Absolutely not, this is such a US centric view. The bicycle is clearly the most egalitarian form of transportation since walking.<p>It requires much less maintenance overhead, no license at all to drive, and you can technically take it cross country if you want.<p>Its fuel and thereby range is not determined by your financial status, only your health.
Nothing which costs that much and excludes so many people can honestly be called egalitarian – especially since it comes at the cost of removing so much public space from any other use.<p>The intellectual dishonesty here is especially staggering:<p>> Horses, intercity trains, streetcars, you name it, were always used mainly by the relatively wealthy and were inaccessible to the poor, especially in cities.<p>In addition to being flat up wrong about streetcars, note how he mixes things like horses which have always been expensive and intercity trains (which serve a different purpose) without mentioning things like buses or bicycles which poor people heavily depend on.<p>Later, he puts access to a car as a sign of egalitarianism without asking whether that’s a sign of preference or necessity. Someone who looks at percentage of income paid and the difficulty of maintaining employment without a car would come to very different conclusions. That is, of course, if the goal was to learn rather than to find support for the position they started with.
> The claim that “accessible public transportation” can produce greater equality ignores the fact that mass transit, whether private or public, has generally been used mainly by an elite. In 2019, the median income of people who commuted by transit to work was significantly higher than the median income of people who commuted by any other method. More people who commuted by transit in 2019 earned over $65,000 a year than those who earned under $25,000.<p>Might have something to do with the fact that there is not much public transport in the US and most can be found in very large cities. Since city dwellers have a higher income on average this is not the least bit surprising.<p>The conclusion of the article is build on this argument and quickly falls apart in Europe. The argument not even true for the US because it is warped by cities like New York City.
Ridiculously US centric article, and this:<p>> The claim that “accessible public transportation” can produce greater equality ignores the fact that mass transit, whether private or public, has generally been used mainly by an elite.<p>skips over a public transport history of the US that has seen the elite (eg Koch brothers) work to sink any public transport effort specifically to increase the per capita use of fossil fuels (and their profits), and planners using infrastructure projects to divide vibrant neighbourhoods and push out those determined as poor, unwanted, etc.
<i>insanely expensive light-rail projects when buses can provide as good or better transportation for far less money</i><p>Haha. Insanely expensive, I don't doubt, but as good as or better service? Spotted the person who hasn't relied on public transport for more than a month of their life. Compared to light rail, buses are miserable.
“In the US”.<p>One only has to visit a less wealthy country (just cross the border to Mexico) where the fallacy of the article is evident when the average person’s salary is not enough to buy even a clunker and keep it running (fuel is damn expensive). And public transportation is used massively due to it being the only other option to getting around. “ mass transit, whether private or public, has generally been used mainly by an elite.” Please what? Has this person ever actually used public transportation? Just get your head out of your iPad and look around. And that’s just one example. I even doubt this holds generally true in the US.
I don't agree with their logic here:
"the fact that mass transit, whether private or public, has generally been used mainly by an elite. In 2019, the median income of people who commuted by transit to work was significantly higher than the median income of people who commuted by any other method."<p>The fact is that people in cities are more likely to use public transit, and living near cities correlates strongly with income. But within metropolitan areas, transit is much more egalitarian (by their metric) than private car ownership.
Maybe the author has it backwards. Correlation causation etc. Could it be that access to public transport, or better infrastructure in general, gives people the opportunity to earn better wages?
I definitely appreciate reading points of view very different than my own, but—even aside from the US-centricity pointed out by other commentors—it seems to me that the author has got some things obviously wrong, most principally the relation between wealth and access to public transport:<p>It is pretty clear that most US residents do not have meaningful access to public transport at all, and even fewer have access to high-quality transport (i.e. clean, safe and pleasant vehicles with turn-up-and-go frequency within a short walk). Those that do are naturally concentrated in just a few major (and mainly older) cities—NYC, SF, Boston, Chicago, Washington and the like—which are also some of the most expensive places to live. Even within those cities, housing near transport routes tends to be more valued and thus more expensive. So yes: the people who have the best access to transit tend to be those who have higher incomes. (This is true in Europe too, albeit not so markedly since even less-well-off areas tend to have at least a decent basic service.)<p>The US, having built itself into a configuration that makes public transport mostly non-viable, can't easily fix this. In that context it probably _does_ make sense to try to provide basic automobiles to those who can't afford them. But don't pretend that this is anything other than a band-aid on the gaping wound that is poor decisions about land-use.
Two things strikes me about the article…<p>1. It oversimplifies too many things. That includes public transit availability, costs, etc<p>2. It’s US centric. The numbers are based on U.S. numbers. Far too many people think other places are like the U.S.<p>Where I live public transit doesn’t go where low income folks live and work. While there are exceptions, that’s the rule. So, low income earners often have cars that are at least 10 years old to get where they need to go
> <i>mass transit, whether private or public, has generally been used mainly by an elite.</i><p>So does this article really apply outside of the US, RU, and other such places with vast swathes of low-density not-so-economically-integrated populations?
I’d be curious to see some of those aggregate statistics broken out.<p>The idea that the average income of mass transit users is higher than that of drivers (pre-pandemic) is counter intuitive.<p>It’s most likely an artifact of the fact that salaries in NYC are high and the bulk of mass transit commuting was in/to/from NYC. I’d be curious to see the same statistics NYC-only and ex-NYC.<p>I don’t have the data but could likely be <a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson%27s_paradox" rel="nofollow">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson%27s_paradox</a>
O’Toole as usual has an agenda to find a way to make every positive thing about transit seem bad.<p>It’s clear here in that he uses average US-wide incomes to segment the population in urban areas. NYC has the highest transit ridership: if you make $65,000 a year, you might not be making rent. If you make $25,000 a year, you’re not able to afford to live anywhere near transit, and would be making less than minimum wage in new york state.<p>all you need to do is compare the cost to take transit to the cost to drive a car to see the weakness in his argument.
While I generally don't support this view, in my corner of the world there's an unexpected advantage of having access to cars, namely they give one <i>leverage</i> when picking where to live.<p>Around here the middle class can't afford real estate - not in 2022 at least. The credit advisor working for a housing development company who I met the other day told me that 75% of their clients pay <i>cash</i>, because the pool of those who are eligible for a mortgage is so small nowadays.<p>Housing close to public transport gets expensive really quick. Meanwhile if you have a car you can live in the middle of buttfuck nowhere and actually have the credit score for the property because it costs half of anything close to civilisation.<p>Of course there are fuel costs and whatnot, but you can work with/around that. There's no going around not having the credit score for a even a one-bedroom apartment in the city.<p>Here's a collection of European countries where there's no consistent trend in urbanization vs the Netherlands, which apparently are turning into a collection of cities:<p><a href="https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.URB.TOTL.IN.ZS?end=2021&locations=PL-CZ-AT-RO-NL&start=1960" rel="nofollow">https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.URB.TOTL.IN.ZS?end=2...</a><p>I know for a fact that where I live the decrease is caused by people moving to the suburbs - it's a widely talked about topic.
> > The claim that “accessible public transportation” can produce greater equality ignores the fact that mass transit, whether private or public, has generally been used mainly by an elite.<p>Yes, the elites of poor countries around the world, places with a GDP per capita a 10th of the US one :-))))<p>One of the first thing poor countries to improve the lives of their wretched (thing people almost starving) is to add bus, tram and train lines so these poor people can go farther away from home to get decent paying jobs.
Excellent article!<p>Why are so few of these posted to hacker news?<p>More and more automobiles is the perfect antidote to a society who's wealth has been built on exclusionary zoning.<p>It's useless trying to plan any desirable alternative to the status quo in the form of mass transit when everyone sees their home as a get-rich-while-doing-nothing investment ponzi scheme rather than a commodity to be consumed:<p><a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2022/12/homeownership-real-estate-investment-renting/672511/" rel="nofollow">https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2022/12/home...</a>
Poorer households are actually the majority of users in Los Angeles [1].<p>I suspect this isn't the case in many other American cities, because<p>a. Transit is a luxury good, raising prices and gentrifying an area<p>b. Transit is the easiest to build to close places (from the CBD), which are often rich<p>c. Poorer communities just aren't a priority for most cities, at least not until recently.<p>Anecdotally, in Europe the modal split is probably more even.<p>[1] <a href="https://pedestrianobservations.com/2018/11/11/meme-weeding-los-angeles-density/" rel="nofollow">https://pedestrianobservations.com/2018/11/11/meme-weeding-l...</a>
Is US-centric not allowed here? I see several complaints about that.<p>I see no problem with a US writer speaking to what he finds is best for himself and fellow US citizens. That this would cause so many complaints and potentially have an article flagged is dystopian, like some of us are less equal than others.
> The claim that “accessible public transportation” can produce greater equality ignores the fact that mass transit, whether private or public, has generally been used mainly by an elite. In 2019, the median income of people who commuted by transit to work was significantly higher than the median income of people who commuted by any other method.<p>Probably ignores the fact that most public transportation infrastructure and people that use it are located in cities where median salaries are higher. Public transportation commuters can still very much have a lower median salary in that area.<p>> In 2021, only 5.0 percent of workers with incomes under $25,000 a year took transit to work, while the other 95 percent disproportionately have to pay the mostly regressive taxes that are used to support transit.<p>Probably good that mass transit was avoided during a pandemic. Can't determine how much it says about the taxes "regressivity" though.<p>> By comparison highways are mainly paid for out of user fees which aren’t regressive because people pay for only what they use.<p>Not from the US, but this doesn't seem to be true, if i'm reading [the table on this page](<a href="https://taxfoundation.org/state-infrastructure-spending/" rel="nofollow">https://taxfoundation.org/state-infrastructure-spending/</a>) correctly.<p>> Of the 4.1 percent of workers who lived in households with no cars in 2021...<p>My understanding is that life without a car is quite challenging in the US - I'd get one too if I lived there. And yeah, the data [does seem to support it](<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_vehicles_per_capita" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_vehicles_...</a>). But it's not an argument for cars, just an argument against US urban planning. Requiring an expensive purchase to be able to participate in society is pretty messed up.<p>> The Times article is correct that debt and the high cost of borrowing for people who have poor credit is a problem, but that is not the fault of the automobile.<p>> Nor are traffic stops that punitively focus on low-income drivers, which the article also cites, the fault of cars.<p>And gun violence isn't the gun's fault. It's public-policy-around-the-gun's fault - which is in turn gun advocacy's fault. You can always install metal detectors in schools and put guards everywhere, but you could also, you know, just not have that many guns.* Similarly, you could just put in more public transportation.<p>> numerous studies have shown that one of the best ways to get people who don’t have access to cars out of poverty is to give them access to an automobile.<p>I don't believe that we need to choose any single policy over another, but given limited resources I'd prioritize redirecting tax revenue into:
- education to give people actual careers
- cheap (tax-based, even) healthcare
- social safety-nets that support economically vulnerable<p>Over<p>> low- or zero-interest loans to low-income people who lack cars so they can buy a decent used or low-cost new car.<p>Just put in more bus lines. Please. Why do anyone need to take a loan out at all? What happens if they get fired or can't pay the loan for any reason?<p>* Not going to pretend that anti-gun stances aren't political suicide in the US and that actual feasibility any gun ban is quite questionable. I'm just railing against this denialist blame-shifting attitude and the cartoonish work-arounds it leads to.
The author doesn't consider the world beyond the US.<p>Mass transit being used by elites and cars by the poor is far from true in many other places. In fact, mass transit was free in many communist countries, and is still free in cities here and there.