Because I'm not in the top 0.1%.

"Why don't you just move into a $2-5 million dollar home?" is an astonishing take.

If you look at places with nice public transit like Germany or Japan, they have much weaker freedom of speech and assembly laws so they can enforce the kind of rules private enterprises do in the USA. Americans, and I agree with them on this point, aren't going to weaken civil rights just because it would happen to make public transit more viable.

Private transport just has a lot of opportunities to deal with security or annoyance concerns you can't address with public transit. I don't think the opposition is so much to mass transit, just public transit, if the USA had something like the jeepnees they have in the philippines where I could pay $.25 to go across town and the bus driver can shove the assholes right off he bus, it'd be awesome.

I ended up buying a house in an internal suburb (a former suburb from the 1930s that had been swallowed by the city) that is also a historic neighborhood (so it's character cannot be destroyed by developers).

I no longer speed when I drive because I want the kids to be safe and the insane rage other drivers send our way because I'm going 40 km/hr on a 40 km/hr road. I've had driver try to force us off the road, tail gate us hard, pass us across double yellow lines, scream at us.

Driving is exhausting.

People run red lights, they speed, they swerve, they get in fender-benders and flee, they honk, they smoke weed and drink vodka while they drive. All illegal, all common occurrences. And I live in a wealthy, safe suburb.

But it does depend on the nature of the panhandling, doesn't it? Passive panhandling is one thing, and aggressive panhandling is something else, right?

The point is that people will accept some level of anti-social behavior, however they define that, and above that level they do not. No amount of bluster or "why I just never" or incredulity doesn't change that. If you want walkable cities with good public transit you make it attractive and hospitable to a wide majority of people.

Or don't, no skin off my nose, but acting shocked that there are people who think and react differently than you do is silly IMO.

I'm glad you chose the experience of taking a walk as your original example because it was instrumental in helping me to decide that I wanted to raise my family in the city.

COVID offered an opportunity for my young family to spend a month in the suburbs and the thing that sticks with me now after all these years later is how much I hated taking our then 1 year-old for a walk as compared to the city. In the suburbs we walked past the same houses on the same sidewalk-lacking streets barely seeing anyone else. If we wanted anything beyond that it required loading our toddler into the car.

Compare this to a nice area of the city where the density allows for a vast array of possible destinations and plenty of folks to smile or wave at on the way. Walks these days could be to the local park on a Saturday morning for the farmers market, or to the local Italian Ice spot because the weather hasn't gotten too cold yet. While it's still possible to have those experiences in the suburbs, it's hard to be as spontaneous when you've got to consider things like car seats and parking.

This is the most hilarious thing I've read on this site. Your cousin might get some weird looks waving to random people, but why would they feel unsafe? I have never known more of my neighbors than in Boston, and I've lived all over the U.S.

It's not dangerous at all to do this. It's just considered odd & borderline impolite to do that. It's hard to explain to an outsider, but you see it brought up a ton on places like r/boston. The stereotype is that people in the northeast are "kind but not nice". By and large we don't engage in frivolity like greeting random people when walking around.

And the difference in crime rates in urban and rural areas is grossly overblown. Looking at California numbers, a city-slicker has about a .9% chance of becoming a victim of violent crime, and hick has about a .6% chance. That's a small reduction to a small probability. For context, if your risk tolerance hasn't forced you to cut out meat and alcohol from your diet to avoid cancer, you're miscalculating risk if you think you should flee the cities to avoid violence.

Such people exist in every country, yes, but fewer in most places.

I take it there's either no toxic mix of individuality and capitalism, so can you confirm whether it's a collectivist state (no individual expression allowed) or non-capitalist, and which economic system it is instead?

I don't get hassled either, but it's not about me. My job as a husband and father is to protect my family.

I watch Cyclists pull shit that's illegal on the road all day, and they refuse to simply USE THE SIDEWALK (infinitely safer for all involved). That way, when the cyclists inevitably do some dumbshit the only people at risk are pedestrians and the usual damage is at most a broken bone rather than roadkill.

Localities that ban cycling on sidewalks are spiritually and ontologically evil.

> Mountain Life

> I love the fact you can drive down the road and wave at friends you know.....and hell you probably will be drinking a beer with them later that day. I love the fact everyone is pretty laid back and neighbors know each other..Anyone for BBQ?. I enjoy the fact I can chill out relax NOT hearing the city noise. I love the fact at night you can look up and see the night sky and here coyote's screeching in the background. I respect the fact I grew up in an environment that was NOT surrounded by pavement and was NOT surrounded by buildings. There was endless landscapes and forests of exploration. I could find any tree and build my fort. I could spend hours hiking with my dog and find no end. I could take a nap in a field of grass and not worry someone would cross my path. The Santa Cruz Mountains have so much to offer and I feel like there is so much to learn about them.

https://santacruzmtns.com/About.html

Many cities have been losing population for a while, regardless of your intimate knowledge of what other people do or don't feel. Incredulity isn't really much of a solution if you want to address issues that people might have.

"Her war on motorists, who last year were hit with a double whammy of speed cuts on the capital’s ring road and the tripling of parking fees for heavy vehicles, such as SUVs, has also sparked fury among families."

Right now in Paris, when you have a newborn, the only mobility solution is to take an Uber if you need to go somewhere >1km from where you leave. Buses are very slow and crowded, the subway doesn't have elevators for strollers, cars are just inaccessible financially due to the war on surface parking space.

- Buses are crowded, very slow, and being blocked for >1h because of protests or roadworks with a sick newborn is a rather unpleasant experience. I did it already. And in general, public transportation in Paris has degraded a lot. Who wants to explain to his 3-year-old son what this fine gentleman is doing while heating crack in the back of the train car?

And bike-centric policies have led the city to invest in bike lanes, rather than in the aging public transport and to remove surface parking, making it almost impossible to own a car if you have a family. All of this is in the article that I linked.

An unexpected casualty of this is that it's now complex to get trade workers to come to Paris for construction jobs, and, funnily enough, public works to build bike lanes are more costly as trucks and workers spend a lot of time in the traffic now.

"The West" is a rather large part of the world.

Look at London - most people don't bother driving into the center of London andit's technically counted as a forest due to all the greenery. When you design for cars, all other travel modes are made impractical as cars take up so much room that all the facilities end up being miles away from people.

They're not gonna use it unless you build it, and they're not gonna use it unless it becomes more convenient than the car.

Right now you've got 3 unreliable bus lines, each bus 30 minutes apart, service stops at 8pm and the schedule is useless because they get stuck in traffic. Consequence is, nobody uses it and there's always a crackhead in the back (they're part of the population that actually uses it to get around even when it's inconvenient)

My point is, you can clean busses regularly (and you should but -), you can put a cop on every bus, you can do a lot of things to improve "the feeling of safety", but it's not going to offset inconvenience, and you won't need to do all that if you just make public transport the most convenient way to get around in your city. Except cleaning them. You'll still need to clean the bus.

I’ll point out that we had a postdoc in the lab I worked in from India, then Germany. When he told people he was going to Boston people told him he was crazy to come to crime ridden america where everyone has guns. He laughed about it hind-site but that image is real and gave him pause. It does real damage.

Cities aren’t perfect, but traffic needs to get bad enough or too costly and people will take transit (as my cousin pointed out about living in NYC). I just ended up riding my bike 50 minutes to work.

Similarly I hated being stuck in 30 minutes of bumper-to-bumper traffic during my old commute in a past life. But I do really enjoy driving on new routes when the road is half empty.

My two observations are that bumper-to-bumper traffic feels much more stressful to me (a lot more honking, people trying to cut into faster lanes, etc) than the subway (crammed and sometimes there’s a homeless person with bad BO), and that I spend much less time on the rush hour subway than in traffic jams in the past (even during rush hour, the subways are not that packed until you get into Manhattan).

It should be discouraged (financially, logistically, socially) to drive in dense urban places. Obviously, in order to achieve that, these urban places need to have alternative means of transportation.

> It's not pro- public transit and better urban planning that bothers me. It's the anti-car "lobby".

Fair but you have to remember that this anti-car lobby is rather tiny in comparison to the pro-car lobby which is every state department of transportation, automaker, insurance company, oil executive, auto dealer, etc. they aren’t as loud and annoying because they don’t have to be, but take away some of their power and you unleash lunatics.

The absolute worst are the "war on cars" people. Not the people who are "anti-car", because while there are some, there's really not that much, so you don't hear those people. No, the people who argue that spending a dime on anything that's not for cars is a "war on cars" and will vociferously reject any investment in public transit. And those tend to be the people who run transportation departments!

Cars aren't getting cheaper, car maintenance has become absurdly expensive (compared to what it was), auto insurance is set to get far more expensive, and making your entire lifestyle dependent on the existence of cheap gasoline is not a great strategy. A lot of people will simply be priced out of driving.

>It's not pro- public transit and better urban planning that bothers me. It's the anti-car "lobby".

Personal car commuting gets in the way of vital freight trucking. The highway system wasn't built to facilitate people going to work or traveling to see their grandma, it was build to move goods.

>I will always choose smaller to mid sized cities, and possibly even rural at some point in the future,...

The more remote your living is, the more everyone else is subsidizing your existence. For instance, rural roads, rural hospitals, rural electrification, rural broadband, rural airports, etc. It's one thing for the people who already live there or genuinely need to live out there, it's another thing for people to choose to live out there for "personal reasons".

I get the same independent feeling from others you describe while riding my bike (not a bubble, but that’s a false sense of security in a car giving the 40kish car occupants who die every year in the US). In fact, I generally enjoy that bike experience more than I ever do driving because I never get stuck in car traffic, never get stuck behind a line of cars at a traffic signal. Never need to work about parking, other than finding a secure place to lock up (which some destinations lack). I used to love driving, but I started commuting by bike for work and realized over time that I enjoy biking so much more that I go weeks at this point without ever driving.

FWIW I live in a smaller American city of about 120k people, but is part of a greater metro area.

Totally get that, some people don't like cities and crowds. But, they should also accept that more space (in this case, access to a car, roads, parking, etc) comes with costs and they should be willing to bear those costs personally.

I understand what you mean. I don’t especially love it either. But I honestly 100% prefer that to being stuck in traffic, being attentive to everything everywhere just not to kill anyone.

And I say that while owning a comfortable car.

I truly enjoy and cherish not having to use my car to go to work because I did it in the past and I hated it.

Being stuck in my car alone is far worse for me than being stuck in a train station because my train is late or cancelled.

But it may be my personality. I came from the countryside, so I was using my parent’s car everyday.

When I moved to the nearby city (in Europe) I truly felt not having to care about a car to be absolutely freeing.

Now I’m back in the countryside but near a train station that I use everyday to commute and the idea that I may, somehow , if I change job, need to use my car everyday (which I like, btw) is really frightening to me.

Exiting a train and walking two minutes to catch a tramway or a metro then a bus without real waiting times and without thinking about it then taking another route on the way back because a friend invited you for an afterwork really feels like society is just working.

I guess my point is that everything has a worst it can be. The idea, though, is that a city should offer all of them so that you can choose. And a subway at its worst, unlike driving at its worst, will still get you where you need to be on time.

The only thing that makes my occasional commute to office or distant family not a complete waste of time, is that I can read something or do a ton of language flashcards on the way. (plus a tiny small health benefit that like 20% of the commute is spent on foot.) In a car, even that would be taken away, with me being forced to focus on the road instead.

> I need that little bubble that separates me from other people. I don't even like walking on sidewalks in busy metropolitan areas because of the amount of other people and the "over stimulation".

Funnily, that's kinda how I feel about being in a car, having to constantly keep some level of awareness of others moving around.

For the record, I had a driver's license. I used it so little that I let it expire and I'm not in a rush to renew it.

Then, you've experienced poor public transit systems. A good one doesn't make you so packed in because there's enough trains for people to have comfortable amounts of space.

Anyway, it's moot - if your city has lots of people, the only feasible way to move them around is public transit. Trying anything else will fail due to the nature of two things not being able to exist in one place at the same time. One somewhat packed subway car is several hundred square meters of unmoving packed highway.

Hard agree, but so long as I have a seat, it means I can have a nap.

One of the things that I can't do driving (safely!) is have a nap.

I’m not sure why you have a right to solitude while out in public. While I sympathize with your desires, your need for a private bubble while moving about in the world has negative consequences for those around you. This is, quite simply, an anti-social attitude.

To convince an American to give up on any collective, just point out they'll be mildly inconvenienced. No wonder we never even tried to fight our carbon emissions.

Have you tried taking a walk in a forest, a desert, or on an ice sheet? Plenty of solitude to go around...

I don't believe this as a real rule. 10min vs 40min, maybe. 1h commute vs 4h commute? I don't believe that you would prefer spending 8h per day in a car.

> The parent poster made an interesting point that resonates a lot with me. Better public transportation will get people off the roads which will make quality of life better for drivers.

The youtuber NotJustBikes keep saying that "the only thing that can improve traffic is viable alternatives to driving".

I just wish that driving wasn't the most taxpayer subsidized personal choice in history, and that drivers would actually need to pay for the externality costs they incur, instead of being leaches on society.

Exactly. Not everyone wants to live in a "walkable" city. I would hazard that most in fact don't. A city is a place you go for services. It is where the big shopping centers and hospitals are. It is where the corporate HQ is. But people want to live in a more suburban or rural environment. Personally, I don't want to go shopping ever other day at a boutique corner store. I want a time-efficient big costco run every few weeks, something not possible on public transport. I want a yard where my dog can hang out unsupervised without worry about stranger dogs coming around. I want to set off fireworks on holidays. Listen to a country-western station. That is the lifestyle that a great many people dream of living.

I used to work with a guy from Belgium. He is now in Canada. The guy works in IT (secure stuff, government) but he loves animals. So he commutes over 50 miles to work each day. Doing that means he can have a hobby farm where he keeps a few horses. He bought an old tractor and is looking at growing/bailing his own hay next season. His lab just had puppies. His kids are growing up on a "farm" but go to a great school and have faster internet than I do in my "big city" apartment. Such a lifestyle just isn't possible without easy personal transportation.

The solution isn't to force people into one option or the other. It's to make all options available at market rates and let them chose.

If you only imagine this as a static scenario where everything is the same except you swap car for a train, of course car looks better.

The problem is you're not in a single-player game full of NPCs. When everyone else also chooses the car, you physically run out of space for everyone's cars, and end up with a city full of asphalt and large roads that are dangerous/inconvenient to cross and unpleasant to be around.

Car infrastructure takes a lot of space. When it can be reduced, it allows building amenities closer together, so you can have multiple useful destinations within walking distances not much worse than crossing a Walmart parking lot, and you get an environment that's nicer than a parking lot.

Being crammed in a train that moves 3 million people a day is the price to pay for not having a sea of asphalt for ~3 million cars.

That isn't how it should be. A good subway system is faster than your car for the trips you normally make, and it comes so often you don't think about waiting. There are very few good subways in the world, (much less the US), and so people think it needs to be bad because that is all they see - but it need not be that way.

Transit isn’t a free market. The federal, state and local governments in the US heavily, heavily subsidize car transit to the exclusion of every other alternative. If consumers paid the fully-burdened cost, cars would be much less popular.

> If these conditions aren’t met then you need additional transport to and from one or both ends of the subway journey.

They’re called buses, street cars, ride-shares, bicycles, etc. This has been a solved problem for about a century.

> There are cities where I’m just not going to take my kids on the subway if I can avoid it.

Interested to see any statistics showing which subway system is less safe than a car in the same area per passenger per mile traveled.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-public-transit...

I wish schools teach something, whats that called, math? probability? to help everyone make decisions to wisely use a car and keep themselves safe from lady with a perfume attacks on the train. This will also free up emergency room infrastructure, we don't need that many EMTs, ambulances, helicopters, trauma doctors and an incredible range of equipment and facilities to deal with odor attacks.

---

Google search for "car accidents single largest cause of death under 50": motor vehicle crashes are the leading cause of death for people under 50 in the United States, and for several specific age groups within that range, such as 1-54-year-olds and 5-29-year-olds globally.

I think you missed the entire point, it's a design choice, if you design everything around cars of course going grocery shopping will require a car... my supermarkets don't even have parking lots.

With the train I step off at my stop, and get on a bicycle and it takes me max 15 minutes to get anywhere else I want to go. The cities in NL have been built in such a way that it's often faster to take a bicycle than any other mode of transport. Usually buses/trams are tied with cars unless you live in awkward spots where the coverage isn't great.

> Oh and you might be odor sensitive

I guess who cares about literally everyone else who isn't in your car that has to breathe in and smell your exhaust fumes? Sure we've got EVs these days, but they still contribute substantially to air quality degradation via tire shedding, and not every car out there is an EV yet either.

I always found it infuriating to have a discussion like this with people who prefer to fly.

For example, a flight from Copenhagen to Stockholm (or, Malmo to Stockholm) is about 50 minutes.

But a train is four hours.. clearly the train is slower!

Except the train takes you into downtown Stockholm- no express train, no getting to the airport 1hr+ before your flight and no travel to the airport in the first place.

I once raced my girlfriend (our travel plans lined up pretty perfectly) and the train ended up 25 minutes faster back to Malmo from Stockholm.

So, even though I have an anecdote that supports your claim, I'm going to go ahead and say that if you have congested traffic a train can easily be faster- even with the time at both ends. But yes, we should be making rail a much more attractive option, not running trains at the same speeds as cars.

Or urine.

Or they want to beat you up, or worse. I can't imagine good public transport without the "good public".

Yes, going to bumfuck nowhere will be more efficient by paving 800 miles of concrete, but by definition most people are in urban centers, and there's no reason you can't have cities that are human-friendly while still having cars as options for the people that need it. In the Netherlands, ~65% of people still have cars and take their cars for long journeys, it's just that we have alternative options to get around so the people who can't or don't want to have a car can choose to do so without being crippled in their mobility.

What you are describing is just a much less efficient, worse version of a subway.

One part of the solution is bikes, the other is mass transit. What self-driving EV pods may be able to do is be people mover for the last mile to a mass transit hub. But for individual traffic across longer distance it simply does not scale.

To make matters worse, in the near future it looks like most cases of self driving will be solved, so now people will have their personal pod that moves them around.

No, this means that the trip was made easier by car, not that a trip was impossible and is now possible.

> limiting the things people can do means you are a bad city.

Not building massive freeways everywhere != limiting the things people can do in a city. Building public transit and better cycling infra is a much more effective way to allow people to do more things.

> if you don't believe me explain why there is no congestion west of Jamestown ND - an area where few people live that has a 4 lane freeway which by your logic should have congestion anyway

Yes, in certain circumstances, you can build big enough roads where the capacity is greater than the demand. This does not work in populated areas with high demand. (This is incredibly well studied)

But I used Malmö and Orlando as specific examples of extreme behaviour because in Malmö I can get around very easily. I can go anywhere in the city at any time with complete freedom even though there is good public transport it only enhances the situation. - I don’t depend on it in the same way you imply.

Where as in Orlando I was completely dependent on a car and any public transport that could exist would be wholly insufficient due to the distance you would have to travel: because of all the enormous car parking lots and expansive highways.

Well... given you're comparing to China... regulations and approvals have a point. China just openly sharts on nature, the environment and the rights of its citizens - the Party and its interests always come first.

> I visit China sometimes and it's seriously just wild seeing a town suddenly have a metro system go from not existing to being fully functional and world-class compared to anything in the west within the span of a few years.

Easy to do when you got the perfect combination: a lot of young single poor men that can be shuffled around the country because they got nothing tying them down to a specific place, combined with a lot of hard dollars from exports.

And China has another incentive... the threat of gulag. When a project gets screwed up, someone or their entire family ends up gulaged, and usually it's going to be someone from the CCP when someone higher-up thinks it's a good time to audit projects of the underlings to have some fall guys to take the usual "corruption" blame.

That's a bold claim without data.

Note that I said "place" not station - stations should be your highest demand places since they are so easy to get to. That real estate should be far too valuable to stores too waste on a parking lot. That parking lot should have a shuttle to the station, not be a station itself.

Remember once somebody has got into a car they have paid most of the costs of having a car. They will always be asking why not drive all the way instead of stopping part way. Your goal should be every family sells a car because they don't need two (they still keep a "truck" for towing the boat or whatever they think they need it for, they just don't use it for most trips and don't need a backup vehicle)

Yes you may. They fall short though for distances bigger than a couple of km, when carrying something or by bad weather.

Even in Europe it’s hard to find a decent affordable home where you can raise a couple kids in places you can live without a car.

The US just radically and systematically destroyed its own cities, Europe did its fair share of that, but simply not as bad. I think what saved Europe is that they were behind the US in investment, and when they finally wanted to adopt those US polices, people had already figured out how shit it was, and in many cities the worst urban highways were prevented.

In the US, very few cities survived and very few highways were stopped.

European cities are do not have more evolvability, in fact, large US roads actually means you have more op. Its more a matter of the US refusing to evolve. Its political far more then an aspect of the build environment.

To buy a car you need a certificate from the police attesting that you have a free parking spot of a certain size. The expressway tolls in Japan are often more expensive than gas for any long distance travel (and even the gas is expensive because there is basically no domestic oil production). The process of getting a license is much more intensive than in America. Japan has significantly more strict drunk driving laws than America (>0.03% for up to 3 years in prison, >0.05% is up to 5). Many workplaces don't allow you to drive to work (even if you could find parking) because by law their workman's comp insurance has to cover commuting and getting a policy that covers driving costs extra. There is absolutely no on-street residential parking.

All of these are deliberate policy choices that contribute to making the majority of road traffic in Tokyo be commercial and for most residents to default to some other form of transit.

Perhaps I could have been more clear, but that was my major point of contention. Bike lanes on the road are problematic. And of course its a given that the trains will have their own dedicated paths.

a comment about bikes on the sidewalk in tokyo: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34801479

I wrote it because in my experience a "balance" between modes can mean something like Amsterdam, or it can mean the status quo in the USA-outside-NYC, which is to say extreme and punishing car dependence. Sorry if I had you wrongly pegged. My belief is that a good balance is radically fewer cars in city centers. What's your idea of a good balance?

Every single thread or post about anything adjacent to cars or public transportation devolves into this. There is hardly any nuance, little effort is made to respond in good faith, and there are insults and insinuations thrown around all the time. Anyone perceived as being on the “wrong side” is instantly given a label and mocked. You don’t even have to be overzealous about it. Even the most benign comment will have someone piling on usually. “Just one more bus bro”

People don't under-report or misclassify homicides.

> when you walk through the cities and realize something is off with this narrative.

I happen to live in one of those war-torn anarchist cities that was claimed by Fox and friends to be an open charnel pit back in 2020, and I assure you, there is something off with a narrative.

Specifically, the narrative that my city is a lawless hellscape.

That narrative (along with the sudden and immediate need for the military to be illegally deployed in it) is back, by the way.

But in a lot of places the bedrock isn't very good and the prices are lower and it just does not make sense to build a skyscraper.

Urban densification is a real thing if you don't legislate to prevent it and create a culture which abhors it. The street I live on was here a century ago, but back then it'd have a few dozen scattered family homes. Over time there's infill, maybe we knock down a big house and we put up a semi (I think Americans would call this a "duplex"?), sell both units and so by the 1980s the street has a lot more individual homes, with smaller lots.

But there's still densification pressure, so two things begin to happen. One is that people buy a family home, cut it up and sell the parts. So maybe you take a 5 bed, slice it up, re-plumb and offer three small units each contained to one floor of what had previously been a house.

The other is what happened where I live, builders buy a house with excess land, knock the house down, and put an entire block of dedicated flats ("apartments") where it stood, designed so that it looks basically like a single large house from the street.

> It’s nice to believe in fairytales, but what you are proposing is effectively cutting access of poor people to opportunities so that the rich can bike to their cafe safely.

This is such a stupid populist argument. It's poor people that are hurt the most by lack of access to affordable dense multi family housing units in north american cities. Making poor families move further and further away from cities to find housing and then waste multiple hours a day sitting in traffic (and waste huge amounts of money on cars) is a ridiculous solution to affordability in cities.

It's rich people who can afford detached single family houses close to city centers, or fancy condos in skyscrapers. It's everyone else who are better served by more modest 3-4 story tall dense housing units.

Unplug your brain for the twitter matrix and go outside my dude, there is a whole life out there that isn't populated by grumpy terminally ill people who think everyone is plotting to slit their throat at the first opportunity

An example of making things unsafe: One of the railway unions took strike action to preserve 12 hour shifts for signallers. That might seem counter-intuitive, who wants 12 hour shifts? Well, you work 3 x 12 hour shifts, that's your week = 4 days per week off. Whereas if the safety reform demands max hour 8 shifts that's only 2-3 days off, so of course affected signallers hated that.

Why was it unsafe? Well humans can't really work 12 hours. We get bored & our minds wander, if it's dark and warm we fall asleep or stumble around dazed. And a signaller's job is normally pretty calm, you could do it half asleep and it'd be OK. "Ding ding" that's the last city express, pull 18, wait a beat, press buzzer, pull 19 and 25. But, sometimes it gets very exciting very fast, and that's why it's a job for a skilled human. "Ding ding" - the express, pull 18, it sticks, uh, what? Pull harder, still sticks. Er... now you should be wide awake, that express at 100mph is about to reach a Danger signal, is it because there's really danger? What should you do? But you are tired, it's been a long day, release 16 and that'll fix it right? Now 18 moves. But wait there's a loud noise and this needle is deflected, what did I do? And now the phone is ringing. We've just de-railed the back half of the slow coal train that was still crossing right in front of the express we've just given a green light. Hope nobody dies.

But this is the exception not the rule.