Once seniors are too old to drive, our transportation system fails them
211–220 of 324 posts
Re: Once seniors are too old to drive, our transportation system fails them
#212Please replace "our" with "US" when submitting on HN. Not everybody lives in US.
Re: Once seniors are too old to drive, our transportation system fails them
#213This should be labelled "in the US". In Europe the public transport is often quite good.
Re: Once seniors are too old to drive, our transportation system fails them
#214Earlier quoted context omitted.
The flexibility of having a car is undeniable. However, pretty much everyone--including the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Consumer Reports, and the American Automobile Association--agrees that the total cost of ownership runs to US$8000-$9000 per year for the average person. The cost might be a lot lower for you, but most people are paying a lot of money for having a car at their disposal without realizing how muc…
Time is money. He is saving about 5 hours each round trip. If his time is worth $50/hour, then $8000 for car ownership gets him 32 trips. Add a few more to account for the cost of rail ticket prices. He breaks even if he takes that trip about 3 times per month and never finds any other use for a car.
> Time is money.
Consider that this way: the time you spend sitting at a desk to earn the money to pay for your car is commute time.
How long does it take the average person to earn 8-9k (after tax)? I think at $50/h that might be an additional 5 hours work per week or an extra hour on your daily commute. For many people it might be more like 2+ hours. Given this, I would be very surprised if most urban dwellers wouldn't have more available time/money if they ditched the car for a bike.
Re: Once seniors are too old to drive, our transportation system fails them
#215My 96-year-old grandmother has macular degeneration in her eyes and neuropathy reducing sensation in her feet. She can neither see the road very well nor feel the pedals accurately. The state of Florida just renewed her license for six more years. I'd say it's irresponsible of her to keep up the license, except she has no options. The town she's in recently made it illegal for residents of her park to drive their ele…
There should be county sponsored transportation for medical appointments. Also it seems uber could work?
Uber has a lot of negative press, but if there's one way for them to turn all of that around, it's to pander to the older generation and to provide senior citizens either heavily subsidised or a subscription-based system.
They won't do it because it'll hit their bottom line, but being the ride option of both the young AND the old would go a long way towards repairing their reputation.
Re: Once seniors are too old to drive, our transportation system fails them
#216Earlier quoted context omitted.
There should be county sponsored transportation for medical appointments. Also it seems uber could work?
Uber has a lot of negative press, but if there's one way for them to turn all of that around, it's to pander to the older generation and to provide senior citizens either heavily subsidised or a subscription-based system. They won't do it because it'll hit their bottom line, but being the ride option of both the young AND the old would go a long way towards repairing their reputation.
More importantly, old people actually vote in local elections.
Re: Once seniors are too old to drive, our transportation system fails them
#217Earlier quoted context omitted.
Given the difficulty and expense associated with going to Japan, perhaps you could describe it to us here using words.
I live in Japan and actually live in rural enough area that there is no train. Well, there was a train until 1968 when the bus company convinced the fishermen that the reduced fish stocks were due to the train scaring away the fish (not over fishing, of course!). Now there are no fish and no train :-( Before I extol the virtues of the train system in Japan, there is one thing that you have to understand first. It is…
> For example, companies that get a monopoly will rip you off, but only by so much.
Sounds like a rare victory of the good over its old nemesis, the perfect. I believe that a social environment that can pull this off will have a clear edge in many different ways, e.g. government can work so much better when it can be trusted that power abuse, if it happens, won't be excessive. Much better than pretend-saints who really aren't.
Re: Once seniors are too old to drive, our transportation system fails them
#218I’m 36, live in the suburbs, and in recent years have gone (legally) blind from Retinitis Pigmentosa. Voluntarily giving up my license was one of the hardest and most important decisions I’ve made. There is literally 0 public transportation here. Not even Uber or Lyft have come around. America’s sprawl and dependence on cars is incredible. It wasn’t until I spent time in London, Oxford, and Paris that I could recogni…
Why is it humiliating? You have a medical condition, stop being a child about it.
Responses like that would do it for most people.
“Humiliation: Making someone feel ashamed or foolish”.
Re: Once seniors are too old to drive, our transportation system fails them
#219Earlier quoted context omitted.
On the footpath, wouldn't you be unusually vulnerable to crime? Why would you want a service that isn't safe for you? That is how your comment sounds to people who use public transport. It sounds ridiculous .
Are you suggesting that a footpath is safe? My father got mugged at knifepoint on one. That is 100% not acceptable. It is a major reason why normal non-poor people encase themselves in cars. My father wasn't even blind. He was just slightly old, maybe 50 years old. At that age, he could no longer sprint away. The comment might sound ridiculous to the people who voluntarily use public transport, but your sampling bias…
> Are you suggesting that a footpath is safe
You mean they aren’t safe where you live?
Blimey. I’ve been attacked once, in total, and that was as a teen and an adult intervened within seconds.
I used to walk to school if I missed the bus (or if I wanted to miss mandatory religious activities), and that took me an hour. Sometimes I’d walk home afterwards, because the school had a then-novel internet connection. I’ve walked a few hundred kilometres around Berlin in the last few months, and explored several other European cities by walking around on foot for hours each day. If you go to Venice, your only options are foot or boat, and the boats don’t go everywhere.
Re: Once seniors are too old to drive, our transportation system fails them
#220Earlier quoted context omitted.
People are downvoting because you're missing the point. The unsafety of the situation is not because of the mode of transport, but because of America's failure to deal with crime. Here in Germany, crime rates have been declining pretty consistently [1], with homicides and robberies down from "low" to "very low". The thought of getting mugged on the street or on public transit is just absurd to me. I don't know anyone…
It isn't proper to ignore America's failure to deal with crime when you compare methods of transportation. Different modes of transportation provide different levels of protection from crime. This matters. You should be wary about trusting official crime statistics, particularly in Germany. There is an ongoing effort to censor this data. You face heavily filtered search engines, content removed from social media, and…
Well done.
You've just engaged in an ideological rant about muslim rapists in a thread about people being too old to drive.
You linked to the Gatestone institute, twice. Started by a known anti-muslim zionist and the reporting has been repeatedly accused of deliberate inaccuracies.
You also linked to WND twice. A publication known for perpetuating shaky conspiracy theories and white supremacism.
You chose two extremely right-wing (and unreliable) sources twice each. Not one countering article did you submit as a comparison.
We can all see exactly where you stand here.