Quote:
Originally Posted by Stay Stoked Brah
when was the last time any of you took public transportation? I had to think about it, for me it has been about 21 months.
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Every day for the past 20 years or thereabouts.
I
do recognize that a majority of Americans view public transit as something you're forced into taking because you can't afford a car. So there's definitely a stigma attached to it in a majority of Americans' minds.
But there are places (New York, Boston, SF, DC come to mind) where this isn't the majority view. I had a doctor for a mom and a university administrator for a dad, and we rode the Boston commuter rail and subway all the time as kids. All my friends did too. So did their parents. And this was in the 80s and 90s. As teens and college kids, we all knew it made no sense driving in central Boston (very scarce and very expensive parking, plus Big Dig construction at the time). We'd take advantage of the T's many inner-ring suburb park-and-ride setups like Riverside and BC Stations in Newton, Alewife in Cambridge, and Oak Grove in Malden.
I've seen weird people do weird stuff on the T, but not as weird as what you see in Tokyo. At least Americans will intervene in sexual assaults, random fist-fights, or dudes furiously masturbating in public, and Americans will help people passed-out drunk who are throwing up on themselves. Japanese generally just let that stuff go down as though nothing were happening; just stare straight ahead or stay focused on that phone screen. If you must, casually move away to another part of the car or into the next car while checking your phone, as though you had always intended to do so.
Despite all that, Tokyo's combined rail network still sees 21+ million daily weekday trips. The Yamanote Line alone see 4 million daily weekday trips. People who own a car or who can afford a car (like me) still use transit every day, because there is no negative social stigma attached to doing so in Japan
and because it's faaaar more convenient. The built environment strongly dictates this and always has. I've heard it argued by Japanese academics (and I agree) that built form necessarily made using public transit socially acceptable and widely adopted from its inception. Maybe this is why transit doesn't have the usual American stigma in places like New York and Boston.