We Should Be Building Cities for People, Not Cars (2016)
It seems this discussion comes up fairly often, and the solution is almost always some variation of &quot;make driving too expensive and&#x2F;or too inconvenient, to force people to use public transit&quot;. On the surface that kind of makes sense, using a large stick to strongly encourage change, but I think at its core it misses a huge portion of the problem, which is that bad public transit is 10x worse than just sitting in a bit of traffic, or dropping a few bucks on an Uber&#x2F;Lyft.<p>For example I live in a very public transit friendly city, but the buses are un-ridable most of the time due to the rampant homeless issue(and all that comes with a large homeless population) while the light rail is usually better about being a semi-safe, semi-clean environment, that just happens to be so overloaded between between 7am-9am, and 3pm-6pm, that there is almost any price I&#x27;d pay to avoid it.<p>The sad part is that no matter how excessive the taxes or how limited the parking the ones to suffer first, and worst, will be the low-income families and workers. The homeless will continue to do whatever they can get away with, and those of us with higher incomes will grumble a bit and pay the taxes. The only solution I&#x27;ve seen that has a chance to change this is to come down hard on poor public transit behavior, perhaps by putting actual people on the buses with the specific job of cracking down on the drunk&#x2F;high&#x2F;piss soaked&#x2F;etc types, in an effort to improve the quality of the service to the point that the middle-upper income groups uses it again.