Which means suburban style businesses have an advantage, and eventually downtown merchants form an association and start pushing for free parking so they can get customers to show up.

Let's say a gallon of gas costs $4 and your car gets 40 MPG. So $1 gets you 10 miles if you only consider gas (which very many people do, even if you think they shouldn't - much maintenance is imagined as time-based, and this is not entirely wrong - cars do decay even if you don't drive them, and insurance only rarely considers your odometer and only coarsely if so).

Wear and tear is generally assumed to be roughly equal to gas costs on well-maintained roads, depending on a lot of varying assumptions of what to include. So, 5 miles.

It really doesn't, though, especially if you've already decide to drive 10 or 20 miles for some other reason. Marginally, the cost of driving 5 miles is quite a bit less than $1.

Japan is remarkably close.

Cuba, also, but their economic priorities are very different.

Dubai (actually all of UAE). Never seen 1 homeless, beggar, panhandler, crackhead or a fent zombie here.

every developed country on earth has solved this problem except us

addiction, mental health, childhood drama… only in america would that lead to sleeping on the streets

In the UK, the newer trains and tube carriages all have USB ports for charging.

But, it is kind of a non issue. You are responsible for your ticket. Having a dead battery is no different to losing your paper ticket.

iPhone NFC will work for a while even when “dead”, not sure about the android world.

But in the edge case of the edge case, security can let you out. If it becomes a pattern, they’ll note it somehow.

Seems like the most important thing to do is _anything_. The current approach of doing nothing and shaming people who suggest public transport is a poor option because it’s full of druggies doesn’t seem to work.

And one reason it went away was because "fareless square" became a synonym for rather extreme levels of drug abuse.

More like never tackle the complex

Most heroin addicts can be remarkably close to a normal functioning healthy person if they don't live in precarious conditions without access to a clean supply.

The proportion of heroin addicts who would still be wrecks with healthcare that extends to prescribing what they need is miniscule.

So the first problem is thinking you need to get them off heroin to be able to start dramatically helping.

it's actually highly effective for a majority of people. [1]

Otherwise, what do you propose?

1: https://nlihc.org/resource/new-study-finds-providing-people-...

> Giving someone a house and a doctor will not get them off heroin on its own and may not even help them very much at all honestly.

Giving someone a house and health care will, though.

Every addict I have ever known (I’ve known many) consume drugs in order to escape something. Addressing this while also treating the user will indeed help them. Mental health care + physical health care = “health care” in my opening sentence.

I don’t know what it is about people in the US, but almost all of us completely reject the idea that someone can be held down entirely by their own mind. Large amounts of people are, and those that don’t seem to understand that this is possible are often people whose own mind holds them down, but not so much that they’re homeless.

People in other countries get this. We do not. I don’t understand it.

Hang on, in another comment you say you’re in Dubai where there aren’t any homeless. So how are you seeing this?