"Public transit has its use, but I generally hate it except in rare situations like Zurich or Berlin."
From the parent:
"I'm in Japan at the moment, and I can't help but agree - it's clean, fast, the trains come exactly when they say they will"
This: (how nice (insert public service here) is in CH/nordic/germany/japan) compared to the United States is always submitted as some kind of perplexing accident - like only some weird burst of cosmic rays could possibly explain why, for instance, polite behaviors on buses are so much better in Tokyo than they are in Cleveland.
But it's not confusing or strange at all: a homogenous society is easy to make work.
Oh, you have a whole city full of Lars Larsons and Handt Hansons ? Why, however do you make such a place work ? How amazing that everything comes together just so and there is no animosity between net tax payers and net tax receivers.
Well, of course there isn't. It's easy to work and live together with people and provide funding for their social benefit when their name is John Johnsson just like yours is.
The US is not easy. It's not an easy place. We have interesting problems that are going to be harder to figure out than pedantically pointing at the nordic countries.
On the other hand, we invented jazz and stuck a flag on the moon, so we've got that going for us - which is nice.
> But it's not confusing or strange at all: a homogenous society is easy to make work.
What has being a homogeneous society to do with building a proper public transport system? Maybe you could argue that having only "John Johnssons" makes being nice to each other easier, but it's not a necessary condition for making a decent schedule or building trains.
Besides, Berlin has probably the least homogeneous population of all of Germany.
> On the other hand, we invented jazz and stuck a flag on the moon, so we've got that going for us - which is nice.
Resting on one's past laurels won't help solving today's problems. How well did that work out for the Roman Empire? Case in point: The US actually lost its ability to send a person to space, and hasn't been able to send people to the Moon for 44 years now.
"What has being a homogeneous society to do with building a proper public transport system?"
A public transport system is a very expensive public good that needs to be paid for by everyone for the good of everyone.
Like fully socialized medicine, that is easy to pay for when you self-identify with the recipients. That's what I mean by the Handt Hansons working together with the John Johnssons. Or the Hiro Nakamuras.
The United States' diversity predates our development of these things - unlike trains and welfare in Zurich[1] and Berlin - all of which predate their diversity. Yes, I have been to Berlin and had a doner kebob. How many doner kebobs were for sale in 1902, when the U-Bahn opened ?
"Resting on one's past laurels won't help solving today's problems."
Agreed. I just wanted to make a caddyshack joke.
[1] And honestly, while Zurich is very diverse on paper, almost all of those foreign born residents of Zurich have one very important thing in common - they have very high incomes and are quite wealthy.
The median income is $4000 in Switzerland. What matters is that they have less income inequality and a good welfare safety net. When you let people with mental illness become homeless because everyone should fend for themselves, of course they're gonna occupy and piss where they can. When you help them become productive members of society, they don't. That's quite simple and has nothing to do with ethnicity like you're trying to imply.
Switzerland has some "fend for yourself" dimension where stuff like health insurance or childcare is largely private (and expensive), but they have a super strong safety net too. You are never being let down to the point that you have no choice but to be homeless.
When the bulk of the Berlin transit system was built, the city had the diversity of New Hampshire, and was being run by autocratic governments that were big on central planning and large public works projects.
This is silly, there are plenty of counterexamples. See Santiago, Chile and Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia for examples of large multi-ethnic cities with efficient, safe, and clean public transportation systems.
This is specious reasoning at best unless you've done an exhaustive study of all public transportation.
To give you a counter-example, Stockholm/Sweden is more multi-cultural and multi-ethnic than some US cities/states. And they have great public transit.
"Public transit has its use, but I generally hate it except in rare situations like Zurich or Berlin."
From the parent:
"I'm in Japan at the moment, and I can't help but agree - it's clean, fast, the trains come exactly when they say they will"
This: (how nice (insert public service here) is in CH/nordic/germany/japan) compared to the United States is always submitted as some kind of perplexing accident - like only some weird burst of cosmic rays could possibly explain why, for instance, polite behaviors on buses are so much better in Tokyo than they are in Cleveland.
But it's not confusing or strange at all: a homogenous society is easy to make work.
Oh, you have a whole city full of Lars Larsons and Handt Hansons ? Why, however do you make such a place work ? How amazing that everything comes together just so and there is no animosity between net tax payers and net tax receivers.
Well, of course there isn't. It's easy to work and live together with people and provide funding for their social benefit when their name is John Johnsson just like yours is.
The US is not easy. It's not an easy place. We have interesting problems that are going to be harder to figure out than pedantically pointing at the nordic countries.
On the other hand, we invented jazz and stuck a flag on the moon, so we've got that going for us - which is nice.