Continued decline of the public university

I much, much prefer to take public transportation.

Instead of sitting behind the wheel w my fingers tense on the steering wheel, I get to use my fingers to talk to my imaginary friends on CC, and occasionally have colorful experiences getting accosted by proselytising Mormon missionaries who invite me to the LDS Halloween party.

I’m going to assume that this wasn’t intended to sound hyperelitist, but…dude.

You obviously don’t live in NYC. In my younger days I rode the subway a bit. Nothing like the bracing smell of stale urine in the morning to wake you up. I could write paragraphs for you on what I learned about the differences in size, texture, color, and fiber content between human feces and dog feces.

For the record, dog feces are usually more slippery, but human feces smell worse.

OK. Now we’re on to the smell and texture of feces. I think this thread is ready to be closed, lol.

Elitist or not, it’s true. Public transportation is notoriously disgusting… and it’s just all-around inferior to driving your own car (minus the cost).

I’m coming to terms with the fact that I could never live in a big city, lol. :stuck_out_tongue:

Depends on the city. Philadelphia? Sure, I’ll give you that. Toronto? Depends on which part of the system. DC, Salt Lake City, Orlando (all places I’ve ridden their system quite a bit)? Not at all.

@fractalmstr, being someone who never has had to choose between “driving” through gridlocked traffic for over half an hour and taking public transit, I don’t think you’re in a position to comment.

And I second the opinion that it depends a lot on the system.

The Muni buses in SF? Filthy.

The Metra trains and CTA buses in Chicago? Clean.

The local Seattle weekly does a regular feature on “disgusting things I saw on public transit”. No shortage of material–from clipping toenails to sex acts.

I don’t know how recently those “younger days were”, but what you described is mainly applicable 20+ years ago.

I haven’t encountered what you described regularly since my middle school/first year of HS during the late '80s/extreme early '90s*. Your subway experience above sounds like it was from the late '60s to early '90s when

And I still ride the subway regularly to when I need to go somewhere in NYC to this day.

  • Subways were already starting to be cleaned up by the early '90s. By the time I graduated HS in the mid-'90s, the subways almost resembled what they are today.

I have lived most of my adult life without a car, and I have lived and worked in Boston, Chicago, Singapore, Chengdu, and Philly, using public transportation as my primary means of transport (aside from feet). I have also taken public transportation in Indianapolis, Louisville, Buffalo, NYC, DC, San Francisco, Atlanta, London, Paris, Seoul, Rome, Venice, many cities in China, and several cities in Japan and Thailand, and probably a dozen places I can’t recall. Although I have occasionally been frightened by odd people or wild driving, I only remember seeing feces once (Philly). I have had wonderful, memorable experiences, meeting all sorts of people whom I never would have had the pleasure to meet otherwise.

Now can we get back on topic? Or is there a connection between public transportation and public education that I am missing?

Well, I think the aside came about from a wider philosophical issue: Whether the individual or the collective is the best director of the commons. If you look at it in that frame, issues surrounding public transportation and public education are exactly the same thing—if you believe that the individual is the best way of dealing with things, then both publicly funded education and transportation systems are at least partially suspect; on the other hand, if the collective is the best for it, then they’re both excellent.

There’s actually some good evidence out there that such preferences actually affect our perceptions (possibly through confirmation bias, but that isn’t universally accepted as the mechanism for it), so that someone who’s suspicious of collectivist tendencies may well observe, say, a subway car as dirty and smelly, while someone who embraces collective action may observe that the exact same subway car at the exact same time is clean and well-kept.

This, as you might have already concluded, creates issues when it comes to things like public policy debates.

When my daughter was in middle school, she said, “You know the problem with public transportation? There’s too much public on it.” She got over that, though. It’s a really narcissistic attitude.

I use public transportation in Philadelphia regularly (although I normally commute in a car). I haven’t seen feces ever, even when I was using it every day 30 years ago. There are definitely a few yucky spots in the awful underground warrens under Center City where you walk to transfer between lines there, but the trains/buses and stations themselves are fine. I also use it in New York, Chicago, and Washington (where, of course, it is immaculate).

One could also fall somewhere between the extreme individualist and collectivist sides and feel certain things like public utilities, emergency services, public infrastructure such as roads, and public transportation are better handled collectively whereas other things are better handled individually and/or that there can be individualist-minded exceptions in certain cases(i.e. Cars in areas where public transportation infrastructure is poor/non-existent or doesn’t serve one’s transportation needs in their situational context).

agree with cobra. That’s a false choice; it doesn’t have to be either/or.

Subway cars don’t have to be dirty. Busses can be maintained so that the air conditioner works the vast majority of the time.

Of course they don’t have to be dirty and can be well maintained – but that takes adequate funding to hire enough people to clean/maintain every bus/train car.

But as a country we’re very reluctant to pay for this sort of thing. Immediately there are accusations that the state/fed’l government is spending too much. So cities trim their maintenance costs. And the results speak for themselves.

Just like the amount of state funding for public universities speaks for itself. It shows where the priorities are. And it’s not schools (or extensive and well maintained bus/train systems.)

I believe that @dfbdfb’s framing accurately characterizes a lot of the public debate. However, it is not my view, nor do I think it is the view of some of the other posters here. Here’s what I think (this is a mixture of fact and personal opinion (that may be incorrect)):

  1. U.S. public higher education is a wonderful investment. In fact, it educates about 2/3’s of all US college students and is almost always the most affordable option. As an example, California’s system is wonderful and deserves tremendous praise … they have great 2 year colleges; the CSU and UC systems are wonderful 4 year options; there is a well thought-out transfer path from the 2 year to the 4 year system; and lastly they have built absolutely first rate research institutions in Berkeley and others

  2. A lot of the angst about college costs among the middle class is in fact due to the escalating tuition at public colleges. A significant contributor to this are cutbacks (adjusted for inflation and population) in state support. The escalating cost structure of higher education in general is also a contributor, but the “cuts” in state support are real.

  3. Why have these cutbacks occurred? Partisan and ideological squabbles are certainly a factor. However, in my view the fundamental factor is that other state government spending is “crowding out” spending on higher education. The growth of Medicaid and government worker / teacher pensions / healthcare benefits has forced these cutbacks; there is also a limited appetite for further taxation. The constituencies for these programs are stronger and more mobilized than that for higher education, and state legislatures are responsive to them.

Personally, I think public higher education is a far better investment and I would rather see the cuts made in those other areas, but no one cares what I think.

  1. Why the digression on high speed rail (HSR)? Because it illustrates this point again … to choose to spend large sums of money on HSR is implicitly to choose not to spend money on public higher education.

Why can’t we afford to do both, you ask? Well, we could if the HSR project was actually a good investment; then we could do both. But it doesn’t seem to be … (i) its costs have exploded (ii) when completed it will not serve that many people since it connects two thinly populated areas. People are claiming that this HSR project is a bad investment, and pouring money down a rathole will inevitably drain funding from other state priorities.

The valid criticism of the HSR project isn’t that it is public - it’s that it is dumb.

  1. Bottom line, we can’t have it all unless we are smart about what we spend our money on. Public higher education is a smart investment, but a lot of other public spending isn’t. And more and more dumb spending is just as disastrous as less and less smart spending.

Let me also apologize for diverting the thread by mentioning human waste. NYC subways during the 70’s and early 80’s were just meant to be an extreme example that I personally experienced of how public transport in the nation’s biggest city was allowed to degenerate, but it is clearly not a typical example. I do think that in many cities the failure to keep public transport clean and nice is an important factor in why the middle-class does not utilize it and why it therefore doesn’t have as much broad political support as it could.

FTR, I wasn’t trying to frame it as a binary, but rather as ends of a continuum. Sorry about any confusion.

k-mom: one could argue that your last point is key, and the priorities of the ruling class are NOT clean mass transit in some cities. That is a local government choice; or viewed another way, the local govt just prefers to spend its money elsewhere. (In Chicago, for example, its pensions. Or in the example that got us digressing, billions for high speed rail in California, which could have been targeted to local busses, for real mass transit).

I remember the same arguments you’re using against HSR being cited against Bart, in the Bay Area. (Or, more recently, against the new international airport outside of Denver and light rail.) All three proved to have been pretty solid investments, lol.

Public transportation costs - it also generates jobs and value. Suburban and urban areas close to public transportation are more desirable, lose less in value during recessions, and are overall a better investment. A society that pits one of these investments against the other is short sighted. Both are crucial to growth and progress.

BART used to be a prime example of dirty public transit, until they replaced the carpet and cloth seats with easy-clean floors and vinyl seats.