Pontevedra, Spain declares its entire urban area a "reduced traffic zone"
greeneuropeanjournal.eu866 points by robtherobber 3 days ago
866 points by robtherobber 3 days ago
I'm from Pontevedra. It has been the major's long-term project (~ 20 years) to make the city for the pedestrians: and he's done it. This works mainly because of two things: 1) the city is small and it takes aprox 30 min to walk it entirely from end to end, and 2) it is mostly flat. Only a smooth hill from "orillamar" to "alameda/peregrina". Unfortunately, the major obsessed with getting rid of cars (which I am highly grateful) but forgot to provide reliable public transport to close-by villages (max 5km,i.e., Poio/Marin/Salcedo). This means tha people from these villages commute by car to the city, which has really poor parking capacity. And the most important thing: there are zero specialized jobs in Pontevedra. Either you are a public state worker, for which you need to pass an exam to lock a lifelong job with no possibility of being fired regardless of how incompetent you are, or you work in hospitality. My partner works in Santiago and I work in the UK. There is no future for us in our city unless we want to study and compete for a position with thousands of other Spaniards. I firmly believe the major should also prioritise quality jobs. It is pretty nice for tourists to experience a city with no cars, but the reality of most locals is that they either leave or settle to accept precarious jobs.
> Unfortunately, the major obsessed with getting rid of cars (which I am highly grateful) but forgot to provide reliable public transport to close-by villages (max 5km,i.e., Poio/Marin/Salcedo).
He can't! Mayors in Spain do not have the authority to establish public transportation outside their municipality, as is the case of the villages you mention. That would fall under the authority of the Xunta de Galicia, which as you surely know, has done a terrible job with that in all Galician cities, not just Pontevedra. (I'm from A Coruña).
Man, I was near A Coruña a few weeks back and was marvelling at how great it was that I could stick my friends on a bus in a small town and they’d get to Santiago. You have public transit.
Where I live in Portugal, there’s nothing - no buses at all, no taxis, zero public transit of any kind. You drive, you walk, or you ride your donkey.
There are bus stops, from when there used to be buses, but there have been none in 20 years.
I'm curious where you are in Portugal. I visited for a few months back in 2017, and I didn't get a sense of the transit, but there were lots of nice new roads to drive on (which I get is not the right answer here).
Huh! I didn't know this. Thanks for clarifying. Yeah, we all know what the Xunta is doing...
I'm looking for a place to move to in 5-10 years, and A Coruña is one of the places I've been researching! A friend from Spain says it's too cloudy/rainy. What do you think about the weather and any points in general about your city?
Maybe I shouldn't answer because housing is becoming prohibitively expensive so I shouldn't incentivize people to come here, but people have helped me in HN in the past :) So I'll do it.
In my view it's a city with awesome quality of life. Indeed it's cloudy, rainy and windy but it's better than most Galician cities (cough, Santiago, cough) and not that bad in the grand scheme of things, depends on what you compare to. 20 or 30 years ago I used to very strongly prefer the climate in southern Spain to that in Galicia, but with climate change things have changed a lot. We now have an actual summer that lasts for 3-4 months (it used to be one month, with luck :)), winters are mild, and we don't have the sweltering summer heat that is common in other parts of Spain. If you really need a lot of sun you won't like it, but if you're OK with weather being somewhat unpredictable as long as temperatures are mild (to give you an idea, we use heating for around 5 months but only turn it on like ~1 hour a day, and we don't feel there is need for AC), I'd say it's fine.
In general, pros:
- Great surroundings with coast, beaches, cliffs, the port, etc.; everything easily reachable by foot or bike from the city center (there are beaches in the city center).
- A 12 km long seafront walk (also friendly for cycling and running) with nice surroundings and sights.
- Nice size, in my opinion: big enough to have plenty of things to do, but small enough to be manageable (in Madrid in theory you have more stuff to do, but in practice my friends who live there end up going to things in their district because moving around is cumbersome. In A Coruña it's easy to get to an event anywhere in the city).
- The city is extremely safe. I have been here for 20 years and I think in all that time I only got asked for money by a junkie at 3 AM once. Nothing more serious than that ever happened to me (and I used to go clubbing night a lot, and still often take walks at night).
- Punches above its weight when it comes to events. From St John's night (23rd June) to early September there are events literally every day - concerts, book/art/medieval/comic/science fairs, exhibitions, workshops, and so on. The rest of the year not so much but still more than in other cities I know of comparable size.
- Also lots of things to do with children, if you have them. Many events specifically for them, apart from not one but three science museums plus an aquarium. And of course the above mentioned beaches.
- Like many Spanish cities, it has plenty of lively walkable streets to go shopping, for some wine/tapas, dining, etc. A lot of street life, unless in very rainy days.
- Galician food is top notch.
- While we are far from northern European levels of bicycle usage, lately there has been quite a lot of progress, with bike lanes and a bike-sharing service that works quite well.
- The city is booming right now, the economy is going well, people have work, so there is a lot of activity in general. (This may change, though. A political change in Spain is incoming and IMO it's not going to be for the better).
- You can reach other interesting cities, like Santiago or Pontevedra, by highway or even better, by train. Santiago is less than half an hour away by train and they are frequent.
So-so:
- Public transport has room for improvement, but it works. Maybe with some wait but it'll take you anywhere.
Cons:
- Still too many cars and pollution for my taste (although we're making progress). Although of course, much less than in any US city, and the city is perfectly walkable.
- The amount of dogs is absolutely insane. Honestly, I travel a lot and I haven't seen a city even close to the amount of dogs you see here. I guess it's maybe not a con if you have one :) But to me it's very annoying, because there's always people that lets them loose near children or that doesn't pick up their excrements, so finding dog poo is very common. And it's difficult not to hear some neighbor with a dog that barks.
- Construction quality tends to be bad. Most buildings are from the 60s-70s boom, ugly blocks with poor insulation. Much of the housing prior to that has little natural light and much of the housing after that has little space.
- Also related to this, the city center, tourist areas and parts of the city by the sea, etc. are beautiful; but many neighborhoods are ugly as hell, full of soulless blocks that have little to envy from Soviet architecture.
- Housing prices are skyrocketing both for buying and renting.
- Since we are in a corner of Spain, traveling tends to be inconvenient. We do have high-speed rail to Madrid which works very well, but if you want to go further, you typically need to take a flight to Madrid or Barcelona and there are not many, so layovers tend to get long.
> three science museums
I'm in. :-)
But I'm not coming for five, maybe ten years, so at least I won't be the one crowding your city for a bit.
Thanks for taking the risk of overcrowding!
What's your current city? To find something comparable...
I've lived all over the place. Currently New York, but not looking to replicate that. Goal is someplace walkable with nice weather and people, and adequate health care. We've spent time in Portugal, Uruguay, Argentina, Thailand, England, and several others for brief visits. Oh, and decent internet :-)
What would it take to change the monopoly of the Xunta de Galicia? Or reform them?
I've been to Pontevedra and actually I thought it was something of a public transport hub! I was there because I was changing buses.
Looking at Google Maps, there's a bus (XG628007) every 20 minutes from Marin to Pontevedra that takes 18 minutes for 7 km, along with at least two other bus routes which are less frequent and less direct.
How much more public transport could you ask for? There are subway stops in Manhattan with less frequent service. It's not practical to build rail to every village. An express bus might save some commuters 10 minutes, but it looks like the population is spread out along the coast so this would not be a huge benefit.
Maybe the buses are always late or cancelled, but that seems like a cultural problem rather than the mayor "forgetting" to provide them.
Public transport just serves as an excuse to argue against car-free policies. Public transport can never be good enough to cover any rural alley cost-effectively. It also does not need to, cities don't need to justify makong themselves more livable to their citizens, at the cost of commuters who only see the city as a parking lot and roads.
The solution is simple. Just build big parking lots outside the city where land is cheap, and a bus service from these parking lots to the inner city. That way commuters can get to their workplace and back fast enough.
Making commuting viable that way is beneficial to inner-city folk too. When people who want to live further away from city can do it effectively, housing will become cheaper for those who actually want to live in the city.
It works great when done well but generally the people with expensive inner suburb real estate typically fight tooth and nail to prevent that.
I've always argued - given the tech we have - that one's municipal rates and taxes should include a public transport rebate.
Say the first €x /month,year is free, thereafter you pay as normal.
Use it or lose it.
It's true there is a bus to Marin every 20min but it uses a _single_ fixed route. People that live far away (>1km) from this path spend less time driving to Pontevedra than walking to the nearest bus stop.
It is not just increasing frequency, it is a matter of providing alternative routes to serve an important part of the population.
You could also bicycle to the stop? It's not really practicle to cover any rural location 1km apart with a bus stop.
> [...] there are zero specialized jobs in Pontevedra. Either you are a public state worker, for which you need to pass an exam to lock a lifelong job with no possibility of being fired regardless of how incompetent you are, or you work in hospitality.
Alas, this is basically how it works in most of southern Europe, including my home country Italy. I don't know how much a small-town mayor can do to reverse years of bad political choices at the national level.
I'm not saying the mayor should change what is not under his radar. I'm saying the mayor should attract private companies for locals that don't want to be public state workers.
Thanks for the perspective. I think it's difficult for small cities like Pontevedra to create high quality jobs. There are not enough people to support rich doctors, lawyers, accountants and such. Factories can be established, but most people employed in a factory won't have a "high-quality" job. What other type of high-quality job could the city create?
[1] population ~ 80k, but working population ~ 50k.
Your perspective is really skewed here. 80k is easily enough to support multiple hospitals, specialist doctors, many dentists, and several multi hundred employee specialized companies.
I live in a city like this. We have muni employees, a hospital, some startups, plenty of non-tech jobs. There are doctors, lawyers, accountants, tradespeople, restaurants.. 80k is a LOT of people.
Side note: an hospital in Spain can be a relatively building with a few specialists, perhaps 20 people working here counting the staff. On many other countries an hospital is a huge building with dozens of specialists. The small places are "medical/care center". For sure there’s specialized jobs here too.
Clinics with 20 workers are not typically called hospitals, but rather "Centro de salud" or "Ambulatorio".
A "hospital" is a place with beds where patients stay overnight. All the countries where I have lived, including Spain, make this distinction.
I mean the option is civil servant vs no jobs
having an factory literally only positive from there
> close by villages, max 5km
a good cycle path would do wonders there. a flat 5km ride is doable for almost everyone, including seniors and children.
regarding jobs: that's got nothing to do with the carless center. to the contrary - for remote work, it'd be perfect.
Do you know the funny thing? There is a cycle path from Pontevedra that stops ~500 meters before Marin (although still Pontevedra jurisdiction). It has been like this for years. Those 500 meters are ocean. We can't cycle through...
looking at the map, everythin is on one side of the ocean, so a bit longer cycle path would do, no ?
How do the employment prospects compare to other Spanish cities? It's one thing to say prioritise quality jobs but it seems breaking the mold in one dimension is hard enough, but to do it for 2 dimensions at the same time is pretty tough.
The situation they describe is true in the overwhelming majority of Spanish cities of comparable size. It is an actively discussed topic in Spain that there is a serious problem with people having to move to Madrid or Barcelona for jobs and the rest of the country emptying out. Regions with no coast that aren't Madrid are now often called "la España vaciada" ("the emptied Spain"). Near the sea cities don't empty so much, but often most jobs are in tourism so there is still a lack of high-skilled jobs.
There are a few cities of that size that are more dynamic, because they have managed to attract some IT/biomedical/etc. Santiago, which they mention, probably falls into that bucket, although it's still far from being a skilled jobs powerhouse. And anyway it's an exception rather than the rule, and I'd say it's mostly related to having a university with over five centuries of history and all the ecosystem that generates, not to anything a mayor could do.
There are a lot of places with crappy job markets and plenty of cars. I'm thinking of southern Italy for instance. At least they put the city on the map for something positive. Better than being just another anonymous place with poor job prospects and, who knows, maybe getting some attention helps with the economy.
Exactly the point, those that celebrate these victories from the outside, completely lack the perspective what it means for the people on the suburbs, let alone everyone else not fortunate to afford housing in the city center.
Cities don't need to cater to people moving out to the suburbs, who only view the city as a road and a parking lot. Citizens of the city have every right to make it attractive and livable for themselves.
Pity that whole thing with having a job, and wanting to get some better living standards.
People usually don't live in the suburbs by choice, they get pushed there by the higher classes that can afford the city.
Having lost access to the city center during my teenage years certainly gave me a perspective on those that talk from above, without worries about everyone else.
Around here, people voluntarily move to the suburbs because they want a house and a garden or simply larger flats for a lower price. And then they demand that prople inside the city center cater to them and turn their city into a parking lot for those not living there. I'm glad this is now being slowly reversed, and that cities actually look after their citizens rather than commuters that moved away because they wanted large houses.
As if, living in the suburbs means having larger houses.
Feeling lucky living into one of those matchbox sized flat up on the 15th floor, while community 4h per day, distributed between several buses, train and subway lines.
> Around here
And around here people are moving out of the city because they cannot afford a flat in the city.
People usually don't live in the suburbs by choice, they get pushed there by the higher classes that can afford the city.
People in Spain live in the suburbs by choice.
it really doesnt work like that in Spain. The associations say the US has with what a suburd is, and of suburban life, does not translate to Spanish city planning. A better word for "suburb" in Spain would be "outskirts" of city—somewhere you might be pushed to for financial reasons. They are often urbanised areas of cheap apartment blocks, and if rural, not in a fancy way, e.g. large spacious houses. The discussion on this thread is coming from a cultural misunderstanding.
There are of course also very nice houses around cities, and rural ones out from that, but they rarely characterise suburbs in Spain (Barcelona is an exception I've noticed, and Madrid has some satellite towns and cities North of city that are very plush, though not the suburbs).
As someone that grew up between Portugal and Spain, you can only be joking, by choice!, thanks for making my day.
Unless you mean those CEOs of construction companies, and offshore factories, with their villas and high powered sports cars.
I really would have liked my parents had such a "choice"!
Thank you for the real "insider" information. As usual govt tries to get rid of something, but by their incompetence they create other problems.
Me myself living in a large city, try to avoid car as much as possible. But when the incompetence kicks in, the public transport fails at so many levels, I have to use my car, or I'd spend 2-3 times more on commuting (e.g. instead of 1hr - 3hrs daily)
This is really amazing to see trending on HN. I spent a couple days in Pontevedra this summer while walking the Camino de Santiago. It was absolutely delightful and what I experienced aligns with the article. The old town was filled with wide streets almost exclusively for walking, cafes and restaurants that sprawled into plazas, and people young and old enjoying the car free public space. It was one of the first stops on our trip through Spain and as an American it was stunning.
In America the contrast is stark. Most of our public spaces prioritize cars instead of people. I’m lucky to live near the beltline in Atlanta. It’s incredible to see how people flock to the beltline for a car free experience. It’s such a rare thing in America. Where it exists you can see that there is tremendous demand for it. Supply on the other hand is unfortunately very difficult to deliver.
I was in Spain last month and what stood out is that walkability requires mom and pop stores as well as more integrated neighborhoods with small commercial shops mixed into residential. Small shops seemed to be the majority in the city centers. The only large store I saw was a Lidl. They have largeish indoor markets that are more like a mini mall of individual shops like a butcher, produce, baker, cheese, even restaurants and bars. And these are located in a neighborhood center serving the surrounding community.
The thing that kills walkability in the USA are the hyper scale stores and malls where everyone wants a mega store that has everything - one stop shops. They are too big to fit in small neighborhoods so they have to be built in a commercial district or large strip mall. And since they are big and house many shoppers at once they need big parking lots. Then they need big streets to feed those big parking lots. These big ass stores DEMAND cars and are very much a part of the problem.
If you want more walkability then incentivize lots of small shops over single giant shops. I would also argue that neighborhoods that are all residential for blocks and blocks are another problem so zoning should force a minimal commercial allotment to ensure walkable neighborhoods.
I think big box stores are popular largely because it would be inconvenient to drive between many smaller shops just to find the same variety of goods. It’s the same dynamic we see with car-dependent shopping malls, where the main advantage is being able to park once and visit multiple stores. If instead you had to re-park at each individual store, the experience would be far less convenient.
But if a town is designed to be fully walkable so that people can easily walk from store to store (similar to the experience of shopping inside a indoor mall), then I think the appeal of large one-stop-shop stores is greatly reduced.
"so that people can easily walk from store to store (similar to the experience of shopping inside a indoor mall), "
That is funny to read that, because indoor malls were meant to replicate the experience of shopping in a commercial area in a city, not the opposite.
It actually failed though. I feel terrible, sleepy and only want to get out after more than half an hour in these indoor malls. Probably something that has to do with artificial light and aircons.
The gruen transfer...look it up :)
Interesting. I guess the loud music and high temperature in some clothing stores is meant to achieve the same. They look like methofs law inforcement would use in an hostage situation.
In my case it gives me the urge of leaving as soon as possible. I could see how it could create impulse buy but most of the time I go to a shopping mall, it is to be able to try out clothing before buying and I will just lose patience and go away if it doesn't fit well. I tend to avoid them as much as I can anyway.
> But if a town is designed to be fully walkable
That is the point here. And do you always need to do all your shopping at once?If things were more walkable you can defer some shopping to other days.
You go to Midtown Manhattan and you continue to find plenty of chain stores like Target. Large scale stores are fine. Just don't dedicate space to parking. If you must, use underground parking garages not surface parking lots. You can cater to lots of shoppers if you assume shoppers will walk there or take public transportation.
It's easy to forget the large Department Store started in downtown areas with plentiful multi-story buildings. We tend to remember the few that remain now as the anchors at the ends of malls, but they started as more natural vertical extensions of urban development.
> They have largeish indoor markets that are more like a mini mall of individual shops like a butcher, produce, baker, cheese, even restaurants and bars.
It's very common all over Europe, they are simply called "markets".
Yeah, that's hilarious, that's what markets ARE. That's how they were created. Like, thousands of years ago.
Mixed use zoning and some rules on what businesses can open would go a long way. Where I live I can walk to a small downtown that spans a few blocks with a train station. Unfortunately there is no where to buy groceries. There's like 3 ice cream shops, 3 pizza joints, and 9 salons though.
Is there no demand for grocery stores? Seems like they naturally would pop up to fill demand
We have a very large number of grocery stores. They just aren't in walking distance of the downtown area. So there's demand, but apparently not enough for a bodega with produce.
Grocery stores are pretty low-margin, and need a certain amount of demand (for the size Americans are used to).
Some convenience stores get moderately close to being a grocery store.
It'd be an interesting experiment to see how few products you could carry (and of course, only one of each type) and have people still willing to shop there.
> It'd be an interesting experiment to see how few products you could carry
Liquor store comes to mind. There are two cigar shops, two wine shops and a beer shop downtown. Just weird priorities I guess.
I don't know about that. There have been large grocery stores and retailers in Washington DC for years, and walkability is fine. It's most comfortable when it's just one or two in a neighborhood, of course, but a block's a block.
Major retailers for sure but DC stores are typically more compact than their suburban counterparts. IMO it’s great. I far prefer the small WF in Logan Circle to a giant one in NOVA - it’s much faster to get in and out and still has everything I need.
I would say that the causality goes in the other direction. We have big stores Carrefour and even some Coscos, but not in the middle of walkable cities.
>Where it exists you can see that there is tremendous demand for it.
Everybody loves public transit until they get panhandled for the jillionth time, or they witness (or experience) violence, or some other anti-social behavior sours the whole thing.
I spent some time in NYC during the Giuliani years, after the city did a lot of work cleaning it all up: stopping turnstile jumpers, removing graffiti, more police, etc. It was great. You'd get the occasional guy that jumps on, makes a speech about how he's raising money for something or other, and walks around trying to sell chocolate bars. And there was the occasional dangerous person, insisting on getting up in your face.
So long as this sort of behavior remains at a very low level, something like maybe once every couple of weeks, that's probably okay. But public transit loses all appeal if it happens often. If it rises to the level of violence, everybody starts thinking about the suburbs.
Public transit requires a certain level of unspoken agreement. "We will all behave in this manner." If this unspoken agreement is broken often enough, then it must be enforced. If it is not, and other options present themselves, people will choose the other options.
This happened en masse many decades ago in America. Those that could decamped for other places where their social expectations were met.
I'm a big supporter of urbanism. I loathe the time I spend in my car, and I don't even have that far of a commute, but I have zero other options if I want to live where crime is low and the schools aren't dysfunctional. Until this is addressed, there is no argument about commuter density or efficiency of movement or anything else the proponents of public transit like to talk about that will make a lick of difference.
The worst argument anybody can make is "but that's just life in the big city!" If so, then I'm not going to live and raise my family in the big city. Airy-fairy principles of efficiency or an arguable notion of convenience will not take precedence over safety and quality.
All this applies to cars as well. Drivers are wild and driving is absurdly dangerous. I hate driving because other drives act like they are the car in the world - particularly post covid. Here in Toronto turn signals feel like they have been uninstalled. We have a ton of street racers tearing up the roads. I see motorcyclists pop wheelies and rip down major streets weekly.
All of your complaints about lack of pro social behavior applies to drivers too.
I sit on the bus watching 10~25% of drivers on their phones watching videos at 60mph on my way to work. All ages too, including surprising old people. I live on a street that's posted 25 MPH and watch people impatient with the light down the block try to cut around traffic at ~40 down a narrow 1.5 lane street. Several times this year I've watched people cross a double yellows to drive into oncoming traffic to make a turn or skip past traffic. On Monday I was late to work because a driver ran into a pedestrian, stopped, then drove off, leaving him bleeding from the head on the side of the road.
Yeah, let's talk about antisocial behaviors. I'm getting to the point where I think roads should be designed specifically to inconvenience drivers. And I am one, I like being able to drive across the state, or across town to places that can take a long time by transit. Cars can be great.
> All of your complaints about lack of pro social behavior applies to drivers too.
I would argue that drivers are worse. I've had motorists stop me while crossing a multilane street asking for directions. I'm thinking, "WTF, this isn't a safe place to stop and talk." I've also have had drivers pass by me while I was laying on the road. (One time after flipping on my bike because of street car tracks. The other time after being struck by another vehicle.) And these are normal people I'm talking about here, not some "big scary" stereotype.
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.
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?
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.
"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.
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.)
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.
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.
> Everybody loves public transit until they get panhandled for the jillionth time
People love driving until they're stuck in traffic, or their kid dies in a fiery car crash after being ran into by a drunk driver, or they get a flat tire, or can't afford their monthly car payment.
To your point about society needing to be better, that applies generally and has nothing to do specifically with transit, walking around outside, or any other daily activities.
You can live in a big city, affordably, with a yard and even a garage and have public transit like a light rail or a bus system, or just damn sidewalks that go to places. These supposed trade-offs are non-existent except in extreme cases like New York City, which isn't what is generally being discussed.
>>> Everybody loves public transit until they get panhandled for the jillionth time
>People love driving until they're stuck in traffic, or their kid dies in a fiery car crash after being ran into by a drunk driver, or they get a flat tire, or can't afford their monthly car payment.
The relative rates of these things are very, very different (as are the harms).
> The relative rates of these things are very, very different (as are the harms).
I mean, as a first approximation, about twice as many people die in car crashes than are murdered in the US every year so...
It applies to public transit specifically because people have freedom of speech to be assholes on public transit. If I have an uber or a private taxi or even a private collectivo which is a private system that works like public transit in much the 3rd world, if I get sick of someone panhandling for the Nth time I can kick them the fuck out.
If you look at places with nice public transit like Germany or Japan, they have much weaker freedom of speech and assembly laws so they can enforce the kind of rules private enterprises do in the USA. Americans, and I agree with them on this point, aren't going to weaken civil rights just because it would happen to make public transit more viable.
Private transport just has a lot of opportunities to deal with security or annoyance concerns you can't address with public transit. I don't think the opposition is so much to mass transit, just public transit, if the USA had something like the jeepnees they have in the philippines where I could pay $.25 to go across town and the bus driver can shove the assholes right off he bus, it'd be awesome.
I don't think that's true at all. Police in NYC are able to remove passengers who are being a nuisance, there just aren't enough of them to police every car of every subway train.
In my experience (as an NYC resident) the people causing problems on the subway aren't just being assholes for the sake of it. They're homeless, have mental issues or frequently both. I suspect when you visit Germany or Japan you're seeing the effects of much more comprehensive social nets that actually care for these people rather than let them fall through the cracks and live on subway trains.
You don't need police to trespass someone in private transit though. You can just tell them to leave, and if they don't they can be made to leave (depending on the state). If you're familiar with bouncers you understand this function.
Expecting a police to be available to every transit disturbance, I agree, is not going to end with a functional outcome.
I'm not sure why there would be a distinction, really. The NYC subway has a specific transit police force who would act as the "bouncers" in this scenario. Either way it has absolutely nothing to do with free speech. Disruptive passengers can be ejected on public transit.
You don't see the difference between every driver being able to be a bouncer, and only sworn police being able to be a bouncer?
Private citizens generally can't trespass people on public property. You have to get a policeman and the policeman has to cite a specific policy or law they have violated.
The private system in this case is way more pragmatic since every driver that is already on the bus has bouncing rights.
I don't really understand what this has to do with the original discussion. You said:
> It applies to public transit specifically because people have freedom of speech to be assholes
My response to was to say I do not believe that is true at all. Passengers on public transit do not have freedom of speech to be assholes.