I was poor, I took the bus to college and work (there were times I'd have to add 30 minutes where I knew I'd have to leg it). It was an hour and a half with transfers. It's doable --you get used to it, just like tech workers get used to driving in from the East Bay into the Peninsula. It's no biggie. On the way home, sometimes you get off at a different stop to pick up groceries and then you're the one walking home with two plastic bags -at first your arms ache. Again, you get used to it.
There are multiple levels of poor, like there are multiple levels of rich. Plenty of people are rich enough to drive, but not rich enough to live in convenient locations. It’s weird that, when I was going to university, many people would save money by living far off campus and driving to pay $5 for parking. The richer kids were living on or next to campus, and didn’t even need cars. Housing is expensive, and the American system has made driving unnaturally cheap.
> Plenty of people are rich enough to drive, but not rich enough to live in convenient locations.
Now they're not rich enough to drive, they're become poor enough to use public transportation. Maybe their votes will improve the convenience of public transportation.
To somebody who can afford to live in Manhattan, you'd have to charge $200 a trip to bother them. Just tax them, and use that money to build out public transportation.
Very weird to crusade for the right of people who can barely afford their cars to be better than those who can't afford cars.
A resident of NY is already one of most, if not the most taxed citizen in the country. You pay fed, state, city, and/or borough tax. Relative to the rest of the country, you pay the most for rent, mortgages, food, electricity, natgas, internet, tolls, and even toiletries.
And you want to tax these residents more, and dump the money into the black hole of state-run public transportation projects that take 10x the budget and 10x the time of any where else on planet earth? ...and that is with no guarantee that project would a) get finished b) not be a total clusterfuck like all the others.
That sucks more than having a car does by far. Even the last part about "your arms ache but you get used to it" - how is that for disabled people? How is it for the elderly? An extra hour and a half - what about if you have kids at home?
Honestly that... Blows?
If the options are to destroy the environment or to have to take an extra three hours daily to commute, I choose destroy the environment - smart people will probably fix it with science.
I thought about it - why would I rather destroy the environment than reduce cars? Because it's a lie - there's clearly no shared burden. Like as soon as humanity bans all privat jets, the entire cruise industry, etc, then maybe I'd consider it. But as it is, it's just one more "eh the poors will get used to it" - meanwhile we don't ban major contributions from sources that are rich people's enjoyment or profits.
3 hours commutes or destroying the environment aren't the only two options. By changing the way we build cities, and by retrofitting the ones we've already built, we can make places where the walked/biked commute is less than a half hour and the environmental impact is slashed dramatically.
A lot of problems can be solved via better urban planning, but most of us have little control over that. What we do have control over leaves us with a couple of options, but we have hope that maybe our grandkids will have more choices.
Agreed. And I'm in the same boat. But I've taken the "best time to plant a tree was 40 years ago" approach and have started working in my community to bring about those changes.
To people who can't afford to drive, this just sounds like relatively wealthy people whining about being reduced to living like they have been the entire time.
If you want to reduce the relative privileges of wealthy people, tax them and redistribute or do a socialist revolution. Never crusade for the privileges of people with some money while ignoring the situation of the people with less money. In the limit, you'll end up crusading for the privileges of billionaires against the privileges of multi-billionaires. As activism, imo it's silly.
