Oh sure just call Sanders supporters criminals why don't you.
It's Bernie Sanders' fault that even millenial shoplifters are unbearably pretentious.
Wait, are teens millenials? I guess not. What is their generational nickname? "My parents had sex when George W. Bush was President, The Generation?"
Sally claims to be a millennial -- says that the official cutoff is born before 1/1/00, which she was by four months. But that sounds idiotic to me.
My kid was born 9 months after Jan 20 2009. Just sayin.
"official" cutoff? Is there an Office of Generational Naming?
Also, according to the stories I've heard, people born in the early 80s—like me!—are millenials, and it seems absurd that Sally and I should be in the same marketing category.
Anybody can attend an inaugural ball, but conceiving a baby at one takes talent.
Speaking of shoplifting, I'm keeping my eye out for the Crime in California 2015 report, due out next month, to see if the predicted increase in lower-level crime pans out.
Its nice that cultural appropriation is wrong, but appropriating some blue jeans from a store, no problem with that.
7: The "generations" run twenty years. Plenty of people are in the same one as their parents.
My son was born 75 years after his grandfather because we start late in my family.
I've read a few things arguing that there's a logical dividing line within "Millennials" that basically denotes whether you have any memory whatsoever of the pre-digital (for want of a better term) age. It's been long enough that I can't reproduce the arguments/claims well, but it was actually pretty convincing.
In general terms, everyone in Gen X came of age in the pre-internet* era, whereas Millennials split roughly down the middle between those who at least recall that era, and those who literally have no recollection of a time when media and information were predominantly offline.
Like my kids--and Iris is only 4 years younger than Sally--have possibly never seen a corded phone in a house. Young Neb most certainly has, and not just because he's encountered the intentionally twee.
*that is, the era before the ubiquity of the internet; perhaps pre-www is more apt. In keeping with local mores, perhaps I should style it as whether your first wanking material was on paper/TV or on a connected screen
Oh sure just call Sanders supporters criminals why don't you.
The choice of campaign song is obvious.
14: I think I'm Gen X. Only people like Sifu and my parents' friend who worked for BB&N knew about the internet. When I got to college, Harvard had put ethernet in all the Freshman dorms, but the upperclass houses didn't get it until the next year, so I had 4 years of broadband internet in my dorm room, but the class ahead of me had only two. There were certainly Seniors my Freshman year who didn't have e-mail at all. But I didn't really come of age before the internet.
At the same time, Tim is 3 years younger than I am but 5 years behind me in school. He was born in November, was a bit off-cycle when he moved back to Canada Sweden, and they had 13 years of school before university in Ontario when he was going through. When he started university, they had dial-up in the dorms and people would dial in to their parents' internet service, clogging the phone lines.
The end of dial-up seems like a bigger milestone than the web as such, but all of this stuff took years to propagate across the country.
They taught us gopher and telnet in high school.
Show somebody a picture of a floppy disk. If they say anything but "save button," send them to carousel.
my parents' friend who worked for BB&N knew about the internet
Like my Dad, who worked for BBN.
9: nice
I thought millennial began 1982 or so.
"This is not petty theft. This is non-violent resistance to a violent and oppressive economic system in which we are trapped."
As they say at the AVClub, it can be two things.
21: Didn't know how to spell Beranek or how people wrote out the initials. (The school is right nearby.)
The division JRoth mentions seems real and important, although as lurid pointed out it's not really a bright line (and I'll add that wank material is probably not the best marker given that porn was one of the first things to shift to being primarily accessed online). The label "millennial" by now seems to be pretty firmly associated with both groups, though, and I think they probably are more similar than different overall so it makes sense to consider them part of the same generation. At some point a separate younger generation will be defined, but it hasn't yet. I suspect current teenagers may end up being considered part of that generation rather than millennials, but that's really just a guess.
We're calling them "Generation Z" around here. Post-Millennial-2012. In practice, though, "Millennial" seems to mean "college student". E.g., senior administrator talks about what the "millennials" want these days, junior faculty points out the "millennials" are actually going up for tenure...
I almost got in an argument with a staff member who was giving a talk to explain what millenials were, and she claimed that Generation X was a synonym for millenial. Meaning I raised my hand to say something, she called on me, and I thought the better of it and said my question had just been answered.
Millennial is a synonym for Generation X and Winona Ryder had her name changed to Zooey Deschanel.
Millenial's just another word for nothing left to lose.
That sounds as harrowing as dsquared'd "barfights"
The "Millennium" in "Millennium Falcon" meant it had nothing to lose but my cargo.
My son's 75 years younger than his grandfather too. And I'm 72 younger than mine.
My daughter, b. 1990, used to type words she'd memorized on a computer screen before she could read. We got internet about '95, and she was communicating with people around the world by about the time she was twelve, making friends she still has. We got broadband about '01, so it would have started about then.
She graduates this weekend from UofC, Masters in Teaching, but clearly belongs to that 2nd cohort who can hardly remember when there was no internet. On the other hand lots of people younger than she have less exposure and familiarity with it, either because of deliberate parental restriction or because the household doesn't have it.
Isn't Gen Y in the middle of X and Millennials? Or are Y the same as Millennials?
34: I've heard the term both ways. I think it's a dumb term in either case, but it makes more sense for the former.
The dumbest thing I've heard is that I'm a "tweener" because I'm not gen X- I'm too young for Winona- but I'm not Gen Y since I do remember the pre-cell phone pre-internet world.
That is super-dumb. Unfogged does seem to have an unusual concentration of people right on the cusp between Gen X and millennials, whatever you want to call them.
Technically, I should say that under x/2+7 I'm not too young for Winona now, but by at the time I first met the criteria I was already dating my future wife and she was already on to Matt Damon.
The dumbest thing I've heard is that I'm a "tweener" because I'm not gen X- I'm too young for Winona- but I'm not Gen Y since I do remember the pre-cell phone pre-internet world.
Me too!
I remember the first two years of summer camp, when we went home we'd write letters to each other. Then the third or fourth year everyone had an email address, so the counselors gave us each other's email addresses instead, and nobody ever kept in touch again.
39- Sorry I never sent you anything after the summer of '92.
That would have been '96 I think. 8th grade.
You're no tweener, you fraud- you're totally a Gen Y. Unless you stayed back a whole lot of years to end up in 8th grade when you were 17.
Ah, the narcissism of small differences.
I'm just saying, summer of '96 was my third year on camp staff, and I wasn't putting up with some 8th grader thinking he was my equal.
Of course these days working at a camp during a summer between college years is a direct route to professional failure.
Whatever happened to Generation Awesome?
I was 11 in the summer of '96. You're both old.
46: I don't even remember what generation that was supposed to refer to. Sorry, Becks!
So you have to be too young for Winona, but not TOO too young for Winona?
What about Kelly Kapowski?
Clearly you are not a Post-Tweener Pre-Awesome Tweener.
Was she one of the characters on Saved by the Bell?
Holy shit she was, I was just making a joke because I remembered a Kelly from that show.
My kid got a high five from Mario Lopez when kid won a race for 5-6 year olds. Unfortunately the next year, when he was in the higher division so didn't win, they started giving out iPads as prizes instead of high-fives from washed up actors.
I am an early millennial. Post–Saved by the Bell, pre–digital native.
One thing the generation divides ignore, at least wrt technology, is that it's also class-based in addition to age/culture. We had a computer in the early 80s, were on Compuserve and dial-in BBSes in the late 80s, MUGs and AOL in the early 90s, but I'm sure that some large classes of people had no routine exposure to computers until the late 90s or 2000s.
It's almost like there's a divide. Since it's related to computers, they could call it the digital divide.
Holy cats, Saved By The Bell stopped running in 1992. So it was well into reruns when it was my favorite show. Now it makes sense that the Kelly Kapowski actress is practically the same age as Winona.
56: Yeah, that's a good point. My family got our first computer in the early nineties, approximately the same time we moved from the Rez to Albuquerque, and we got Internet access a few years later. That made us relatively but not absolutely early-adopters, and I definitely remember assuming in elementary school that many of my classmates wouldn't have had Internet at home.
We had a computer in the early 80s, were on Compuserve and dial-in BBSes in the late 80s, MUGs and AOL in the early 90s, but I'm sure that some large classes of people had no routine exposure to computers until the late 90s or 2000s.
Almost nobody had exposure to the internet like you did, until at least the mid-90s. My dad was one of the first people he knew to get an email address, because his college started giving out email addresses to faculty, around 1995. This was before the college even had its own web domain. And thus I was the only person I knew in 7th grade able to get on the internet and do awesome stuff (i.e. print out Canonical Lists of ethnic jokes, and Nirvana lyrics and tablatures).
Speaking of x/2+7, I'm not sure what to think about this picture.
As one of the younger members of this commentariat (born 1989, graduated high school in 2007, raised in an affluent suburb full of techies and engineers), the difference between adolescences before and after social media and Web 2.0 loom large. When I was in high school, social media use was restricted the weirdos and weird groups communicating on Myspace and other niche forums, about half of my classmates didn't have cell phones, and laptops were not allowed into class. Now students at my alma mater are doing lessons on iPads (and are all pressured to learn coding, coding, coding) and people 5 years younger than me seem instantly conversant with viral content and (heightened for women) under immense pressure to conform to whatever Instagram standard of beauty and serenity is the most up to date. "The internet is serious business" was strictly ironic when I was an adolescent.
I used my dad's remote connection to work to play tic tac toe and Go on a Unix mainframe in the early 80s. No hacking and and no global thermonuclear war, though.
Oh, so SP and I are the same age? FASCINATING. I wonder where my missing 10-15 years of achievement went. Let me check Dropbox.
Man, I remember very well the level of guitar incompetence that required tabs for Nirvana songs. I may finally have gotten beyond it (again) tonight.
We've been reading my daughter The Boggart, a book from 1993 with a computer/ game design subplot. The computer stuff makes very little sense and I keep verbally editing the weirdest bits on the fly, plus interjecting fascinating historical footnotes about early PCs. (She's going to be so annoyed by me by the time she's twelve, which given current psychological development trends should be next year sometime. Banned from Instagram until it's obsolete, though.)
Heh, I've been having similar thoughts lately- this weekend is the 60th birthday symposium for our big name faculty/department leader which 1) has me thinking I have only 20-something years until I'm in the same position and I certainly won't have people throwing a party like that for me and 2) I'll get to mingle with all the other alumni from his lab, some of whom are around my age and are themselves big-name faculty at other places, senior partners at VCs, or in one case president of the research arm of a major pharma, while I'm here up until 3am writing overdue employee reviews because I spend too much time reading blogs.
61 In 1992, Lonnie incorporated Greatest of All Time, Inc. (G.O.A.T. Inc)
She got there first, heh.
I wonder where my missing 10-15 years of achievement went. Let me check Dropbox.
Early Gen X-er here. I know where mine went: illness, depression, divorce. But life has been soooooo much better these last half dozen or so years and no year better than this, oddly.
I definitely identify as an millennial, despite being born in 1980. There's some obvious reasons for that: all my siblings are younger than me and definitely millennials, many of my social groups during formative years had average age a year or two younger than me, and I largely missed out on 80s pop culture because we didn't really watch movies or TV then. But for me a lot of it is that I don't draw the dividing line based on technology, but rather based on economy. Millennials are the generation that entered the workforce at times when there were no jobs. I don't feel like I have much in common with people who graduated during the Clinton economy. We're the generation who had to manage after the boomers killed the world.
Or, to 26, deans don't see us as millennials because the number of us going up for tenure is half what it should be, because those fucking boomer deans didn't hire any of us and we had to do twice what they had to do for half the reward while they're all "lol, you're obsessed with facebook."
Thread overwhelmingly concentrates on demographic self-identification over the expropriation and resistance at the link.
This is Unfogged bob, I know you know it well. Soon it will be all ekranplans and Blackadder references
65: The tech noticeably didn't make sense at the time either, and yet I have a copy upstairs that the girls can have once Mara can handle narrative tension and Mia can handle things that magically get into houses.
68 is really funny to me because all you'd have to do is change younger friends to older and make it DON'T identify as millennial and every work in the first part is true for me. This bears out my belief that there's a bit of a horoscope thing going on here.
If people currently becoming serious consumers are Millennials, is the next cohort Generation XP?
They taught us gopher and telnet in high school.
They taught us joined up writing...
I am 78/9 years younger than my paternal grandfather (not sure when his birthday was, but he was born in 1872.
70: I think there's an unspoken agreement that the person quoted in the OP is too insufferable to bother talking about.
Re: the digital divide. We had PCs at home starting in about 1981 and I was on BBSs in high school. When the web exploded in the mid 90s, it became really clear how totally foreign all of this stuff was to a great many people.
One way to tell that you're a GenXer is if you immediately associate summer camp with Jason Vorohees.
I never could get into movies like that. I watched a couple because of peer pressure (they were right about beer after all), didn't enjoy it, and stopped. Anyway, I've never seen a Friday the 13th movie.
76: A few years ago there was a documentary about the Friday the 13th series on TV. I especially enjoyed the interview with Betsy Palmer (Jason's mother in the original movie), where she kept saying that even after 30 years she couldn't understand why a movie that was such a piece of junk became so popular.
I would actually kind of prefer to not be considered part of the same generation as the pretentious teenage shoplifters of Tumblr, but I realize that's not really under my control.
pretentious teenage shoplifters of Tumblr
This needs to be the name of either a band or a swimsuit calendar.
I think 6 would actually be a good idea, so we could finally have a resoloution for all these ridiculous arguments -- useful in the same way as the college football playoffs.
According to some sources I am a Boomer and according to others I'm Gen X. Either possibility seems preposterous to me but I suppose I'm a special case. What can I possibly have in common with my cohort when I have absolutely nothing in common with myself?
They probably don't want to reveal their identities.
Ehh, teo, my cuspy-millennial college friend who shoplifted from Walmart on a near-daily basis and is now a sociologist would have said pretty much the same things. Some trends are universal, I'm sure!
Fair enough, though I wouldn't have guessed that pretentious shoplifting would be one of those timeless universal phenomena.
Congratulations, if you don't feel like a special snowflake you're not really a millennial.
But I mostly just wanted to use the phrase.
62 is really interesting and a reminder of how much has changed internet-wise between, say, 2006 and now. Except here, which is basically the society for preservation of steam-powered trains.
I definitely identify as an millennial, despite being born in 1980. There's some obvious reasons for that: all my siblings are younger than me and definitely millennials, many of my social groups during formative years had average age a year or two younger than me, and I largely missed out on 80s pop culture because we didn't really watch movies or TV then. But for me a lot of it is that I don't draw the dividing line based on technology, but rather based on economy. Millennials are the generation that entered the workforce at times when there were no jobs. I don't feel like I have much in common with people who graduated during the Clinton economy. We're the generation who had to manage after the boomers killed the world.
This is spot on. I was born in 1978, but continuously got lumped in with people slightly older than me. So when I graduated college in 1999, grad schools were hungry for math students because so many people were getting easy tech jobs. Within 2 years, the bubble burst and it was much, much harder to get into grad school.
Then again, in 2006 I was on the job market, and the job market was healthy. Even before the market crashed, the people a few years behind me were so much larger in number that they had a harder time getting a job, even though they were stronger candidates than me, and then the market really did tank everything immediately thereafter. I agree that there is some dividing line separating me and Uptegni9.
86: I feel like there was a real shift with the advent of Facebook and Twitter. It seems like I went from usually being an early adopter of intertubes related things to "Get off my lawn you darn kids" in the space of about 2 years.
Born in 1981, and I definitely feel on the cusp. Older, techie friends meant I was BBSing in 1993, and a year or two later I remember being bored enough to sit down and read the entire Internet Yellow Pages. I paid for my own phone line the last two years of high school, mainly so I could use AIM and check my Juno mail. (Did anyone else read the high school debate serial The Nostrum?)
But clearly, the dividing line is whether one was into the New Kids on the Block or the Backstreet Boys.
I was born at the end of 1982, like a lot of the younger commenters here. I had an older brother who is apparently the same age as heebie, and a younger sister closer to my age.
I was thinking about class too. I grew up in working class or socio-economically mixed neighborhoods, and most of the MC people I knew were hippies who didn't own TVs. My first friend with a gaming system had an atari from the goodwill, and we would play Mario Brothers on it in the early 90s. When I tell people my first gaming experience was on an atari, they tell me I've had excellent plastic surgery. I had another MC friend with a nintendo, but she wouldn't let me play it. My elementary school got a grant to provide computer access to underprivileged kids, so we had a computer lab of Apple IIEs, and in fifth grade we had a Macintosh in the classroom, and did our class newspaper on it.
In middle school, some math teachers yet again got a grant to provide technology exposure to underprivileged kids, so we got internet in the classroom in 6th grade (1994ish), and had pen pals from some school in Kentucky. We also got a CD burner, and our teacher was like, CDs are the way of the future. Our classroom had a poster that had a rainbow pathway and said, "information superhighway" on it. I also remember having to write early research papers using card catalogs, but I started doing at least some initial research on the internet (using infotrack!) in high school.
My family got a 286 in 1990 or 91, and then a 486 a few years later. My brother got us on the internet pre user-friendly internet browser, back when you had to type lines of code into DOS. I remember installing software and computer games off of 36 floppy disks, and I remember hacking early anti-piracy security codes software piracy (my mother got pirated versions of wp and other software).
90 is making me feel old.
We used to have to program our computer games on punch cards.
I still have fond memories of my Intellivision.
One of those sentences is true.
My first real job, the office supply cabinet still had a stack of blank punch cards.
That was probably more a result of my boss being very frugal as that was in 1996.
I used to beat the crap out of my intellivision when I lost a game.
We programmed games on our TI but for a while didn't have any sort of storage media for it so every time we wanted to play the slot machine game we had to type in a thousand lines of code. Eventually we got a cassette deck that let you save programs to audio tape. They also sold cartridges with games like Hunt the Wumpus.
In my fifth or possibly sixth job, depending how you count, production runs were still submitted on physical card. In my previous job this had not been the case, but at the site in question the Ops Manager had a cautious approach to all this new fangled stuff.
I learned to program in BASIC from a worn-out book at the public library offering instructions on using the language with your TI and/or Timex Sinclair computers. Ours was an Apple IIe which, it turned out, could be coaxed into making an unadvertised wide variety of horrible sounds.
73: The tech noticeably didn't make sense at the time either -- oh of course; I wasn't attributing the weirdness to anachronism. It's definitely the folk understanding of computers which lourdes described as "inside any computer there is another computer, which is magic."
Big thumbs up to teo in 55 for the en dashes. Keep it up.
Our family were early adopters of Pong home edition. I can't remember which year it was but we acquired it for my sister for Christmas. I don't think she played it much after the first few weeks, but it clearly had an effect as she now makes more money than I can spend QA'ing satellite guidance code.
That's a really esoteric hobby you have.
That too.
But it is just possible, if you are the type, to read 99.last as chris talking about how much he spends on QA for satellite guidance code.
And if anybody's the type, it's Moby.
I was worried I was getting too subtle.
OT: Gawker filed for bankruptcy. It looks like it will just restructure, so you can keep masturbating to it. Especially if you are aroused by Hulk Hogan.
Not that jerking off to Gawker makes you anything but a terrible, terrible, terrible human being, and also a bad lay. Commenters with active dating profiles are especially discouraged.
Travel bleg:
We're going to a wedding in southern Maine the weekend after Labor Day, flying into BOS on Friday and departing Sunday. To max out vacation time, we're arriving early and departing late, but I'm loath to pay for 3 days' worth of rental car.
So my question is whether the Silver Line from Logan to South Station is a sensible workaround, such that we could land, train into town, get lunch, walk around, etc., then train back, pick up the car, and head north. Or do the same on Sunday, since beating Friday traffic out of town seems like a great idea.
AB loves Boston and hasn't been back in ages, so this isn't just time-killing; I'm sure she'd enjoy ~4 hours in town with no particular plans.
108: That should work, but prepare yourself for the fact that the "silver line" is actually a bus--one that stops halfway through so that the driver can change engines from electric to gas or something (I haven't taken it in awhile). But it still doesn't take very long, and Boston's small enough that you'll be able to get wherever you want to go from South Station.
Definitely, I always take that to and from the airport unless someone else is paying for my trip. It is subject to rush hour traffic. In fact the Friday afternoon after Labor Day I will be taking it. Airport meetup?
In fact the Friday afternoon after Labor Day I will be taking it. Airport meetup?
Maybe! I'll let you know when we book a flight.
prepare yourself for the fact that the "silver line" is actually a bus--one that stops halfway through so that the driver can change engines from electric to gas or something
Right, I knew that, I was just being sloppy using train as a verb there. The second part is weird.
I'm leaning towards the Sunday plan, but that may be complicated by a brunch that I'm pretty sure is planned for guests. The event site is a couple hours away IIRC. Anyway, thanks. I knew y'all would be able to help.
There isn't a train to the airport in Boston? Did there used to be? I could have sworn I got on the T right at Logan to go downtown back in the late eighties.
Blue line (train) and Silver line (glorified bus) both run to Logan.
Silver line (glorified bus) goes to South Station. I assumed that was where Jroth wanted to end up.
112: Yes, you could have taken a train in the late eighties--and you still can--but you would have had to change from blue to green or orange and then to red. The silver line goes direct to red.
As to the OP and the internet facilitating shitty enabling groupthink, I found this one way more entertaining.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/11/health/gang-stalking-targeted-individuals.html
That makes sense. Funny, I'm closed-minded about buses. I wouldn't even think twice about thinking of changing train lines twice as being strongly preferable to taking a bus, but I'm probably just being silly about that.
Buses are the pits (doesn't everyone get motion sick on a bus?) but having to change trains isn't so much better. The whole point of public transportation is to space out. I currently do part of my commute as a twenty minute walk rather than change to a train the pulls into the building.
I was actually wondering how far, above ground, the closest blue-line stop is to South Station. I'd think any walk short of two miles or so would be a step up from either changing trains or taking a bus. (I mean, depends on luggage.
I take a bus every day. The trip is only about 3.5 miles.
In fact, South Station is less than a mile from Government Center. No train-changing required.
I could take the trolley, but I'd have transfer to 1958.
That's how I remember Boston; it was so small that lots of things were walking distance from the city center.
In fact, though, you have to take a shuttle bus from the terminals to the blue line station, so might as well just take the hybrid bus directly from the terminals. Also when leaving the airport the silver line is free.
You make a convincing point. Unfogged -- your one-stop shop for incisive analysis of your public transportation options.
117 is pretty disturbing. It's normal to comment at an eclectic web magazine, though, right? This particular virtual community of like-minded ekranoplanists is not itself a symptom of anything in particular, pretty much.
Yeah, even granting that buses suck (and they do), there's nothing about the Blue line that's worthwhile. You get the worst of all worlds: a bus and a transfer to a train that doesn't go anywhere useful.
I'd think any walk short of two miles or so would be a step up from either changing trains or taking a bus.
One mile I'd buy, but two? The connection would have to be pretty darned bad for that not to be worth it.
Eh, I'm probably being overly expansive there. I sort of meant it more to include 'a little over a mile,' than really two.
I only have a strong sense of this because the nearest subway stops are around a mile from my house. I'll walk home from them in the evening, but I hop on a bus to get to one in the morning.
With all the discussion about the T's green line extension, I've also read some things about max distance from subway stops that you can expect people to walk from, and I think it's not much more than a mile.
118/120: It's a glorified bus. Not a regular bus.
But the Government Center stop on the Blue Line is easy walking distance from South Station: Google Maps has it at .6 mile. The convenience really does come down to what's easier at the airport end.
Silver line is easier at the airport end, because it is already a bus, so it takes you right up to the terminals. From the blue line airport station you have to get on the shuttle that drives around to all the terminals.
The convenience really does come down to what's easier at the airport end.
Silver line (glorified bus) wins hands down on the airport end.
134- It has the bendy parts in the middle where you can get all twisted around when the bus turns if your feet are on the two different sections. And they have optimized the transfer from diesel to/from electric pretty well- used to be that drivers had to shut off the engine, unhook cables, align, etc. which would take a few minutes. They put in some kind of guides that makes it under a minute changeover. Although I always wondered why they don't just have a person standing there whose job is to put the connects up or down every time a bus comes by so drivers can just stay in their seats.
Can you walk from the airport to the blue line? My recollection was that you took a (sucky, nonglorified) bus from the terminal to the subway station anyway. So you're not gaining anything.
At any rate, even if the blue line were easier to get to, the silver line is just way better. Not only should is the silver line more train-like than a typical bus, but all the Boston trains that aren't the red line are more bus-like than a typical train.
Yeah, I had forgotten to account for that (or, more, didn't know the Silver Line picked up at the terminals). I will pipe down with my insane bus-antipathy now.
NYC is funny: mostly, the buses suck enough that your closest approximation by subway+walking is almost always going to be dominant. But there are occasional routes where the bus really works well, and I always have to be told about them after doing it the hard way, because I do not consider buses a valid option.
This is what's currently going on at America's Most Evil University (TM). I was thinking you guys could rassle up some ekranoplans and invade from the East. We'd just have to take out the top levels of administration, the business school, and the econ department, which shouldn't be too impossible if we get the woolly mammoth brigade started up.
141: It that because buses run crosstown and nobody can move crosstown? I've heard things like that, but do visit often enough to actually know.
Yeah, Boston is very different from Manhattan in that way. For example, busses in Manhattan are usually for going crosstown and so are on slow roads with lots of lights. Plus they're all way too busy and stop at every stop. There are busses like that in Boston (e.g. the 1 that runs down Mass Ave, where walking is almost always more pleasant and almost as fast), but there are also lots of busses that run on faster roads with fewer people to pick up that are genuinely convenient. For example, if you want to get from somewhere in Cambridge to somewhere a few miles away across the river on the Boston side (e.g. Harvard Square to Cleveland Circle, or Central Square to BU) you really really don't want to go all the way in on the red line and then back out on the green. Also there are whole giant dense areas (Somerville) without a subway line.
I basically only used the busses in NYC in two circumstances: the M60 to Laguardia before I got smart and realized that much misery is never worth it, and the M116 to get to Patsy's or Target which wasn't bad at all.
I like buses. Especially double decker ones. I do find them a little confusing, though, especially when new to them, because of the whole having to know when to get off thing. (If it is busy. I do usually also just ask the driver, now that I'm grown up and not scared of such things.) Smart phones make that easier, though.
What Pause said; driving crosstown is slow, so you can usually beat a bus walking, and Manhattan isn't that wide. This is an embarrassingly Manhattan-centric perspective: there are big parts of, e.g., Queens where it's the bus or nothing, but I don't go to those parts of Queens much.
No, the only way to get to the blue line is to walk on the 5-lane multi-crossing airport ring road. Or at least I've never seen anyone walking on any path that looks remotely safe or legal. There are some fields between the airport and the train stopbut I don't know how you get to those without driving either.
141.2 Yes, I hated when I had to take the bus, like getting to QC from Astoria by way of Jackson Heights (? I no longer remember). But oddly taking the bus from Astoria to get to Columbia turned out to be far faster than taking the subway. I think it's that crosstown thing.
144- The problem there is the central hub without any kind of non-bus ring to let you get places without going to the center then back out. The Urban Ring has been talked about for decades as a way to solve all that, some combination of new trains and dedicated right-of-way bus, but we can't even build a goddamn light rail extension along an existing ROW for less than $3B so a mass-transit ring will never happen.
I took the Dulles-DC bus during morning rush hour and it was a nightmare. The bus to a metro stop nearer Dulles is better, at least until the Metro extension is done. On the other hand, BWI to DC buses have always worked for me.
I'm generally on team train, though. Buses do enough lurching that it's hard for me to read or use a computing type device.
Buses do enough lurching
In the countryside (and in the city, come to think of it), I feel like the drivers go out of their way to ensure they hit overhanging branches, etc. It makes it exciting.
The psychological attractiveness of different bus systems is interesting and weird. In Seattle for example using the bus seems easy and totally fine. DC IIRC also had buses that just seemed like normal public transit, Boston seems to as well, so does Pittsburgh. AC Transit and LA Metro and the NYC bus system just seem like enforced misery. But there's no very super obvious reason for the difference.
I guess plausible possibilities are (a) racism (b) classism (c) something about bus routes (d) this is all in my head.
OT: Now up to chapter 4 of the Buchan nonsense. See URL on nickname for details.
Buses in Portland are (or used to be) quite good, in part because middle or even upper middle class white people took the bus. I have a memory of taking the bus to a CC in a quite nice suburb one summer break and having everyone around me on the bus be an UMC middle aged white person. Bus routes also cut across geographic segregation, so it was harder to marginalize minority communities by providing inferior bus service.
I was once going from Union Square to somewhere right downtown, and google maps suggested three different routes all of which took about the same amount of time (35-40 minutes), but each involved a different train line with no overlap in stops (orange from Sullivan square to State street, red from Harvard square to Park street, and green from Lechmere to Government Center).
AC Transit buses I've been on in the last couple years have been nicer than what I remember from pre-2005. Vancouver buses were generally good but certain lines and times of day were still awful.
I don't think I've ever been on a Muni bus that was good. Most haven't had vomit on the back door, so there's that.
117 has a sentence which resonates: While Mr. Hall has faced scrutiny from the Texas Medical Board over his mental fitness, he retains his license.
I like to believe that if the voices in his head had been preaching gun control he'd no longer be licensed to practice medicine
Oh hey I'm actually going to take the silver line now although not all the way to the airport, the aforementioned party is in the seaport district. That's the part where the bus is much more train-like, dedicated underground electrified lanes with controlled access stations.
From what I can recall of the (now old) reddit thread on 'a secret that if it came out could ruin your life'* there were a surprising number of people** who said they heard voices, a lot, but were otherwise entirely functional.
*Or one of them, anyway. I think there have been more.
**Not "I'm having sex with my sister/brother/aunt/uncle/whatever" common, I mean, but still in there a bunch. The whole thing was mainly a sequence of "I'm mentally ill" and "I'm having sex with a close relative". After a while it started to feel unsettling, as if there was a connection between the two.
I've also read some things about max distance from subway stops that you can expect people to walk from, and I think it's not much more than a mile.
IIRC, bus stops are 1/4 mile and subway/light rail stops are, as you say, a mile or so. That's one of the driving factors in transit-oriented development: the knock-on effects of a train station are vastly greater than bus (I can say with some certainty that busways/BRT are somewhere between the two: we live at least 1/3 mile from the busway stop, and I always take it Downtown rather than the surface buses that I could, almost literally, hit with a rock from my desk).
Anyway, since the whole point is to go into town and then come back and get the rental car, we will have no luggage (Silver Line has dedicated luggage area), and we don't share LB's bus prejudice, so. The train would have to offer a positive benefit, not just be a not-bus for us to prefer it.
So that's who throws rocks at the bus.
155: A friend of mine who's from here but lived in Cleveland for a number of years talked about how white professionals are happy to use the light rail (which I guess mostly just runs from U Circle to Downtown?) but never, ever, ever use the bus. At first I thought he was using hyperbole, but he seemed to be quite sincere and literal about this. I'm sure the lakeshore contingent will tell me this is all wrong.
Bus routes also cut across geographic segregation, so it was harder to marginalize minority communities by providing inferior bus service.
I was going to say something like this about Pgh buses. There are a handful of routes that don't go anywhere a MC white person would go, but the vast majority, at least somewhere along their routes, go someplace not-isolated. Although maybe it's true that this is more true than it used to be because the poor-only routes got cut.
They actually want to add routes & service, but they can't do the most-needed improvements because they already use every available bus at rush hour (so they can only add off-hour service and routes that don't run at rush hour), and their garages are maxed out so they can't add more buses. Of course they closed a garage 10 years ago in a funding crisis, but it's either gone or so shitty that it would cost a fortune to get going again.
Transit is so fucked in this country.
165: Shortly before I moved away, they made a new bus line with a dedicated lane that runs from University Circle to downtown. My impression was that it was pretty popular, including with white professionals. My unscientific impression based on comparing Cleveland to Baltimore is that Cleveland just had a more than usually crappy and inconvenient bus system (except for fancy new dedicated lane thing).
So that's who throws rocks at the bus.
Well, I can't hit them on the fly from here.
Actually, the first 5-10 years we lived here, there were only a couple buildings on the block between us and Negley, and at 5 am the first buses of the day were the loudest noise around. But now there's a multistory school in between, so it would take some artillery-grade calculation for me to hit one.
I just found out that the old submarine in Cleveland is named the Cod. Ours is the Requin.
167: Oh, is the BRT what I was thinking of? Is there a subway/light rail in Cleveland at all?
The Rapid! Fond memories when I visited my grandparents in Shaker, it's how he got to his law office downtown every day.
98: Thanks! I figured you'd appreciate them.
Now up to chapter 4 of the Buchan nonsense
Thank goodness! Thursday came and went and I began to despair.
On topic because crime and stupid: The "Next Door" for my neighborhood had a helpful reminder about not leaving your car unlocked in your driveway and especially not doing that while keeping a spare key in your car. Apparently, one of my neighbors did that as recently as last night.
174: That kind of stuff is a big part of my caseload. One of our chronics told me he doesn't bother shaving keys anymore because all he has to do is go try door handles in parking lots and it doesn't take long before he hits the combo of unlocked with a key inside. Said usually gets a key within the first 6-10 unlocked cars.
I like him. Young kid who got into drugs early but has a decent family and is doing well in drug court. He was in front of me in the line for the metal detector at court ( I was going to a different hearing, he was going to drug court) and didn't think I'd remember him. Turned around and asked if I knew him and laughed when I called him by name without pause.
As this was in a driveway, it was probably a neighbor kid or an Uber driver who had car trouble. Cops found the car undamaged the next day.
Does Uber encourage its drivers to steal other people's cars if theirs break down or something?
I just figure the whole thing smacks of legal short cuts for the sake of operating.
Absolutely. I totally wouldn't put this past them.
Maybe they're playing the long game. Someone who leaves a key in an unlocked car might not change the locks after the car is stolen. So copy the key, leave the car undamaged, and take it later.
I don't mean to brag, but I'm now 50% more avuncular than I was this morning.
What, did you buy a tweed jacket or something?
Congratulations Uncle Moby!
We got a new car just before Christmas, and for some reason I quite often forget to lock it. Went out one morning this week and had left it unlocked overnight - I don't seem to be improving. Fortunately there is never anything left in it, as I am paranoid about theft here.
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From Loomis;wishing for a pdf rather than embedded Scribs
I think this is very important and interesting. Jamelle Bouie at Slate is on this; and I think it was a driver of the structure of the ACA. I do not know how much traction it would have in the Clinton administration. I am less in opposition to it than you might suppose as a Marxist. I'm curious.
I would expect some virulent disagreement on my characterization of it, but a certain framing will be necessary to sell it in these times, with out history.
1) Explicit opposition in principle to universalist redistribution programs, as historically not really helping black Americans.
2) Less overt opposition to funding by universalist or broad-based means, iow, a desire to keep black wealth intact, because it provides targeted assistance to black communities and other reasons. Taxing the 1% will not fly, because the black 1% will be taxed. The larger point goes down much farther into black wealth than the 1% to the black 10% or 20%. Therefore funding will come from 1) above, universalist New Deal programs, or what? Another way to say this is that resources should never be moved from blacks to whites.
3) The usual danger that feminists will try to attach themselves to this as an equally repressed group. However big difference between American blacks and American women, in the amount of real wealth and power each group holds, and the consequences of anti-universalist distribution policies. However of course, the AA movement represented above becomes much more, perhaps only if, viable and powerful if they get the huge numbers of women into their political coalition. And rich and powerful women only get richer and more powerful if they have a narrative that includes them as oppressed.
You can read it and judge for yourselves. Would require more than a post, maybe a reading group to really work through.
You will be very mistaken if you overestimate the degree to which I care. Probably too old and doomed to be individually damaged, and have no attachment to whites or working class. Just interested, curious, watching to see how it works out.
The "backlash" could be catastrophic.
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Repeat:1) Explicit opposition in principle to universalist redistribution programs, as historically not really helping black Americans.
As a concrete example o the way I look at this we could look at the housing crash of 2007-2009.
The housing crash devastated black and latino wealth and upward mobility. Horrible.
But mortgage cramdown was particularly politically difficult because of all the rich and upper middle class whites who bought houses and real estate as speculation, renting, and for quick swapping.
A targeted mortgage cramdown preserving only the black and latino wealth was probably politically impossible, but would have been what I would have supported.
A class targeted program (was this attempted?), renegotiating mortgages only for those with a given low amount of capital or wealth...I don't know.
In any case, I think this is a good example of the complexities of targeted or anti-universalist redistribution policy. Another of course is affirmative action for education.
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And of course following the link in 185 and studying the perspective, authors and associates of the Roosevelt Institute (and other orgs, CAP) can give a lot of insight into the top layers of the Hillary Clinton coalition
Cheryl Mills; Neera Tanden
A friend of mine who's from here but lived in Cleveland for a number of years talked about how white professionals are happy to use the light rail (which I guess mostly just runs from U Circle to Downtown?) but never, ever, ever use the bus.
This appears to be an article of faith among transport planning types. I've seen it asserted without any citation or justification in several instances where the authority has wanted to spend megabucks building light rail where a bus would seem to be perfectly appropriate. Margaret Thatcher made no bones about thinking that only losers used buses; I wonder if this is or was a common believe among people like that?
Actually Margaret Thatcher never said that; at least there's no evidence she did, and it's also been attributed to the Duchess of Westminster.
I wonder if there's an NYC effect there? I mean, I've got a mental block about buses, but I don't think it's class-based, more that NYC buses are kind of terrible for traffic and geography reasons. But you have to figure that American research about what public transit users want and will do is going to be disproportionately weighted toward local NYC preferences, just because we're the biggest public transit system with the heaviest usage.
I can sort of see how it would happen. I mean, I'm not necessarily normal or anything but to me trains feel different than buses. Buses are regular transportation - just like cars only public. Trains alter the geography of the city. They can take exactly the same amount of time (or even take longer) but if two places are connected by a light rail line it makes them feel (to me) like they're just closer together - like you go to one place, walk into a room and then walk out of the room by a different door. Buses never feel that way.
If that isn't just a random idiosyncrasy on my part that would be enough to explain some distinction there. If the white professional sort tend to think of public transportation as something poor people use but they don't have to because they are more virtuous can afford a car then I can see people avoiding buses but happily taking light rail or subways without noticing the inconsistency.
It is true that buses immediately bring to mind "why am I not in a car again?" in a way trains don't. But somehow this seems to matter less in some places than others, for reasons that really aren't at all obvious to me. I mean I'm personally too awesome to ride in the loser cruiser anywhere by choice but other people do so.
I gave up my car a year after moving to Baltimore, and have formed a pretty good picture of the local public transportation landscape, I think.
We have 3 main flavors of public transportation. There's the light rail, but it's only a single North-South line that seems to have been built mainly to allow suburbanites to come to ball games with passing through the rest of the city. Still the places it does go to are nice and 191.1 is basically right.
The are the free buses ("Charm City Circulators"), a set of 3 different lines that offer pretty comprehensive coverage of downtown and surrounding neighborhoods and run every 15-20 minutes. These are pretty cross race/class in terms of who uses them, although I suppose the very rich probably don't ride them.
The conventional metro bus system definitely trends poorer and less white.
Light rail, by being a seriously expensive, hard-to-undo commitment, attracts developer money in a way that buses can't. So if you have light rail, a disproportionate number of people living by it are going to be UMC due to new high quality development. I suspect we also make a similar calculation: this isn't the loser cruiser, this was made for people like us, it cost a lot, the city'll take care of it.
If there are sections that aren't at grade, that probably helps. I ride the regular bus every day and it's still annoying that the driver has to negotiate traffic. Around here a highly static dedicated busway (on a former rail right-of-way, in a gully between neighborhoods) probably has a similar effect to light rail.
Have you time out taking the 64 to and from the busway? Or taking the 53-whatever?
My city has decided that trolley cars are the people movers of the future.
I haven't and should, but it's probably not worth it given the 64's unreliability. My company had a shindig at Highland Park this week and I planned on doing a 64 to 71B transfer. Realtime tracking had the 64 half an hour late, so I had to run to Shadyside. That's not sustainable.
53's a bit far south for me, and at that point I might as well take the 65. 65 is actually a great route, but since I've moved within Squirrel Hill it's not efficient for me in the morning.
I never have figured out what the 65 does.
Google maps failed to find a transit route from my house to Swissvale. Which suggests it is far stupider than I had thought given that the route takes one transfer.
I'm kind of torn on this one. On the one hand, I think that having a dedicated right-of-way and fewer stops really makes public transit much more useful and pleasant. On the other hand, Portland as the exception that proves the rule suggests that it really is racism driving a lot of this, because the thing that makes Portland different from everywhere else is that it's so so white.
194 is true. Here in Roc North high-end development is visibly mushrooming along the metro lines, even the ones still years from completion. Subjectively, rail feels a lot better to me, in part I think because waiting on a platform is more comfortable than waiting at a bus stop.
I'd be more enthusiastic about the trolley if street urchins were to be allowed to hop on and off at will.
Stupid neoliberal fares and safety regulations.
I don't think urchins were formally allowed to hop on and off trolleys in the old timey times, they were just sort of tolerated until some well-meaning representative of the private street car monopoly beat them off with a stick.
Portland as the exception that proves the rule suggests that it really is racism driving a lot of this, because the thing that makes Portland different from everywhere else is that it's so so white.
This seems very plausible to me. The thing about the LA buses (which have HUGE ridership and go everywhere, it's a major major public transit system) is that they are insanely racially segregated. It's changing a bit because millenials, but old racist me still has a mild bit of surprise when I see a non-homeless looking white person waiting for the bus.
OTOH there is a special kind of misery crawling through traffic on a bus when you could be crawling through traffic slightly faster in your car rocking out.
Interestingly, we just opened up a train line that sort-of goes on a route I used to take as a pre-driving teenager on our old crappier bus system. The train was fun but the memories of sitting. sitting. sitting. sitting. sitting. start. stop. sitting. on the bus as a teen was enough to put one off of the bus forever.
197/198: The 65 is a commuter route that goes from SH to Downtown via Boulevard. It only runs a few times a day, but it's very nice; it could be useful to you if you're ever going to e.g. McGee.
From where you are to Swissvale, I'd almost suggest walking over taking the 61C/D to the B.
200: Racism's a big part of it, but it can't be the whole story. There are places like here and others mentioned above where the lines cut across socioeconomic zones and so you end up with a diverse ridership. (Although there is what JRoth said, where routes that only serve poor riders get cut first.) So why are some UMC white people okay with it here, but not elsewhere?
I suppose it could be that you don't get that mixing in places like Chicago where large sectors of the city are racially uniform, but that can't explain everything.
Well, you guys don't have any sort of rail alternative, do you? But it's an urban enough environment that driving everywhere would suck.
If transit planning in the US was weighted towards NYC preferences, we'd probably have less shitty transit. IIRC, interior design of some of the big post-60s systems - BART, MARTA, DC Metro - was explicitly anti-NYC subway. So you got more cushiony seats* and less standing room and an uneasy compromise between suburban rail and urban subway. But I don't think those systems were designed to be alternatives to buses so much as alternatives to roads. BART was definitely aimed at middle-class commuters but that was at least as much about the route as it was about being a train.
As a transit rider I've gotten the unscientific impression that you do see fewer middle-class riders on buses than on some kind of rail, but to the extent that I used to follow transit planning the bus vs. rail arguments tend to be about capacity and whether you'll get infrastructure you can build around. Buses can't carry as many people and bus lines are easier to cancel, but they're cheaper and can cover more area.
Light rail seems like an attempt to split the difference. Around here there's probably a bigger divide between light rail riders and Caltrain riders than between light rail and bus.
*which in the long run soaked up fluids more thoroughly
Here, the bus routes certainly cut through incredibly racially (and economically) mixed neighborhoods, but still the buses are extremely segregated.
True. The only part of the city that has light rail is the South Hills, and my perception is that once you're past the city limits and a few small inner-ring suburbs it gets very white very quickly (may be inaccurate).
From at least some neighborhoods, driving isn't bad at all; I have a 25-40 minute bus commute each way that would be 5-10 minutes driving. But driving is expensive both personally and societally, and it's nice to be able to relax during my commute.
209 seems right to me, with the addition that Bus Rapid Transit (of which Boston's Silver Line in a prime example) is another way to split the difference at a point more on the bus side of the spectrum.
Does "light rail" mean exclusively "not at grade"? I can see it being sensible if it's not at grade, but if it is, you're not getting much benefit over buses at a huge cost. Which would lead me to believe that racism is the motivating factor.
207.2: The problem with walking is that the only reasonably direct way has a good stretch with no sidewalk and very little shoulder.
I'll probably just stay home or drive.
Light rail is generally at grade but on a dedicated right-of-way (though there's a lot of variation). So it's generally a big improvement over regular buses but not much of one over BRT.
Light rail is basically streetcars. Usually it's at grade but there are places where it's in a tunnel or elevated, even around here. You can still fit more people in them, there are fewer stops and you have a building plant you can develop around. I think racism plays a big role in route choices, but it's more like willingness to spend on something better than buses for the middle-class and less light rail is better than buses because it attracts the middle class without actually being better as a mode of transit.
I do think light rail here would be much better if it could flip the traffic signals. Also, light rail here is widely considered a failure. Land use and commute patterns have not fit well with the route laid down 30 years ago.
Admittedly I have very minimal experience with Portland busses, but the one time I was on a bus there that had black people on it all the white people were in the front half of the bus and all the black people in the back half. It was super awkward. I'm not sure whether to count that as an integrated bus line.
We have 3 main flavors of public transportation.
It amuses me that the Baltimore subway system is so bad that its not considered among the 3 main flavors. And rightly so! The Baltimore subway is terrible.
I didn't even know Baltimore had a subway.
I'm visiting Baltimore right now and I also didn't know there was a subway here. But I really just took the light rail directly from the airport to the convention center, so I'm not seeing much of the city.
It the best way to get from Owings Mills Mall to a place where you can walk a couple blocks to transfer to the light rail.
Still kinda impressive that a city with what, 600k people, has a subway at all. I don't think even Euro cities of that size have subways.
I guess let's check.
Per wiki, which notes that the southern half of the Baltimore subway's only line never got built due to "crime concerns" from the suburbs.
As the vision was translated into reality, the original concept was trimmed to a 28 mi (45 km) system in the Phase 1 plan, published in 1971. This plan involved two of the original six lines: a northwest line from Downtown Baltimore to Owings Mills and a south line to Glen Burnie and the airport. Phase 1 was approved for funding by the Maryland General Assembly in 1972. In response to crime concerns of Anne Arundel County residents, the MTA eliminated the south line from Phase 1 plans in 1975.
Baltimore was bigger than DC at the time the DC subway was built. Its only very recently that DC has passed it in population.
Yeah, the subway is pretty weird. I've never taken it. I suppose an Owings Mills-downtown subway line must have made sense to someone, although I have no idea why.
Looks like Lille and Brescia, which are both substantially smaller than B-More, have subways. Who doesn't yearn for the romance of riding on the Lille Metro -- now that same romance is available in Baltimore!
225 written before seeing 223.
Also, funds for the long promised East West light rail line were cancelled a few months ago by our newly elected asshat republican governor.
Catania has 300k and a metro. Palma has 400k and a metro. Rennes has 200k and a metro. Genoa has 600k and a metro. Lausanne hase 200k and a metro.
That's from wiki, but may include very very small systems and those that have rubber wheels as well as steel.
Yeah, Baltimore has shrunk a lot. It was at 950K in 1950. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Largest_cities_in_the_United_States_by_population_by_decade
Yeah, I clicked around on that same wikipedia list. Looks like the three contenders for "world's smallest city with a subway" are Rennes, Lausanne, and Brescia, with Brescia the winner at population 196k. Subway opened in 2013! Take in the romance.
Probably an even more surprising city that has a subway is Buffalo.
Though if you sort the Wikipedia list by ridership, the Catania subway has by far the lowest. The Baltimore subway system gets 24x the ridership of the Catania subway.
The Buffalo subway is not on the wikipedia list, and therefore cannot exist.
I suppose an Owings Mills-downtown subway line must have made sense to someone, although I have no idea why.
Owings Mills was supposed to be the next Columbia. Then they decided not to build the lake. And they built the Mall far enough away from the Metro entrance that you needed a shuttle bus to get there. Because fuck urbanism, I guess.
How can Baltimore possibly have a subway if it wasn't in The Wire?
Buffalo is not inhabitable on the surface for 6 months of the year, so it make sense they have a subway.
235: That it didn't rate an appearance in The Wire is the ultimate "fuck you" to the Baltimore subway.
I'm on light rail right fucking now. It's actually kind of full because they're only running one car on this train.
That automatically makes it a trolley.
It can't be a train without having two things connected because word origins matter.
The quad cities, as its DJs have said, has the best train system in America.
I once stopped to vomit in Davenport, Iowa.
Glasgow and Newcastle have underground systems. Neither are huge cities, although Glasgow, I suppose, once was. Glasgow is about 600,000 -- down a lot from its industrial peak, and the greater urban area is still around a million -- and Newcastle is about 275,000 I think.
I'M ON LIGHT RAIL AGAIN NOTHING CAN STOP ME EXCEPT REGULAR TRAFFIC RULES
Of course, I just discovered that Sunday-schedule light rail in Baltimore can't take me back to the airport; the first trip that goes there arrives ten minutes after my flight leaves. Hired car of some kind it is.
(My group here has been using Uber a lot. It's really hard to mentally reconcile the whole "Uber-the-company is a bunch of terrible assholes" with the quality and convenience of the service you get as a rider. Especially visiting another city where you don't know the local taxi companies, probability of being able to pay with credit cards, taxi stand locations, etc.)
It's really hard to mentally reconcile the whole "Uber-the-company is a bunch of terrible assholes" with the quality and convenience of the service you get as a rider. Especially visiting another city where you don't know the local taxi companies, probability of being able to pay with credit cards, taxi stand locations, etc.
Yep. They may be world-class dicks, but it's sure a great service to have.
OT: "Hot Fuzz" is ballistically implausible but not bad.
A naval mine is going to be my go to ending if I ever start writing short stories.
I'd like the last six words I hear in this life to be: "Don't touch it, it's pure evil!"
245 Too much cavorting, I presume.
Two alternate cultural history ideas:
1. Rock 'n' roll never develops beyond being a weird little blues offshoot. Various types of jazz predominate for awhile instead.
2. George Lucas dies just after completing Return of the Jedi. Jim Henson doesn't die in 1990, but instead goes on to have another 30+ productive years of new puppetry and film.
254.2 The Jim Henson Company fills the Marvel Studios niche. Among other films 2017 will see the release of the seventh film in the "Pigs in Space" franchise and the fourth Gonzo/ Fozzie Bear buddy cop movie, Swedish Master Chef and Swedish Iron Chef are the top hit shows on competing cable TV reality foodie channels, Kermit stars in the latest Mission Impossible sequel and Scooter's kiss-and-tell-all memoir has been optioned by Leo DiCaprio.
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I just tried to log in to my facebook account (against the rules I have 2 - one has my middle name) and I can't get in. Someone seems to have changed the e-mail address, and I never gave them my cell phone number. Or else something happened when I marked a facebook e-mail as junk.
1. Apologies to anyone here who may have been spammed from that account.
2. Is there anything I can do to get it back or do I just need to refriend all the people on my list using the other account?
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Yeah, you can still get some tense race relations on the bus. You can also get some great conversations. Some of the best conversations I've had on race in America are on a long bus ride once all the white people (except me) get off. And since I actively make and respond to chit chat with people of color and grew up (in part) in the 'hood, I sometimes got treated differently from other white people. On the bus, I've observed or participated in conversations about (among other things):
1) meta conversations about norms of sociality among white vs. black people
2) treatment of black vs. native people in Portland,
3) Cultural norms among black people in the PNW vs. LA or the South
4) The experience of being Latino in Portland over the course of 60 years
5) Child rearing differences between African-Americans and West African women.
6) The changing experience of segregation from the 1960s-1990s
7) Why and how white Portlanders are more racist or racist in different ways from white people elsewhere.
I've had all sorts of other weird, funny, or creepy conversations too (I appreciate being offered a screw driver by a homeless man with a paper bag of vodka and a bottle of orange juice), but in general I enjoyed the experience of interacting in even a very temporary community of diverse people.
The Jim Henson Company fills the Marvel Studios niche.
Speaking of Muppets and Marvel.
I think racism plays a big role in route choices, but it's more like willingness to spend on something better than buses for the middle-class and less light rail is better than buses because it attracts the middle class without actually being better as a mode of transit.
ttaM can no doubt speak to this better than I can, but as I recall the aborted West London Tram was very much pitched as a way to get UMC types out of their cars (as were other tram/light rail systems proposed or built in the UK in the 90s and early 2000s). And that's in London, where the buses have a fairly diverse user base.
Admittedly, the other big idea to the scheme seemed to be to just make sure there was no space on the Uxbridge road for cars, thereby reducing congestion by fiat.
The thing is that, IME, commuters prefer light rail (or the Tube) mainly because it's predictable. Unless there is a breakdown or something, you can be sure that there will be a train every few minutes, and it will take the same time to get from A to B every day. Traffic conditions make buses uncertain; the same journey might take half an hour or it might take an hour. So why would you commute by bus if you had the choice? That's the big reason why light rail is better as a mode of transit.
And so commuters prefer to live in places that have good Tube access, and up go the house prices.
258 is terrific (largely unintentionally). I don't think I've ever been on a monoethnic form of transport in London, except my bike, and that's because there's generally only me on it.
re: 260
I think that all predates me. I moved to that bit off London in around 2009-2010.
If they'd built it, though, it'd have handily taken me from home to station, and near enough to xelA's nursery to make it bloody handy.
re: 261.last
I've certainly been the only white person on a bus, fairly often. But that's not been because buses are generally whitey-free, it's just been that I'm on buses often enough, and the area I live is non-white enough, that that's just a statistical thing that's going to happen.
Yeah, I probably have been, late at night when there are only a dozen or so people on the bus. I'd say the buses in my immediate area are about 60% black and 10% Asian (in the American sense) on average. But that's not far off the general demographics.
The thing is that, IME, commuters prefer light rail (or the Tube) mainly because it's predictable. Unless there is a breakdown or something, you can be sure that there will be a train every few minutes, and it will take the same time to get from A to B every day. Traffic conditions make buses uncertain; the same journey might take half an hour or it might take an hour. So why would you commute by bus if you had the choice? That's the big reason why light rail is better as a mode of transit.
True enough. Having done it in the past, I wouldn't commute by bus if I didn't have too, for precisely that reason. But for journeys to the shops etc, they're great. Especially now you can get realtime departure info.
I'd say the buses in my immediate area are about 60% black and 10% Asian (in the American sense) on average.
The black people, conversely and concomitantly, explained the policeman, are on average about 60% bus.
AND BLACK PEOPLE BE LIKE THIS (walks slowly along in group of three)
I can generally zone out and get into a book on the subway and not have to worry about missing my stop. Not so on the bus.
261: I used to feel this way in Boston, but then the winter of 2014-2015 happened. The T now breaks down a lot AND buses get stuck in traffic. Our public transportation is just falling apart.
I'm waiting for a bus while listening to the school crossing guard talk about marijuana to another commuter.
That's one reason I bike, no matter what the traffic is like my commute is always within 10% of my mean travel time.
