Originally Posted by
Roody
It does seem strange that a Londoner complains about transit, when they live in a city with arguably the most advanced transit system in the world. They have extensive subways, light rail, commuter trains, cool double decker buses, and rapidly growing bicycle infrastructure. Hell, they have a beautiful new pedestrian footbridge as well as a cable car across the Thames.
I think their transit system is superb, but clearly it's going to take more fundamental changes to deal with the problem of getting millions of workers, shoppers, and tourists into and out of a central district every day. Ultimately they will have to look to more fundamental improvements in land use and time management. There's only so much that any transit system can do.
I'm not saying this specifically about the poster you're referring to but generally I have noticed that people have a tendency to complain about the most optimal situations simply because they're programmed to seek out dissatisfaction, hence the grass always being greener.
On a related note, I was cycling through a poorer area today and it occurred to me that middle class people typically express greater economic dissatisfaction than poor people do, who just seem to be getting by. This stands in contrast to stereotypes you hear about the global poor being up in arms protesting poverty. I think it may be because the opportunities available for poor people to get jobs at the lowest level are such hard work and hard hours, they end up just being satisfied (and tired) to get by without going through the extra back-breaking work it would take to impress managers enough to climb through the ranks a bit.
Now if you read this far you're probably wondering what this has to do with the other post complaining about London transit. The point is that I think people with access to good public transit may romanticize the 'American' lifestyle of everyone having and driving a car simply because it's the grass on the other side of the fence. Probably once such a person would actually get the option to drive all the time but end up losing the transit choice along with everyone else and being stuck in traffic with them, they would realize the value of the transit option.
It would be the same if someone on the UK dole would complain that there are plenty of jobs in the US until they realize that the jobs that are easy for anyone to get in the US are low paying, hard dead-end service jobs with bad hours and that few, if any, people that do these jobs get the opportunity to work their way up without putting in extreme amounts of hours and years. Is this comparison sounding like a dead horse getting beaten or does it make sense?