I've had panhandlers walk up to me at stop lights in suburban sprawl cities. I find it very hard to believe that the GP hasn't experienced the same.

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tengbretson 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

Would you agree that being able to drive away from that situation is different from sharing space in a confined metal tube for 20+ minutes?

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LexiMax 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

If you're sitting next to a homeless person for 20+ minutes you're not in danger, you're just uncomfortable sharing space with the less fortunate.

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inglor_cz 5 days ago | parent [-]

"you're just uncomfortable sharing space with the less fortunate."

This is the sort of vacuous moral posturing that loses elections and if it wins them, it makes cities unlivable.

Why should I be fine sitting next to someone who shit his pants several times and likely has lice and scabies? And yes, it occassionally happens even in Czech public transport.

If you not just tolerate this, but scold people for being disgusted, the public transport system will lose the middle class and with it, any benevolence of the tax payer.

Civilizations always have some minimum for public behavior. Not stinking to high heaven in closed spaces is one of them. If you fight against such bare minimums and tell people that they are bad people for requiring them, you are promoting pure, unadulterated barbarism.

	▲	LexiMax 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		I don't know how it is in Czechia, but here in the US, we have a long and storied history of suburbanization, white flight, redlining, exclusionary covenents and discriminatory mortgaging. The result is entire generations of people who grew up in suburban sprawl, isolated away from anyone who didn't look like them. I don't expect to be able to convince those people to suddenly turn over a new leaf - if anything, the argument was lost long before I was born. You cannot make public transportation both useful and sufficiently sanitized to where these sorts of people won't be bothered. It's an impossible standard - at least for a country as diverse as ours. At this point, what is there to lose by speaking the truth?

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woodruffw 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

My experience is that panhandlers on the road like to post up at long red lights, at which point you’re effectively forced to share space with them for N minutes unless you intend to run a red light. In the subway, you just change cars.

(I’m riding the subway right now, and two people just changed cars because of weak A/C.)

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dmd 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Well, as one data point, I've been driving in the Northeast US since 1996, mostly around Philadelphia and Boston, and that has never once happened to me.

	▲	xarope 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		Saw a juggler in Barcelona do this. Was juggling at the lights, then ran around asking for tips. Ran up to me too, as a pedestrian, but I was crossing the lights then so he decided to focus on the cars instead.