The conservative case for public transportation includes the point that middle-class riders like trains but hate buses. Garry, of Posterous, makes the same point when he explains how to keep things nice:
- Enforce rules.
- Be a train, not a bus.
The MUNI bus system in San Francisco is a complete disaster. You are guaranteed to run into insane street people and misanthropic hoodlums.
Contrast this to Caltrain, the local commuter train system on the Peninsula. I’ve often felt unsafe on MUNI, but never even slightly threatened on Caltrain. Why? Caltrain has conductors. They roam the trains making sure people have correct tickets. They throw people off and fine them if they try to sneak free rides. They must be strict in enforcing rules and they patrol it with almost an air of tradition. You can’t even put your feet up on the seats. That’s disrepectful. That’s how things are on trains.
Buses don’t have this tradition. Nobody every yelled at you for putting your feet on a seat on a bus. In fact, if you give someone a the dirty look or talking-to they deserve for their behavior, you’re liable to catch a beating. Why doesn’t a bus driver have the same capacity to kick people out and command authority? They really should.
Damn it, people. Turns out you need law and order and authority to keep things from degenerating into anarchy. Or worse, MUNI. This applies to online communities as well. You need rules and restraint to keep bad things from happening. Like 11 year old children getting stabbed for no reason.
“Why doesn’t a bus driver have the same capacity to kick people out and command authority?” Practical problem is that he’s busy driving the bus: it seems it takes a minimum of 2 employees to maintain decorum. Since the multi-car train carries more passengers, the extra labor cost of employee #2 is less as a % of fares. (And with self-driving trains, only the roaming employee would be needed.)
Quite right, David, but I don’t think a modern American bus driver would even pull over the bus and ask an obvious trouble-maker to leave.
The traditional American response would have been to pull the bus over and let the passengers collectively beat the troublemaker severely. Traditional Americans were a meddlesome people who made other people’s business their own. One definition of American Progressivism since the 1890s is “The attempt to outsource American meddling to professional meddlers. Badly.”