Are We Seeing The Same Thing?

Urbanism is ninety percent mental. The other half is land use.

I see these posts on social media: I love riding the bus and seeing people I know, people who might be my friends one day. This feeling that these loose ties of just being around people and even just minimally interacting with them are an amenity in and of themselves. That part of community is the people we bump in to but aren’t close with. The opposite of “hell is other people.”

Then there are those who prefer driving precisely because they don’t want to share an enclosed space with a few dozen unknown people. Some of them just don’t like the hustle and bustle of it. Others are fearful of crime. A suburbanite, they think, is an urbanite mugged by reality. Or just mugged.

I can always hear conservatives I know saying, Oh yeah? You love riding transit in D.C. so much? Just wait till it’s your turn. There’s this idea that nobody really likes cities. They’re just pretending because their politics say they’re supposed to. If you can’t imagine somebody liking a subway ride or a bike trip to the store, you should try especially hard to imagine why someone might like it.