• UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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      6 months ago

      last time I checked, buses, trains, and planes didn’t go DIRECTLY TO THE PLACE YOU NEED TO GO. YOU HAVE TO GET OFF AND KEEP GOING TO THE ACTUAL LOCATION YOU NEED TO GET TO.

      When you build a community around mass transit, these services do in fact drop you off directly at your destination.

      Check out Terminal Tower in Cleveland, Ohio. A 52-story skyscraper built directly above the Cleveland Union Terminal. Penn Station, NY is directly across the street from Madison Square Garden and in the beating heart of the city’s largest shopping quarter. Transbay Transit Center in San Fransisco is surrounded by enormous apartment blocks. And these are in the states, where our transit networks generally suck.

      Tokyo’s Metro has an entire in-built navigation system for the blind, with metro stops at some of the densest housing, retail, and business districts in the world. There is nowhere else in the world you would rather be wheelchair bound, sightless, or otherwise disabled.

      The dirty secret about mass transit is that it encourages dense urban development. And, as a consequence, it reduces the total distance traveled from your front door to your destination. This, combined with large public municipal works friendly to disabled individuals, means you can leverage economies of scale in public investment rather than being forced to take up the entire burden of your disability on your own shoulders.

      Elevators are the most efficient and disability friendly forms of mass transit. But they’re enormously expensive for individuals to build and maintain.

      I’m the person that is being attacked by your very attitudes and words

      If you feel attacked because I’m suggesting meaningful improvements to your quality of life, I have to question what your end goal is.

      Are you sadistically inflicting misery upon yourself? Or are you simply burned out from all the individualized burdens of disability heaped upon the individual in a society that refuses to invest in high quality mass transit on a national scale?

      Either way, I believe you’ve fallen to a kind of car-owner Stockholm Syndrome. Trapped in a machine that tortures you for so long you’ve lost sight of the scars.

      Go to hell.

      I’m in Houston. Hell would be an improvement.