What I find interesting is that people have a negative relationship with buses but not with trolley cars, like the old SF trolley cars where you could almost hang off them. If we injected some fun or joy into busses like trolley cars would that improve people's relationships or perspective of them too?
When I was in Mexico City I was blown away and inspired that their bus lanes were actually physically separate from car traffic, sometimes they were even elevated a foot or so alongside car traffic. It made the buses so much faster! I wish bus and bike lanes in the USA were equally separated from car traffic. Different color paint and intermittent bollards don't cut it.
If something is worth doing, it's worth doing right and physically separate bus lanes is doing it right.
There's an intimidation factor that a lot of Americans won't quickly admit to when it comes to taking the bus. They don't know if they can tap with their phone to pay, if they need cash, if they can use change, if they need exact cash/change, if they need a specific transit card etc. They don't know the etiquette for asking to get off the bus and sometimes it varies by bus design. They don't know the routes or the time schedules and find it confusing and overwhelming and often have a low tolerance for the embarrassment that can come with publicly learning something.
Yes. As long as we're looking for relatively easy or cheap improvements, I believe that UX is a huge one. Buses have a long tradition of user-hostile design. "Exact change only", unhelpful and condescending and impatient drivers, unwritten etiquette rules, and everything else you listed.
It has always baffled me why they make it so hard for first-time users in particular. Sure, they mostly care about the regular customers who make up 99% of their passengers, but everyone has to be a first-timer before they can be a long-timer. It's not just UX papercuts, the experience seems designed to be maximally hostile. Is it because one more marginal person is a little more delay, a little more crowding, etc? It feels like there are perverse incentives at work.
It's the same in Europe. There are many car drivers who would never admit that, but they just don't want to leave their comfort zone and learn how to use public transport. But when asked they will say stuff like "well, we live a bit outside the city", or "now with kids you basically need a car".
Sorry, in the case of the bus there are too many bus stops (although there are more express lines now), so the bus stops a lot instead of having less stops where more people get off and walk one more block (what the article talks about).
The muni (tram), stops at stop signs at every block on the west side like the N line, so it’s extreeeemly slow. A system where the tram has priority over cars and does not need to stop at every single block would be life changing.
It does that, but the parent means stop signs. San Francisco where there aren't traffic lights mostly blankets every intersection with 4 way stop signs. The parent is likely referring to The Sunset district, which looks like this: https://www.google.com/maps/@37.7569397,-122.5007035,3a,75y,...
What if a degree could be seized? For example, what if bankruptcy courts could require a debtor to stop "representing themselves" as having a degree as a condition for discharging debt. If a court revoked a degree, it would effectively reset the graduate to the status of a dropout removing a significant amount of the degree's value (I know knowledge has its own value, but credentialism is a big part of a degree's value too).Universities already have the infrastructure to flag students. For example, many institutions withhold official transcripts or diplomas for academic fraud, moral infringements etc. Could this create enough of an incentive to pay back loans and not declare bankruptcy?
I don't think that would fly, since it would provide no benefit to the owner of the debt and would just be enormously punitive and feel pointlessly cruel.
It would be like if instead of a foreclosure they just took a bulldozer to the house, then salted the earth with asbestos and lead so nobody could ever build a house there again. What's the (acute) benefit in just destroying the value? Plus, it turns the four years into a complete waste of time, no matter how hard you worked to get the degree, just because you couldn't find employment after.
I know we're talking about tweaking incentives to make it not worth it to game the system, but this would also screw over people that found themselves in that position through no fault of their own, plus it would waste all the time and work of everyone that taught that person and contributed to their education (even though they got paid, people largely aren't in education for the cash).
I don't know, I think it would be too much of a bummer to work.
When student debt becomes dischargeable, market forces will finally price degrees according to their actual economic value relative to the risk of poor returns. Currently, that price discovery is broken; the cost of a degree bears almost no relationship to its real-world payoff. No need for degree seizure to correct it. Lenders can decide for themselves which degrees lead to returns, which in turn provides degree seekers with actual financial signals instead of vibes-based "go into programming" propaganda from FAANG.
We live in an apartment but use Costco to stock our freezer with meat and seafood. We also use it for gas, cat litter, eggs, and cheese (lasts a long time). Basically for perishables that only need to be stored so long.
We used to buy raspberries, blackberries, blueberries etc at Dollar Stores. They wouldn't last a week in the fridge which is why they were at the Dollar Store, but we were eating them same-day or next day so spoilage wasn't a concern. Really helped the berry budget with toddlers.
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