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Next time I see a woman walking alone late at night in my neighborhood, should go up and talk to her to see if you're right?
In recent memory, the weirdest person I saw late at night near my place was an odd looking man in his 30s who seemed to be talking to himself. Turned out he was using a handless cellphone.
If you know what's good for you, you'll leave here alone. She might be carrying mace!
Riding a bus, by itself, isn't inherently more dangerous than driving. But when you pack thirty people into an area the size of your living room, you get stuff like this
Or you could get pushed in front of a train by a crazy person.
I'm going to have to stick to my original statement. Saying that people don't become more aggressive when it gets more crowded flies in the face of just about every scientific experiment out there. A quick Google search of the phrase "crowding causes aggression" reveals a whole wealth of articles that have been written on the subject. Here's one, which accurately states that crowding is a major factor (but not the only one) that causes it.
And here's the link they cited on crowding causing aggression: link
A quick google search of "The moon landing was filmed in Hollywood" reveals a whole wealth of articles that have been written on the subject too. I'm not surprised there are studies that suggest crowding causes aggression though, and I would agree that it can cause stress, but beyond being stressed out, I think it's more complicated.
For starters, the gunmen shooting up a bus had nothing to do with crowding, since they weren't even on the bus. As for the woman pulling the gun on the noisy girl, maybe she had a bad day before that, and just took out her anger on the girl who she found irritating and pushed her over the brink. But maybe that would have happened if it was just the woman and the girl on the bus (and no-one else), except that there wouldnt' have been anyone else (like that brave man) to calm her down and diffuse the situation, and it could have escalated. I think that's an important aspect of what happened, although you might be more likely to get stressed in a crowded place, having all those witnesses around you might prevent you from acting out because you'd be embarrassed, and even if you do act out, there's a good chance someone will try to calm you down and remind you that violence is not worth it.
Much of the studies on crowding causing aggression are also related to prisons, which is a rather different situation from being on a bus. If you get violent in prison, there aren't going to be any consequences (you're not going to go to jail for it since you're already there), and your jail mates aren't very likely to try to calm you down since many are immoral criminals who likely don't care if you get in a fight with someone else. They might even find it entertaining and encourage the violence.
Also, it's not as if being in a car is necessarily stress free. You can find plenty of articles on the negative behavioural effects of stress caused by traffic congestion. And in the case of road rage for instance, you're often alone in the car, which is like a bubble with no-one to keep you in line and calm you down. I haven't heard of traffic congestion causing road rage or anything like that on buses, and transit with it's own right of way (like subways) don't have to deal with congestion on the road.
I don't see where everyone thinks the buses, much less the subways, are unsafe. In Chicago there were about 500 murders this year. I doubt if more than one or two were on public transport. Easily more killed in traffic accidents, even though your car is "perfectly safe."
I don't think the buses, etc are unsafe. I do think it's somewhat unsafe to walk to/from transit, wait at transit stops by oneself in the dark, especially for women. Just how unsafe that is depends on the neighborhood.
Do people who use driving as their primary node of transport understand transit?
So what do you think, can a person who drives as their primary transit node, understand what makes for "good transit access?"
Sure. That's WHY they drive.
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