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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34984 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 3, 2023

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In many safe transit systems not filled with scary homeless people, travellers talk to friends if they're travelling in a group, they read books, they watch TV on their phones, they play games, they read the news, they check their emails, they take a nap.

Realistically speaking, even if bums / smelly or mentally ill people / druggies / criminals etc. magically aren't present, you can only do these things if you find a free seat. Which is a huge limiting factor if public transport is ran efficiently i.e. by packing passengers with maximum efficiency.

Driving is labor

I have no idea why you don't think public transit is labor by this same standard. Yes, people can talk to each other. They can also talk to each other at their actual jobs. Since you admit that people use public transport for a goal, but you don't think that their failure to use it as an end in itself makes it labor, I can get no coherent, definition of "labor" out of this post. By my standards, I would say that both driving and public transport are labor. The person with the 45 minute commute by train is also donating 90 minutes of unpaid labor.

He could however translate that into paid labour if his company accepted that he was at work on the train.

This is also true if you replace "train" with "car".

Hard to work while driving.

The condition was "if his company accepted that..." The company is perfectly capable of "accepting that" driving to work is something he should be paid for doing.

Driving is necessary for him to do his job. Unless this is a minimum wage job, the company is going to have to pay a salary that is subject to market forces, and those will be affected by the relative desirability of the job. So on the average, the company will pay him for driving to work in his car, even if driving isn't a separate line item on his paycheck.

I am talking about people actually working on trains - writing emails, using their laptops, attending meetings, writing code etc. very common on many commuter trains in Europe.

Rrmember, the argument is that driving is labor. You're now trying to argue the reverse of the OP.

Just because you can't use your laptop when driving, that doesn't mean that driving isn't 1) labor and 2) labor that you're getting paid for.

(Also, the kind of job that it is possible to do on a train is pretty limited, and if you can do it on a train, you can do it without commuting at all.)

I wasn’t making or dismissing the point of the op. I’m making my own point. That people do actual paid work on trains, and that they are paid for it. Trains to London that arrive post 9am are full of workers avoiding the rush hour crush (and premium pricing), and are actually paid for it - the company considers that work part of the 9-5. And all office workers can do this, it’s hardly limited. Nor does “they can do it at home” work as a counter, because even prior to covid when I lived outside London, and worked in London, I did both.

However people are not paid for commuting in the kind of job where they commute and can’t work the commute. As in they drive. In that case they are paid 9-5. If commuting were part of the payment then companies would pay more compensation to people who commute longer.

I never worked at a job that let me clock in just because I'm driving to the office, but my last 2 jobs do let me clock in to answer some emails, or do code reviews.

I suppose you're right that I could clock in and do these things while driving a car, but I don't want to die.

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Well, post-COVID, those people don't even really need trains--or travel in general--to do those things as much anymore.

It's not any easier on the train.

Er….ok.

I remember looking into this for stockholm and it's a similar picture. The subway and a part of the bus network is profitable but a substantial minority of the bus network is so poorly used that it makes the entire system unprofitable, even when it's both subsidised and pretty expensive post subsidy.

There is little to no discussion about this for some reason. It can't an equality issue because the poor areas are generally serviced by the subway or light rail and a measure to cut the really poorly performing lines could enable cutting rates for those that are profitable and thus actually helping the financially disadvantaged. The people living in the areas that aren't profitable generally use cars anyway so I dont understand why we're doing this. I believe a goal is that you should be able to take public transit anywhere but I think this is a bit stupid since ride sharing makes the occasional shorter taxi ride comparable or even cheaper than post subsidy PT if you're two passengers.

To be clear, the current situation is pretty good but there seems like there is low having fruit not being picked.

Part of the value of cars is that cars may be used for the long tail of rare, unusual, trips. In order for public transport to replace cars, it has to run routes in rarely used locations and at rarely used times, or it just can't replace cars. Saying "these rarely used lines make the system unprofitable" is really just another way to say "making public transit as useful as cars makes it unprofitable".

Sure, but most transit advocates don't actually want trains to replace cars, they just don't want cars to replace trains (in the areas trains are viable, AKA cities)

Sure, but if the cost of a cab ride approaches the cost of a ride on tax subsidised PT then the system is clearly out of balance.

There's a psychic cost that urbanists miss: namely, that public transit replaces the labor of driving with a lack of agency. Aside from the obvious downside of longer trips: whether you get there or not is out of your control. The wariness of being in a public space, of watching your possessions, of keeping your eye out for the urban lumpenproletariat - it's stressful in its own way.

Once again we return to the revealed preference of most people: when given the choice between the public commons and paying money and labor for a private space, they elect for the latter.

We clearly have very different points of view on driving: I think "lack of agency" is not a terrible summary of why I so strongly dislike driving. It's hard to imagine a more intense instance of lack of agency in everyday life than being surrounded by dozens to hundreds of people any one of whom has a non-trivial chance at any moment to make a mistake that will kill or maim me. Sure, driving a car as opposed to riding in one increases the agency there, but most of the danger is other people.

I would argue that it would be nice if we could live in walkable cities: but I'd rather be in the multi-ton steel behemoth than not, if the world is dangerous as you say.

Driving on an open highway obviously makes you feel more free than waiting for a train, but I don’t think driving in a city where you have to stop every block for stoplights or pedestrians and then spend half an hour looking for parking (and then can't drive yourself home from a bar if you've had a few drinks) compares all that favorably to taking the subway in terms of agency.

One of the problems here is trying to apply one-size-fits-all transit solutions. Being so pro-train that you want high-speed rail from California to New York is just as silly as being so pro-car that you bulldoze apartments to build an interstate through downtown Manhattan. The difference is that the former is the sole province of internet meme groups, while the latter is quite close to actual policies in the tristate area under Robert Moses.

There's a psychic cost that urbanists miss: namely, that public transit replaces the labor of driving with a lack of agency.

I think in some instances this is probably true, but I feel deeply “managed” and stripped of my agency when waiting at a red light or stuck in traffic.

A car is not just a means of transport: it is a private space in the public space, so to speak. You can store a great deal of things without watching them, you will always have a chair, a radio, a air conditioner. You can eat and even sleep in your car! These are not qualities that are commonly associated with public transit.

I went on a trip recently and I have never felt the desire to have a car to get around places, not just for travelling, but for its restful quality and comfort.

We stray ever further into our personal experiences but this is another case where I’m sure what you say is true for you, but I just feel the exact opposite. The fact that a car is a private place in a public place is one of my least favorite things about it! It means my most valuable possession, and whatever possessions I might want to store in it, are outside of my house where I can’t keep an eye of them. Instead they sit on the street with the weirdos, and any time I want to go somewhere I have to hope none of the people passing by are gonna mess with it despite the fact that I hear about more car break-ins every week.

I don’t find cars very comfortable either, but in fairness I haven’t had nice cars.

Of course YMMV.

Driving is labor

Public transit is a labor-saving tool.

You and I have fundamentally irreconcilable differences in how we feel what costs us effort and what is comfortable relaxation.

My drive to drop my kid off at school and then to my work is a pleasant 20 minutes with my thoughts or a news radio show. It's comfortable. I've had much longer commutes in bad traffic and that was labor. But anything under 30 minutes is "free" in terms of expending my energy and mood.

I've ridden busses and trains in America. Those are very much not comfortable and free in terms of my energy and mood. But maybe if I lived in some European city I'd have a different feeling about it.

I would describe the difference as being the amount of situational awareness that is required. In a walkable city with good transit (e.g. most cities in East Asia), I don't need to pay attention to where I am going or who is around me. I could stumble drunk from one end of town to the other at 3 in the morning and never be mugged or otherwise accosted. I can relax on the subway and read a book or listen to music, confident that none of the other passengers is going to start a fight or spill something on the seats. If I drop my wallet on the street, it will either be left exactly where it fell or some random person who passed it will find me to return it.

When contrasted with that type of city, driving a car feels about like walking in a bad neighborhood i.e. I need to pay attention to everyone around me at all times or someone could get hurt. Of course, if the only kind of transit you have ever ridden is the sort where you also need to watch everyone on board for potential risks, then it is strictly inferior to driving outside of places as congested as New York. Many of the differences of opinion on this issue seem to stem from people who have only experienced one of these systems not comprehending the other.

Yes, the question of whether people will use public transport when it's offered, even if it's significantly cheaper than a car, varies a lot by city, and even by parts of the city.

When I was taking public transport in Chicago, which is quite good by American standards, people would advise me on what lines or stops to avoid, or where my car would be stolen from the park and ride lot. There's a local train I'd like to take, but everyone says to avoid it because I have to drive to the station and cars are stolen from the lot frequently. There's a lot of inconvenience people will put up with to avoid gambling on losing an object worth half a year's pay.

Interesting point. I do wonder what a comprehensive analysis of how you should value transit time and driving time for commuters would show. I wonder if there clean data on relative like/dislike of driving vs various quality metro systems.

I also don't think that even on safe and non-crowded trains you should value the time at full billable hour rate. Or that you should value the car time as total waste. Commuting by train requires walking time on either end that does not allow for reading, so on equal total commute time basis you don't yield the full time for semi-productive pursuits. Of the possible activities mentioned I think the closest analogs in a car are: talking with friends you are carpooling with, listing to audio books, listening to music, podcasts, or the news. I would concede there aren't close analogs to playing games or checking emails; though you might be able to take a call in a car but not on a train. I'm also unsure how much is lost from reading on the train vs audio book. Personally, the motion, sound from other commuters, and having to listen for the station call negate most of the advantages of reading over audio books for me.

So the 'cost per mile' metric alone doesn't account for the fact that someone with a 45 minute commute donates 90 minutes a day of unpaid labor for the privilege of driving themselves to and from work.

This is exactly what often gets missed in these conversations. So many pro-car folks can't seem to wrap their head around the fact that many people don't like driving, and in fact it's a negative. Even for people that like driving, if they could be doing productive work/relaxing/enjoying themselves instead, that would be a much better outcome IMO.

Transit is a means to an end. If self-driving cars connected to a traffic AI that can solve congestion by micro-adjusting speeds and pacing across the entire network can allow everyone in, say, Manhattan to travel quickly and safely (and at low cost) by Uber, then by all means demolish the subway.

Self-driving is something I'm also cautiously optimistic for, but the failure of previous promises to materialize is making me wary. There are some early rollouts in Phoenix and SF that look pretty good, but I'm convinced the regulatory environment will kill them out at the behest of one or another vested interest, until the tech gets so good it's implausible to argue against it.

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