693
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 11 Jun 2024
693 points (96.4% liked)
memes
10336 readers
1348 users here now
Community rules
1. Be civil
No trolling, bigotry or other insulting / annoying behaviour
2. No politics
This is non-politics community. For political memes please go to !politicalmemes@lemmy.world
3. No recent reposts
Check for reposts when posting a meme, you can only repost after 1 month
4. No bots
No bots without the express approval of the mods or the admins
5. No Spam/Ads
No advertisements or spam. This is an instance rule and the only way to live.
Sister communities
- !tenforward@lemmy.world : Star Trek memes, chat and shitposts
- !lemmyshitpost@lemmy.world : Lemmy Shitposts, anything and everything goes.
- !linuxmemes@lemmy.world : Linux themed memes
- !comicstrips@lemmy.world : for those who love comic stories.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
Top 10 in North America is still pretty bad.
People need to grow up with this infrastructure being in place, seeing it used by regular people for basic tasks like going to work or the grocery store. Seeing it in movies and other media (in a positive/neutral way). It needs to be normalized. Unfortunately, that takes a long time and a ton of money.
The truth is, right now, in the United States, most public transit is absolutely horrible. It doesn't serve many locations, it's usually crappy old buses with stains on their seats, there's often one or more individuals with overt mental health issues, and public transit in general is associated with poverty.
You're not going to get people using public transit regularly if it's not normalized, incentivized, clean, safe, etc. It's a tough problem, to be sure. Some places are making a lot of progress on it, such as where I live in Seattle, but it's an uphill battle due to the way the United States was built to be car-centric.
By the way, if you don't know anyone who advocates for public transit and uses it more regularly than you say, I doubt you are in the top 10.
I live in Vancouver, easily top 10 city, probably top 5. And yeah you're right, I do know two people who advocate, my aunt and uncle. No one else I know is even remotely passionate about urbanization efforts. Lots of people I know use public transit, but they don't view it as something that can be relied on as their main form of transportation. Yes, the fact that our public transit is not nearly as good as it could be is a huge part of it, but the point remains that most people do not feel strongly about improving it.
I'm sure my privilege has kept me in a bit of a bubble but there are seriously very few people who feel strongly about public transit and cycling infrastructure. Even my less privileged friends are hardly advocates for better infrastructure and the people I've met through sports leagues all drive, I'm literally the only person I know who rides a bike everywhere they go. I used to frequent a local news website and any article that mentioned road diets or public transportation became toxic battlefields between pro and anti car folks.
There is absolutely a significant group of advocates in the city, but I really feel like you're misjudging the percentage of people who support urbanization efforts.