I think public transport should be frictionless. Stop building cities around the car and start building public transit fucking everywhere. It should be faster and more convenient to take transit than to drive.
this post was submitted on 25 Jan 2026
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traingang
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You can never have a completely frictionless experience with a mass of fellow humans. And I think its important that everyone experience that in a varied and unctrolled way
put on the headphones when you're on the bus
Pretty much all of the violent transphobic incidents that have happened to people I know happened on the local public transit. You can keep your friction, no thanks
Yeah and I've been harassed on public transit for being trans maybe like 40% of the time. Unpleasant stuff.
Put the fear of God in the Br*tish on your commute.
I just had people stare at me. Nobody's ever said anything though.
It seems to vary significantly by region
I'm in the deep south. Back when WorldStarHipHop was a thing I typed my city's name for it's public transit into the search and the only video was a guy beating on a trans woman for no reason
Jeez that’s horrific. I’m really sorry
It's one of the things I like about bike commuting, especially when I can avoid streets. Driving is very stressful for me in general so any acute stressor is amplified and terrible for my body. All the while I'm totally disengaged from the landscape, can't pay attention to anything apart from the road without risking an accident, and I'm poised for the most antisocial encounters of my day from people under similar stress.
When biking, there's always something minor to complain about but it's surmountable and low-grade enough to just wake me up in the morning. Maybe the weather is bad, maybe some trail hazard presents a little physical puzzle, maybe a family of ducks walks across it and I have to birdwatch for a couple minutes. I'm not so insulated from nature that I'm afraid of the times the outdoor temperature doesn't match my air conditioner's. If I have encounters with other people on the trail, usually it's pleasant and cooperative because we aren't locked in an arms race. The worst trail rage I see is people yelling at each other to protect the wildlife, pick up trash, and bike slower than the speed limit.
Mass transit has that similar kind of socioeconomic inclusiveness, but it doesn't have the socioenvironmental side that gives people something to cooperate around. The most cooperative project in mass transit is people enforcing silence on each other or explaining the routes. In the absence of it, the only goal is everyone individually getting to their destination as efficiently as possible and shunning anything which impedes that. It makes for really antisocial encounters under high stress. The ideal garden city would balance the friction and speed of mass transit with last-mile pedestrian Grass Touching Zones to make people have some slow, pleasant association with their surroundings. You WILL stroll through the park with your neighbours to get to its subway station. You WILL have dozens of opportunities to grow with every commute.
It sounds like chud shit but I do truly believe the car has made people too divorced from the world in the most basic sense, i.e. having to navigate a puddle or whatever.
Yep. We are forest apes reduced to slightly moving our hands and feet while staring at empty space and unnatural angles for hours each day. You take away exploration and dynamic play from a lab primate, they shut down and stop having their species-being. Take that away from our species and we become suburbanite salarymen regardless of which rectangle we're sitting in.
people don't realise how terrible our spaces are when they zoom past them in their heated metal box
I'm happy for you that you enjoy your biking but disagree that the public transit is somehow more individualistic.
Transit is often stressful, especially when it is under resourced or poorly planned for the number of people using it. But in those situations I am very aware of other people and we are all trying to work together to squeeze through. People are constantly negotiating with each other, anticipating one anothers' needs and otherwise cooperating.
Example: A while ago, the city decided to install a box-type fixture, I think it was trash collection or something, right where the rear door of the bus sometimes opens. A woman got on with her stroller for just a couple stops, staying in the rearmost doorway, and then couldn't get off when she needed to because the exit was blocked by the fixture. People who didn't have strollers could squeeze past but not her. No way to get to another door as it was too crowded. She looked really worried, being trapped. The next stop isn't for quite a while; it would be very inconvenient detour to turn around to get back where she was headed. Several people saw the situation and they lifted the stroller, baby and all, over the barrier so she was able to get off the bus. I was a bit worried when I saw this plan get made and implemented by a bunch of people who didn't seem to know each other at all, and I barely heard anyone talking, they just did it with eye contact... Coordinating to lift a baby like that over a pretty large barrier. But it was smoothly and quickly done and everyone dispersed. Impressive actually. I submitted a request to move this thing; thankfully the city workers were responsive and the fixture was gone in a couple of weeks.. So like OP is saying, there is some friction but ultimately everyone got through their day. There is a lot of that kind of thing on transit. Most people going out of their way to accommodate each other.
It sounds like the main reason you enjoy your bike trail is that it has high resources per person using it. If the same number of people were moving around on the trail as a mass transit system, it wouldn't have the quiet charm. So it's nice that you are having this thing that suits you well but no reason to be looking down on everyone else. Especially from the description, the unpopularity is a major benefit. Even though you don't see them, all those people on the bus in your town are doing you a favor by staying away from your park.
I'm not anti-mass transit. It's better and more cooperative than driving. The friction is downgraded from road rage and is generally healthy. I want to rip out roads and build railways on top of their corpses, and I would take those railways over biking some days. What I'm arguing for is mixed-modal public transit that makes that healthier and more socially positive in more ways. The role of bike infrastructure isn't to replace the bus or the train. Here the waterways are public land with a greenstrip surrounding both sides. The bike trails are mostly built along the edge of the riparian zone with the banks reinforced by it and kept as protected wildlife corridors. The bike infrastructure exists so that someone who otherwise has no access to nature can interact with it in an area that's now safe from catastrophic flooding. It induces demand for public control of spaces that would otherwise be sold off to developers, then funds parks departments that are usually the lowest budget priority for cities.
That's why I say it's just an additional socioecological angle that changes the psychogeography of the city more toward what mass transit tries to achieve.
Driving in the city is friction enough for me. Give me public transit to reduce the friction
Different kinds of friction
This sounds akin to Richard Sennett's definition of a city as "a human settlement in which strangers are likely to meet."
Sennett likes “grim.” He also likes “difficulty,” “complexity,” and “friction.” His critique of the effect of digital devices on the city, apart from the fact that they are “individualizing machines,” is that apps like Google Maps make the city too user-friendly, too “friction-free.” If you think that the role of a designer, whether of software or of city streets, is to make those things easier to use, Sennett would disagree. He sees “encounters with resistance” as crucial to learning any craft, even the craft of dwelling. Getting lost is how we learn.
I know it's not very believable given how similar the idea is, but I have never heard of this concept before. That's kinda cool.
I believe you! I only remembered the one-liner myself, and not even his name. I'm glad this thread spurred me to add more to my urbanism reading list.
Public transit feeling like friction for any of its passengers
Feeling the friction of public transit running over 
tied to the tracks (their wealth was expropriated to make public transit clean, safe, and efficient for everyone else)
Working construction I get plenty of interpersonal fiction daily
I feel friction every day when i jerk my- woops let's keep it pg
I refuse to ever get a car so walking trains and bus has been my life and as much as it sucks from decaying infrastructure its still more peaceful than driving… well until someone steals the middle armrest cos i decided to stretch for a second then I want every inch of the country nuked to ashes
I got so much more done with my life when I lived and worked near rail stations.
It's only annoying when the train is late or when I miss the train because it's on time.