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0 pointscloseparen7y ago0 comments

>We live in communities, not economies.

The City already tries to foster community by forcing people to share space against their will, via public transit. It's a dystopian hellscape, not a community. You can't just build those by force.

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7 comments · 2 top-level

st267y ago· 5 in thread

It's hard to imagine your local city bus is so unpleasant to be called a dystopian hellscape.

closeparenOP7y ago

While I was a BART commuter, I walked a gauntlet of slumped-over hard drug users, sprawled-out homeless people, human urine, and feces every day. Fortunately, I've only seen people drop their pants and take a shit on the sidewalk in front of me twice. Missed a random stabbing on the stairwell into my station by about 5 minutes.

This is Civic Center Station, which serves Twitter, Uber, and Square. No amount of tech worker foot traffic is going to clean up an area if the government isn't willing to police it.

Video doesn't even show the worst part, but helps to illustrate: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5gT5NULvRSk

adrianN7y ago

That's not an inherent problem of public transit. It's just a symptom of failing to take care of poor people in your society. Try taking public transit in a civilized country like Germany or Japan.

4 more replies

mschuster917y ago

> No amount of tech worker foot traffic is going to clean up an area if the government isn't willing to police it.

And policing will just drive the problem somewhere else. What America desperately needs is a new approach to a lot of issues that goes way beyond ever more police, courts and jails:

- drugs and addictions (now that enough white middle class people suffer from heroin or worse, something hopefully will be done beyond the "put them all in prison" attitude that caused the War on Drugs in the first place)

- mental health resources, whose lack of is directly affecting or even causing much of the homeless population

- medical resources

- housing

2 more replies

isostatic7y ago

Perhaps move out of the third world city you live in and move to a developed one?

Only problem I've encountered on public transport on 5 continents is the occasional drunk group singing on Friday night.

1 more reply

robbiemitchell7y ago

> video: "... the city's jurisdiction ends when you head down those BART stairs."

That's shocking to me. Get city policy in there if the commuter cops can't handle it.

NYC cops be in there removing people stat if this happened here.

shub7y ago

I always thought that force would work pretty well to build a dystopian hellscape.

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