Everyone is constantly doing illegal stuff
Walking and taking transit in city centers in the USA is much worse than in Europe. In Europe sidewalks and transit are clean and dignified. In the USA it is a much more mixed bag. I think one big contributor to the lack of dignity is an overall feeling of lawlessness on the street level that isn't as present elsewhere
I went to a local festival yesterday by walking to our light rail, riding it for ~45 minutes, and then taking an uber the last two miles. While I live in a nice city with high incomes and beautiful buildings, the following things made the whole experience feel disorderly:
- Cars regularly turning while I'm in the crosswalk (this would cause an instant failure in a driving exam) and rolling through reds to make right turns without checking for pedestrians.
- It was a very hot day and several unhoused people were laying motionless on the sidewalk in the shade, and on one block a man was yelling incoherently and fighting a ghost.
- The hub station that I boarded at was dirty, and the ticket validator had been physically damaged and burned (but to its credit, it still worked fine)
- About half the stops for the connecting buses at the hub are completely without amenities, just signposts for bus numbers along a loud, busy road.
- Cars were making blatantly illegal levels of exhaust noise, immiserating everyone waiting out in the extreme heat.
- A bicyclist was hit by car while I waited for my train
- I didn't see the collision but the bicyclist was able to stand up and walk to the sidewalk after about a minute to stop blocking traffic.
- It's not clear who did something wrong - I regularly see cars going unsafe speeds and drivers not paying attention to their surroundings, and bicyclists (especially unhoused/unwell people) just riding into intersections against the signals(!)
- I couldn't tell but I think the bicyclist was an unhoused person, and many other unhoused people came to help them and box in the car. Some of the people boxing in the car were acting in a way that was likely to escalate the situation and I was worried the driver would panic and try to drive through.
- I didn't stay to help. There were plenty of people already involved, and while I think many of them were making the situation worse, I think it was correct for me to continue on my way. However this morning I'm kinda concluding that it makes me deeply unhappy that one of my thought processes was that this as an "unhoused people" thing that shouldn't concern me as much.
- The car was like a mid-2000s corolla or something that was in bad shape, and I couldn't see the driver well but they didn't do anything to indicate that they were anything but remorseful. With a car like that I doubt they are in a great place in life to weather what comes from this collision, and many drivers don't have insurance at all so this could be very bad for them.
- Onboard the light rail:
- A guy in the back was smoking a cigarette and taking up multiple seats with his belongings. I had to transfer midway so this was only a problem for a few minutes.
- The trolley slowed to a crawl by a building because someone was threatening to jump off the roof.
- I saw dozens if not hundreds of tents on sidewalks along the route (mostly under bridges/underpasses).
- Some of the trolley stations are in the middle of the street. Nearly everyone using these stations just jaywalks to get in and out, instead of waiting for the crosswalks.
- The light rail slows to a crawl near known homeless encampments, presumably because there are sometimes people or items near the tracks.
- At one point a transit officer got on to check tickets, and half the passengers jumped off at some random unshaded station in extreme heat to avoid getting fined.
- The car pickup zone at the final station requires driving between the trains and the buses. There was a continuous stream of pedestrian traffic so my driver just slowly rolled into the crosswalk until enough pedestrians stopped and then he accelerated through.
- Fairly boring driving through the suburb to get to the festival actually involved several illegal road maneuvers (drifting in and out of bike lane, speeding, illegal U turn to reach dropoff point)
- After the festival, I called a rideshare to drop my friend off at his house and then added a stop to get me home. When I got in the driver expressed frustration that I added a stop after he agreed to the pickup, because he got a bad rate on it. I offered to just take the ride to my friend's place (the initial fare) but he begrudgingly said he'd take me all the way, and after some discussion I ended up removing the stop and paying him $20 cash for the rest. The ride was uninsured and unmonitored.
Some reflections:
- Waymos do sometimes roll though stops and pull over in illegal places, but they are in the same situations re: unpredictable pedestrians and bicyclists and would not have hit that bicyclist (in fact, waymos operate on that very street)
- The four rideshare drivers I had this weekend shared - unprompted - anxiety about waymos, the economy, or gas prices. I don't like that waymos (which so far seem to be far safer than human drivers) are threatening these people who are already struggling. It's not good that, while we can deliver the same service (transportation) with fewer externalities (collisions), it will necessarily cause economic hardship for these human drivers. We should look closely at why our current system requires anyone to become worse off as part of this transition which is otherwise overwhelmingly good.
- While it's easy to say "all of these bad people made me sad", what are humans involved in all of this supposed to do?
- The light rail is one of the few places that unhoused people can get air conditioning on this extreme heat warning day.
- It is unsafe to drive legally - eg if you go the speed limit and don't enter bike lane early to turn right, other drivers will rush in and box you out, creating a dangerous situation.
- I had enough near misses driving downtown that now I am extremely cautious - checking bike lanes, fully stopping at stop signs, yielding to pedestrians, etc. I used to get stressed that people would honk at me for driving like this. But a few years ago I realized that a good fraction of drivers are really just homicidally unsafe, and that I SHOULD get honked at about once an hour if I'm driving safely.
- The USA has a lot of unhoused people. Being unhoused is miserable, and while most of them want to get back on their feet, I think our country makes it uniquely difficult, and every day it gets harder to avoid a drug addiction or a crime that will make it even harder.
- My friends talk about my neighborhood like "ew downtown" and ask why I don't move somewhere else. I usually say that my problem with homelessness is that it makes me really sad to know that people are in that state, not that I am actually at risk of harm. My go-to is something like "I don't see how me going somewhere else will improve their situation at all"
- Also - and this will come off a cynical - but why do we expect homelessness to be in the city center? If we're ALL saving tax dollars by not having functional social services, why are city center residents more exposed to the outcome of that policy choice?
- Since it's trespassing all the same, wouldn't an unsheltered person rather lay under a tree on a suburban lawn rather than on some hot, hard sidewalk downtown?
- It's natural to say that homelessness belongs downtown because that's where the social services and shelters are, but why did we assume those services should be downtown to begin with?
- People will say that downtown has the best transit so it's the natural place to put a population that can't afford cars, but why is car ownership a requirement to participation in society?
- This uninspected suburban car-brain (this is not a persuasive phrase but I really need to emphasize that it's ridiculous) is implicit in USAian's beliefs (including previously my own, when I grew up in a suburb).
- When an unhoused person is spotted in a rich suburb, the police will literally come and coerce them to move downtown or to a poorer suburb.
- When rich suburbs deport problematic people to my neighborhood and erect barriers to them coming back, we are behaving more like two societies in a might-makes-right struggle than a single country. If that's the case, the right move for me is to vote for tit-for-tat responses that cause equal hardship to the other side as the alternative to cooperation.
- The other side of this is that, if we coerce unhoused people from both nice suburbs and downtown, they'll end up in poorer suburbs. That is also bad, and is dangerous because I don't have visibility into poorer suburbs, so it'll be easy for me to just say "out of sight, out of mind"
- When an unhoused person is spotted in a rich suburb, the police will literally come and coerce them to move downtown or to a poorer suburb.
- Maybe the thing that bothers me here is that I expect people who are struggling and living on the street to contribute to a general feeling of disorder, but I don't like that drivers - who at least operate in modern society well enough to spend thousands a year on car upkeep and pass a driving exam - come and contribute to the lawless feeling by knowingly taking illegal actions.
- Much of the lawlessness I experience is rooted in complex social/economic issues, but a lot of it is also just bad traffic engineering. There are areas of downtown that have added traffic calming and bike lanes that have both MASSIVELY improved the pedestrian experience and decreased the amount of vehicular lawlessness. Social services are apparently hard and expensive, but repainting lanes, broadening sidewalks, and other traffic calming measures are completely doable physical changes that are long overdue.