-crime policies that make people think it's too harsh to keep the guy incarcerated. Of course, prisons being near max capacity hasn't helped matters either.

Meanwhile in North America you have, well, murders taking place on it (despite all the "eyes on the street"). I've never really seen urbanists acknowledge this point.

I mean, you could just read any of the countless articles in publications like City Journal and papers put out by the Manhattan Institute to see examples of right-wing urbanists that are obsessed with restoring law and order to cities.

I applaud them all the same and wish the best with their efforts to restore law and order to cities. Unfortunately, urbanism - while ostensibly being politically neutral - does have a left-wing bent to it. This is seen most clearly when people who are against public transit because it will bring crime are dismissed as saying a "racist dogwhistle" only said by thinly-veiled racists who just really want to say the n-word.