Episode 188: Microtransit

Speaker 1 There you go. Now it's recorded.
Weirdly the Zencaster doesn't look like it failed to me, but the OBS looked like it did because I can't see the slides.

Speaker 1 I also can't see the slides. Fuck face.
Well, yeah, that's because I haven't started the thing yet. Oh, okay.
You incompetent.

Speaker 1 Ah, yes.

Speaker 1 Yeah, you're not going to get to see my face on this one. And there's a beautiful, intriguing reason for this.
There's a magical reason. There's a magical reason.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 There's a magical reason for this, which is also that I'm trying to save bandwidth.

Speaker 1 When you hear the reason, you're probably wondering why I had to say that. you have to say bandwidth because my fucking internet is extremely bad and it's 4G.

Speaker 1 Yes.

Speaker 1 Yeah, which means that, like, even after a lot of fucking around with it, um, we've gotten it to a point where it's just about acceptable, but the upload speed and more importantly, latency is very high,

Speaker 1 which means

Speaker 1 the lag is atrocious. All right, well, the sig point's gonna be a hoot.
Oh, yeah. I was about to say, I'm gonna

Speaker 1 do a 3-2-1 mark and clap. Yeah.
3-2-1

Speaker 1 mark.

Speaker 1 All right. Doesn't sound that bad, actually.

Speaker 1 Yeah, see, it's improving, right? Like, the more time you give my wife to try and fix things, the better the things will be. I have learned to trust in my, I've learned to trust in my wife.
Yes.

Speaker 1 Yeah. My favorite part of tour was just running around looking for Corinne saying, has anyone seen Borat Voice My Wife? And without fail, Raza would go, my wife.
And I'm like, not your wife, bud.

Speaker 1 For all intents and purposes, I'm your wife

Speaker 1 your work wife yeah yeah but i listen we've been over this i would marry rods if i had to you have uh you have the married couple energy what is what is this podcast but a polycule um oh yeah let me tonic hold on don't talk to me about polycules right now so um the reason the reason why uh i i sound like this and the reason why liam before we started recording went are you sure you don't want to uh sort of punt on this one because you sound sound like you're dying?

Speaker 1 Is

Speaker 1 because my girlfriend's wife, love that woman, deeply, deeply fond of her,

Speaker 1 took me out for dinner before the recording. And she took me for dinner to the restaurant where she works, where everyone loves her because she's an angel.

Speaker 1 And because everyone loves her, customer service workers, restaurant workers like to express that love by giving you free drinks. And she doesn't drink.
So

Speaker 1 I have been drinking for two people across dinner and now had to run uphill in the dark, freezing cold to get to work. That's why I sound like this.
When my lungs stop burning, I'll be okay.

Speaker 1 Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, I thought you were sad. No, killer.
Killer.

Speaker 1 Killer.

Speaker 1 I was having too good of a time. This is what I've been doing with your Patreon.

Speaker 1 That's not even true. She paid.
Like,

Speaker 1 No,

Speaker 1 I thought you weren't feeling good. No, kill her dead.
Kill her dead.

Speaker 1 I really cannot stress enough my fondness and affection for my girlfriend's wife, who is a beautiful woman and all of whose drinks I consumed.

Speaker 1 I had a similar experience to this in Pittsburgh, at least the running up the hill part. Yep.
It's just

Speaker 1 a time to throw up.

Speaker 1 The guy serving you who is like her friend is like, okay, you don't want to see the dessert menu. That's fine.
Do you want a couple of limoncellos?

Speaker 1 And I, knowing that what this doesn't for me is drinking two limoncellos, go, yes. Yeah, it's, it's not like physically possible and is also very rude to refuse a limoncello.
Yeah, free limoncellos.

Speaker 1 Although that said, no, no, I thought you weren't feeling good. I thought you were sad.
I, All my sympathy is gone. No, I just want to say

Speaker 1 that. Okay, let's go.
Let's fucking go.

Speaker 1 Yeah, everyone's in a good mood. All right.

Speaker 1 Fuck you, buddy.

Speaker 1 Fuck you for being happy. Yeah.

Speaker 1 It's a podcast that thrives on shared misery. Yeah.
Oh, it sure does, November. Hello, and welcome to Well, There's Your Problem.
It's a podcast about engineering disasters with slides.

Speaker 1 I'm Justin Rozniak. I'm the person who's talking right now.
My pronouns are he and him.

Speaker 1 Okay, go. I'm November Kelly.
I'm the person who's talking now. My pronouns are she and her.
I'm very sorry. I try not to get drunk before work unless it's a bonus episode.

Speaker 1 But in this case, the circumstances were beyond my control. Yay, Liam.

Speaker 1 No, they weren't beyond your control. They were beyond my control.
They were beyond her control. All All right, fine.
I'll take that.

Speaker 1 I've been

Speaker 1 camera drunk recording this before. That's no big problem.

Speaker 1 Fuck. What are we? What's my name? Hi, I'm Liam McAnderson.
My pronouns.

Speaker 1 He and him, right? Yeah. It already has bonus episode energy.

Speaker 1 Well,

Speaker 1 I think this one, this one is a little bit of a silly one, I will say. What you see in front of you is a car.
That's a van, dumbass. It's a minivan.
This is a minivan.

Speaker 1 A minivan minivan is a type of car. No, a minivan is a type of van.

Speaker 1 Smart. Smart.

Speaker 1 Smart.

Speaker 1 Yes, it says smart.

Speaker 1 There's actually a Versus. It says it in the notes.
No, it's not. This is a...
I've got a... Oh, you already downloaded the PowerPoint, so I can't interfere with you.
S-M-Q-R-T.

Speaker 1 There's a subtle line here. It actually says smart, but it looks like smart.
No, it doesn't. Smart.
That line's coming out at an angle. That says smart.

Speaker 1 Squirt?

Speaker 1 Squirt?

Speaker 1 Yeah, I'm just gonna

Speaker 1 get the squirt home. One second.
Yeah, I'm just gonna.

Speaker 1 I gotta leave. I gotta bounce.
Let me just call it squirt. Yeah, even better than the

Speaker 1 South Lake Union trolley. Yeah, I get my,

Speaker 1 I got my burrito taxi to my house by a squirt eat. Via squirt.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Oh, I'd like to share squirt with her. I hardly know her.
What? Horrible. Well, it's not that bad.
It's just urethral fluid.

Speaker 1 This

Speaker 1 is a car branded as a transit vehicle. It's a van.
It's not. If we would transfer it, I feel like it very much is

Speaker 1 the episode where we could do one billion I actually identify as a bus jokes, but we're not

Speaker 1 going to do that.

Speaker 1 No, I identify as one of those nice conversion vans from Explorer with the, with the, with the, with the, with the, with the TV in the back and the, and the, and the couch.

Speaker 1 I bet their couch works, motherfuckers. They didn't have a lot of

Speaker 1 the fucking uh Amish. I identify as a car made by a communist country that no longer exists

Speaker 1 that had to make like the headlights in a separate pass of it for representation reasons and doesn't work at all. I don't, I haven't figured out my van Sona yet.
Um, I gotta.

Speaker 1 You need to study the sacred texts of cars cars to and planes yes not cars

Speaker 1 the esoterica like uh uh pixars metros

Speaker 1 i almost produced

Speaker 1 almost made it i saw the concept art too yeah yeah it looked dope um

Speaker 1 oh well but anyway so a bunch of people figured out how we could take some cars and say they were public transit on the today's

Speaker 1 technique called lying yes

Speaker 1 oh yes with this newfound technology called speeding.

Speaker 1 Yes. Well, that does speed up the transit.
On today's episode, we're going to talk about microtransit.

Speaker 1 But first, we have to do the goddamn news.

Speaker 1 I want the record to

Speaker 1 have a crispy timing on the news drop for a drunken woman. Oh, yeah.
Oh, no, you did a good job there. Thank you.

Speaker 1 So does anyone, does anyone remember the California forever people who are going to build a new city somewhere

Speaker 1 in the middle of nowhere? Salam.

Speaker 1 Yes.

Speaker 1 Their final plans came out recently before they hold the big referendum. You know, the idea being, okay, if we just change the zoning, we can build the perfect community.

Speaker 1 Oh, we're going to be the ones to do it, right? Can you,

Speaker 1 Devin, can you flash up in the edit

Speaker 1 Ironamish Bosch's The Harrowing of Hell, please? Oh, right. The California housing policy.
Yeah. Because, I mean, yeah, California Central Valley, most impoverished part of California,

Speaker 1 has had no investment in it. But what these guys want to do, noticeably, isn't investment.
It's just kind of vibes, as I understand it.

Speaker 1 It's a weird plan. I mean, it's not actually, I don't know where the Central Valley begins and ends.
This is sort of like north of San Francisco. The less you know, California River, you are, my guy.

Speaker 1 Whatchamacallit?

Speaker 1 I want to say Richmond, something like that.

Speaker 1 It's supposed to be this like sort of new, like dense like housing thing.

Speaker 1 And then there's going to be businesses and there's going to be, you know, you're going to be able to build any kind of building you want, you know, as opposed to having to be constrained with zoning, although there's a little bit of zoning.

Speaker 1 It's interesting.

Speaker 1 I've noticed. Oh, you go first.
Okay, sure.

Speaker 1 It's interesting

Speaker 1 reading these people's tweets.

Speaker 1 It gets a bit andaryal and they get a bit NASAC brained because if you see on the sort of bottom left of this plan here, technically this has access to the Pacific in the form of a bunch of like boggy swamps or whatever.

Speaker 1 Yes. And all of them are like, hey, we could build like an AI shipyard downstream and like dredge this.

Speaker 1 you could use this for some like NATSEC stuff, which is strange.

Speaker 1 Big shipyard.

Speaker 1 This right now is a bunch of like pasture, I want to say. This isn't even like Central Valley, like sort of intensive agriculture, you know, which I think should be obliterated.

Speaker 1 This is just pasture land right now.

Speaker 1 I don't know what they do with it. I've never been to this part of California.
Don't go to California as a rule, my guy.

Speaker 1 Yeah, the one thing I thought was interesting about this plan is, you know, this is supposed to be, again, dense walkable urbanism that's illegal to build in most American cities.

Speaker 1 Guess what they did not put in? A train station? That's right, a train station.

Speaker 1 Don't need it, you know? Just walk there. Yeah.
Same as weight.

Speaker 1 Have you seen this plan? It's a long walk. Well, now you can replicate it by going.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Well, it's weird. There is a railroad line here, which they plan to use

Speaker 1 as like a spur to bring freight in.

Speaker 1 Maybe they get two or three cars a week to whatever tech industries are over there. I don't think those guys use a lot of material in a way that a railroad makes sense.

Speaker 1 You know who owns this railroad is right over here. Hold on.
I lost the cursor. There we go.
Right about here. This entire line is owned by the Western Railway Museum.

Speaker 1 Okay, sure. I'm the only access in and out.

Speaker 1 Talk about living history, you know. You're going to get a really

Speaker 1 high-rated list of locomotives working in this. Yeah,

Speaker 1 they're going to have to go out with the little steeple cab and go pick up the freight cars and drag them into the ultra-high-tech city.

Speaker 1 So said this, yes.

Speaker 1 I think they got a steam locomotive, too, but

Speaker 1 they got to restore it. Really covering their bases, yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Just reaching a kind of compromise between these tech chuds and these foamers in the sense of like, you get to drive your steam engine, but we get to put a bunch of neon on the sides to make it look cyberpunk and you have to wear like tech wear.

Speaker 1 Yeah, like once a week.

Speaker 1 Nike jackets are weights 30 ounces. Yeah, we go up to the Union Pacific interchange once a week and pick up five box cars of graphics cards.

Speaker 1 The question is

Speaker 1 not even box cars. It's just like hoppers.
Bring back SLR. It's like a gondola.
How do like your coal cinders respond to the fabric of an acronym jacket? You know, like, I assume. Well,

Speaker 1 you got to wear only cotton on the foot plate. No, what if I'm wearing this like cool shit? Just because it catches

Speaker 1 it. It's fine.
It's fine. It's the future.

Speaker 1 You know, my funniest example of this is there's this one brand called, I think, Wallebach. I don't know how they want me to fucking pronounce that, but they make like

Speaker 1 kind of like jerk-off motion future clothes, right?

Speaker 1 And one of the things that they make is a jacket that costs like a thousand dollars because it's made in like with like copper fibers woven through it. So I will say this: it looks incredible.

Speaker 1 Okay, it looks incredible, right? Because it looks like a big sheet of copper with a zip on the front. But I think every so often about the kind of hubris of, well, how did he die?

Speaker 1 Well, he was walking around in the thunderstorm in his copper jacket.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's like this. You get like a, you get like a hot sim, a very small hot cinder hits the hits the clothing, and then immediately the heat is transferred to your entire body.

Speaker 1 And you get skin horsey, like golfing.

Speaker 1 I guess technically, this is a plug. It's not sponsored content, but it's technically me going, hey, these clothes look good, but are conceptually dumb as hell and really expensive.

Speaker 1 So if you want a jacket that you can be like electrocuted in and have a thousand dollars to spend. Yeah, copper jacket.

Speaker 1 Oh, I like when I search copper jacket, it searches, it comes up with Palmer Lucky. Oh, God, of course, he's the kind of person who's into this.
Yeah,

Speaker 1 yeah,

Speaker 1 ballaback copper jacket, Palmer Lucky Edition. Yeah, yeah, oh, God,

Speaker 1 he's gonna be the first guy whose copper jacket gets like Statue of Liberty colored just because he doesn't wash.

Speaker 1 Well,

Speaker 1 I will say this: I don't know what's gonna happen with the whole,

Speaker 1 the whole tech bro Greenfield City situation. I will say, go to Western Railway Museum before they either get destroyed by tech bros or receive a huge windfall of money.
I don't know.

Speaker 1 One of those two things is going to happen.

Speaker 1 I kind of

Speaker 1 back them to... I back them as a kind of Fallout style faction or a New Order style faction, primarily train-based, who are going to defeat Solano.
Oh, that'd be really funny. Oh, that'd be fun.

Speaker 1 That'd be fun.

Speaker 1 You got to start a, you do like a Mad Max style like war rig, but with old inter-urbans. Training.
Oh, yeah. Oh, Miles will have a field day.
Yes.

Speaker 1 Yeah. But

Speaker 1 in other news.

Speaker 1 New Fetterman Rising. This fucking dipshit.

Speaker 1 I said this on Twitter.

Speaker 1 I am going around America like Johnny Appleseed with a bunch of apology forms for Americans to fill out for making fun of the your party shit because not so easy to build a left that isn't stupid, is it?

Speaker 1 Apparently, yeah.

Speaker 1 No,

Speaker 1 they want $175 for a t-shirt.

Speaker 1 I'm excited for you to be mad at this brand for the rest of the episode. Yeah, fuck you.

Speaker 1 Graham Plattner.

Speaker 1 He's

Speaker 1 a Mainer.

Speaker 1 He's running for Senate in Maine.

Speaker 1 He is. What you call it? He was a...
And Pas Bernard, who's the side?

Speaker 1 He's the woke troop who also worked for Blackwater. He's the woke PMC,

Speaker 1 not professional managerial class, the other kind.

Speaker 1 The PMPMC stands for pronouns now. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Pronoun military contractor.

Speaker 1 Just on the on the tack vest, you've got the pronoun patch as you're leaning out of the kind of up-armored suburban to like shoot into crowds for no reason.

Speaker 1 Yeah, maybe a guy who joined Blackwater back in the day isn't that woke, or maybe he's one of the people. Welcome back in the day.
Was it like 2017?

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 I think he's definitely like, I would say, you know, currently

Speaker 1 he's woke, probably, I think. but I could see this guy pulling a Fetterman, right? You know, fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice.

Speaker 1 They found a bunch of his

Speaker 1 old Reddit posts, which never post on Reddit, but in fairness,

Speaker 1 I wouldn't be stupid enough to run for office, and I mean ever, but if I did and they found my tweets, I couldn't be mad.

Speaker 1 They found a bunch of his old Reddit posts, a bunch of which were like, yeah, I wish I could have fought applications for the

Speaker 1 yeah my god um like i wish i could have fought in like the u.s in like secret invasion of nicaragua or some shit like that where i'm like wow man what

Speaker 1 i also found out he was he was a he was an instructor for the fucking um oh what's the what's the like arm the left guys

Speaker 1 um

Speaker 1 what's it called the the like um the like

Speaker 1 the left gun people.

Speaker 1 I want to say socialist majority caucus, but that's a DSA. SRA, thank you.
Socialist, the SRA. Socialist rifle.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. He was an SRA instructor.

Speaker 1 And if you've ever had a criticism of the SRA that they were kind of like

Speaker 1 politically incoherent, this here is your example number one as well.

Speaker 1 So this is cool.

Speaker 1 The SRA are very stinky.

Speaker 1 But most of all, most of all, I mean, we're going to get yelled at for that, but it's like, man i don't know impose some party discipline or something um the but most of all the reason the reason why we're laughing at this guy is because of his cool celtic dog tattoo which is a cover-up of his vuffin ss totenkof tattoo

Speaker 1 yeah

Speaker 1 it was uh very very much a totenkof and he seemed to be aware that it was yeah

Speaker 1 this is one of the things that i could of course i could understand if you're a stupid marine and and 19 getting that tattoo, but like, you know, you should probably get that laser.

Speaker 1 But you should have covered that off for Dory Ronaldo.

Speaker 1 Right, exactly. He said, he said that he got it drunk.
At the very least, just get the get the get the Punisher logo, you fucking idiot. Well, that's cop, that's cop coded.

Speaker 1 And one thing you do learn from his Reddit is that he does authentically hate cops, which cool.

Speaker 1 But like, apparently he, he said he got this on sure leave in Croatia drunk, which I believe instantly.

Speaker 1 The problem is,

Speaker 1 like a

Speaker 1 Marine getting a tattoo of an SS logo in Croatia. I believe that that's something you could do by mistake.
I also believe that's something you would do on purpose.

Speaker 1 So it's really much of a muchness to me. And then keeping it for the next like 20 years or whatever.
is really sick shit. Yep.
Yes.

Speaker 1 Yep. Also, since it it seems again from the old reddit post that uh at some point he became aware of what it was yeah

Speaker 1 just having yeah not here's the thing if i if i had like a nazi tattoo on me and i became aware that i had a nazi tattoo on me i would count that day as probably one of the worst experiences of my life um

Speaker 1 and i would probably chop off my arm i wouldn't wait for like uh yeah

Speaker 1 for for like lasering off i'd be like all right we got a, this is three.

Speaker 1 Drunk driving to the nearest tattoo place, holding someone at gunpoint to make them cover it up. Give me your lasers.

Speaker 1 Just, just like, I, yeah. Also, I wouldn't do any of this cute, like, Celtic fucking runic shit either.
You know? Especially if it was a Nazi tattoo. Knocking on the door, basically.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Just black it out, you sick fuck. Like,

Speaker 1 um,

Speaker 1 but so again, I would say

Speaker 1 heavy and strong there.

Speaker 1 Regardless of whatever this guy's politics may or may not be, I would suggest that this shows a severe deficiency in judgment, the likes of which might be acceptable for a podcaster, but fucking not for a senator.

Speaker 1 Jesus Christ. Um, he's ahead in the polls.
I don't think any fact. Yeah, he's ahead in the polls.
I mean, you know, I don't.

Speaker 1 I don't think this guy should be, you know, the great white hope of the left, emphasis on white. Yeah.

Speaker 1 I mean, I I don't know. Because like

Speaker 1 main localism, they've all fucking

Speaker 1 they all have some kind of prion disease you can only get from lobsters out there. And so they're like, yep, fuck yeah, give me, give me the woke stern banfiro or whatever.

Speaker 1 And I'm happy for him to represent Innsmouth in the Senate, you know? Yeah, I mean, I don't know. Maybe, maybe we'll be proven wrong, but I don't think so.
I think this guy is going to.

Speaker 1 I don't think we've ever been. This guy is going to Fetterman hard.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah. No, it's going to be worse because at least Fetterman, when we elected him, was like not, I don't know.
He wasn't that bad. Yeah.

Speaker 1 We made a mistake. Oh, we made a mistake.
I'll be the first to tell you. But like, yeah.
Well, I mean, here's the thing.

Speaker 1 We've always on Federman been like, okay, sure, he seems cool or whatever at the time, but Liam doesn't like him. So we were saved from total embarrassment by that.

Speaker 1 So thank you, Liam.

Speaker 1 I don't think so.

Speaker 1 We were not saved from total embarrassment. Were Were we not? I remember us being like, Liam doesn't like him.
Fuck. Okay.
No, I did like him. That's the worst part.
Yeah, no, I did.

Speaker 1 I have a picture with a picture with him. Oh.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Okay. I ran after to get it.
That was before he went full fuckface.

Speaker 1 At least Zoran's always going to be good. At least Zach Polanski is always going to be good.
You can always trust all politicians to do the right thing, always forever. Yes.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Under no circumstances attempt to build like a broad-based party thing that doesn't rely on individual personalities. Don't do that.
Yeah, no, no. We need, we need individual personalities.

Speaker 1 Individual action is how you do politics. That's right.
That's a factual truth. Right.

Speaker 1 You kind of wait until the counter ticks up and you generate a JFK. Yeah, exactly.
Never build a broad-based movement. Just do individual action.
Or, I don't know.

Speaker 1 Well, the weird thing about this guy is I keep hearing stuff about why is the left supporting this guy? And it doesn't really seem to be the left that's supporting this guy.

Speaker 1 No, he's weirdly a new generation establishment dem from like the pod save Johns, like the guys who

Speaker 1 weirdly now aren't that for this motherfucker, you know, aren't the establishment but want to be so that they can, I guess, remold the Democratic Party in their image, which will be God only knows how different, you know, I assume not very.

Speaker 1 They've been, they've They've been disestablished. Yeah.
And I think that's wrong. That's why I'm an anti-disestablishmentarianist.
The long years in exile for the pod saved Johnson. Did you see the

Speaker 1 Washington Post review of Carrine Jean-Pierre's book,

Speaker 1 which was just like...

Speaker 1 I highly recommend this to anyone who enjoys Schaden Freuder because her book is like Biden didn't do anything wrong. Kamala didn't do anything wrong.
Both of them were betrayed by party interests.

Speaker 1 And that's why question mark, question mark, question mark. And for once, she actually gets called on this stuff.

Speaker 1 And this review just takes the whole thing apart in a way that's really, really satisfying to read. I'm sure it won't change anything.

Speaker 1 I hate this

Speaker 1 people. Yeah.
Speaking of individual action.

Speaker 1 The East Wing of the White House is gone.

Speaker 1 We've all got friends, we've all got mutuals for whom this stuff is meaningful and who will genuinely be like, it's the people's house. And I respect the strength of their convictions.

Speaker 1 However, do it again, Canada. God damn America with three K's.
God damn America. Finished off the rest of it.
It's a terrible building anyway.

Speaker 1 The White House should continue to exist only as a Hitman blood money level. That's not wrong.
But I, I don't know.

Speaker 1 I, you know, I just, I, I like, I like the architecture of DC by and large because I'm stupid and a rube.

Speaker 1 I do not.

Speaker 1 Demolish all the federal government,

Speaker 1 give DC local sovereignty, and then move the federal government to the central point of the United States, which is like a dirt field in fucking, I don't know, Wales, Wyoming, possibly, and build a beautiful modernist Oscar Niemeyer-style capital there.

Speaker 1 That's my opinion.

Speaker 1 It's going to be, it's going to be like Denver or somewhere. No, so Donald John Trump, who was president of these United States of America,

Speaker 1 has seen fit to demolish the East Wing of the White House, the East Wing being a 1942 addition to the White House,

Speaker 1 which was, according to some

Speaker 1 sources, largely built to conceal the construction of a bunker underneath the White House. Yeah, the East Wing hasn't been pulling its weight ever.
It's where the First Lady's stuff is.

Speaker 1 Yeah, this is true. The East Wing was not, it was not a very good good building.

Speaker 1 I will say this.

Speaker 1 I'm going to be honest.

Speaker 1 I was talking to a friend of the podcast, June, a while back about this before it was like, it suddenly happened.

Speaker 1 Like, yeah, I think Trump has a few points about the whole tent situation because we're both familiar with stupid real estate guys.

Speaker 1 And,

Speaker 1 you know, okay, he's demolishing it to put up this huge new stupid ballroom.

Speaker 1 I didn't think it would happen so quick, though.

Speaker 1 I figured they would, you know, get through some kind of process and it would, you know, stall out. It's like permits or anything for it.
They're just doing it, which

Speaker 1 is not. My question is whether they, do they legally need permits? I don't know.
Um, because of federalism. I don't think they're doing anyway.

Speaker 1 If it's, if, if it were the Capitol building, because I looked this up, I was like, surely the architect of the Capitol has something to say here. No, that's only for the Capitol complex.

Speaker 1 Everything else, they can apparently just do what they want.

Speaker 1 I will say, no one's going to get food stamps in November, so that does piss me off.

Speaker 1 I want the wokest Democratic president to take that, to take that kind of knowledge that the president can just do whatever the fuck they want to the White House and really get extra with it, you know?

Speaker 1 Um,

Speaker 1 go to town, yeah. But I mean, listen, the East Wing, I'm not historically attached to it.

Speaker 1 You have to be the kind of person who cares about like first lady history to care about that, or the kind of person who cares about the norms.

Speaker 1 I dread to think what Melania was using the East Wing for. Like, what kind of sick freak shit was going on in there, though? Nothing.

Speaker 1 I wonder if that's where

Speaker 1 the Christmas trees were. Although, I think that was on the corridor to the West Wing.
And the corridor to the East Wing, I think, was actually historic. Most of that is gone.

Speaker 1 You go into the East Wing, and all of a sudden, it starts looking like the bits of control where the fucking Hiss is really going.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I don't know. Personally,

Speaker 1 I don't care other than in the sense that it kind of seems like there will not be free elections in 2028. Yeah,

Speaker 1 I would very much like people to get their food stamped so they stop bothering me at work. Yeah, this is very much sort of a symbolic situation.

Speaker 1 I mean, he did this during the ongoing government shutdown, which I don't know at this point, maybe it's just be permanent government shutdown. Who knows?

Speaker 1 No one wants those Epstein files to get out.

Speaker 1 You know, so this is,

Speaker 1 I mean, symbolically,

Speaker 1 very, very disturbing. But also, I think factually, it was a shitty building.
Get rid of it.

Speaker 1 And I mean, in fairness, like, as we've seen, just randomly adding or

Speaker 1 subtracting to the White House is just a kind of presidential whim historically, you know, like

Speaker 1 it's kind of funny. Yeah.
And people will be like, oh, well, they cut down fucking Chester A. Arthur's magnolia trees or whatever.
And I'm like, okay. Well, they got rid of the,

Speaker 1 what is it? The

Speaker 1 Jacqueline Kennedy Gardens.

Speaker 1 That one does piss me off a bit. In the sense of like, it's too ugly to like be allowed to continue to exist.

Speaker 1 Which, you know, the, i mean and also the gardens they'll just probably replant them when they uh finish this project yeah i yeah i i turning turning the kind of um like rose garden into like not that i was hugely attached to the rose garden or whatever but turning it into like

Speaker 1 um this kind of patio seating thing with where you can get like a chocolate lava cake or whatever and there's a big gold statue of george washington um obviously that was that was just a long

Speaker 1 you know i yeah i've played

Speaker 1 yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah. They could put that back in like, you know, 10 days if they need to.

Speaker 1 It's going to be job number one for the kind of next woke president. That assumes we're allowed to have a woke president.
Well, that's going to be an interesting one.

Speaker 1 It's like, you know, I pay, I'm the woke president. I'm going to come in.
I'm going to make a lawn. I don't know.
I don't know if that's good either.

Speaker 1 Listen, I want the kind of, I miss the insincere kind of Democratic Party woke enough that if they wanted to come back into power after whatever kind of blood-soaked military coup and be like, okay, it's the Black Lives Matter pronouns Rose Garden now.

Speaker 1 I would be like, okay, cool, based. Oh, yeah.
And then you replant it with like native swamp grasses to Washington, D.C. Oh, sick.
Yeah, okay. We're selling me on this.

Speaker 1 And then you have like formal events there and you bring in dignitaries and they all get ticks.

Speaker 1 again. I'm seeing the modernism.
You take all of the shit in the walls behind those, like between those columns, smash that out,

Speaker 1 big glass windows, and you just do a kind of like fusion thing. It'd be cool.
There you go.

Speaker 1 All right. We have a plan for the White House now.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Next, next woke president or chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, depending on how it shakes out, hit my line. I will be the new architect of the capital.

Speaker 1 Yeah. We're going to give every major world leader ticks.
Yes. Oh, you're all going to get a prion disease we have never heard of before.
They're all going to get that

Speaker 1 disease that

Speaker 1 makes it impossible for you to eat meat.

Speaker 1 It's going to be very funny if we can give that to Jordan Peterson.

Speaker 1 How was that? Was that good? It's good, yeah. What is it? Jordan Peterson impression? That's probably how he sounds right now, yeah.
That's probably how he sounds right now, yeah.

Speaker 1 Well,

Speaker 1 that was the goddamn news.

Speaker 1 Okay, I wanted to add a disclaimer to start out.

Speaker 1 So microtransit, the sort of on-demand public transportation, there's good forms of this, like paratransit, where, you know, they send out a bus for you to get around. If

Speaker 1 the seniors I work with rely on CCT to get around. The drivers are nice.
Yeah, you see like community trust minivans that are adapted here

Speaker 1 for that.

Speaker 1 Yeah, scheduled the rides for the seniors, and then they go to the casino, and then they lose all their money, and then they come to me and they say, Give me your money, and I get robbed at gunpoint by my seniors.

Speaker 1 It's very unfortunate. So there's a cycle, really.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah. My upstairs neighbor also uses paratransit.

Speaker 1 God bless Miss Venus. Yeah.
There's also, you know, other, like, we'll, we'll figure out this term demand responsive later.

Speaker 1 There's other systems like this, which are not, you know, the brainchild of, you know, idiots who think a bunch of cars with the transit system logo on them can replace buses.

Speaker 1 We're going to talk about the bad stuff. Yeah.
So anyway, yeah, paratransit is good.

Speaker 1 Anyway, first we must ask a question. What is public transportation? What is it for? To move a lot of people very slowly through 18th and Chestnut.

Speaker 1 why does that train have one half of a pair of handcuffs on it shut up okay

Speaker 1 why is that there i never noticed that before

Speaker 1 i expected you to have an answer you're you you know about this stuff uh it's it's disconcerting if you're like

Speaker 1 yeah i don't know oh i was trying to be following god damn it

Speaker 1 all right we're doing great nova i have no clue jesus

Speaker 1 i don't know what that is if you if you know why this train is wearing one half of a pair of handcuffs write in in the comments. Yeah.

Speaker 1 I didn't have to get it cut off with bolt cutters on like something. It's like a fugitive.
Maybe it's like a bondage. It's wearing a lot of chains up front as well.

Speaker 1 That's what I think is bondage gear. That was the joke I was aiming for.
Yeah. Yeah.
We're not aiming for the truck.

Speaker 1 Anyway. It's a toy story, right? Yeah.

Speaker 1 It's falling with style.

Speaker 1 Hopefully not on the Broad Street line. You don't want to be falling with style.
Yeah. There's lots of ways to look at public transportation.
It's a means of transportation, right?

Speaker 1 It gets you from near to point A to near to point A, point B, you know. Yeah.
That's usually pretty good, at least for my purposes.

Speaker 1 You could say this is a jobs program, which is weirdly how I think a lot of Democratic politicians look at it, right? Look at all the good union jobs we've created.

Speaker 1 Bus drivers, mechanics, motormen, administrators, construction guys, so on and so forth, right? Yeah. On the other side of the aisle, it's a welfare program, right?

Speaker 1 Wherein we provide chauffeurs for poor people, right? That's what the Republican, uh, uh, Republican Pennsylvania state senators think. Oh, they could all kill themselves.
Sorry. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Wooply, but it's fine. Yeah.
Sorry, Dev, 39 minutes, 36 seconds in.

Speaker 1 Yeah. So I think there's another interesting way to look at it

Speaker 1 through the lens of, of course, second wave feminism.

Speaker 1 Hell yeah, Justin, brackets with a caveat.

Speaker 1 All right. Hit me with it.
All right. All right.

Speaker 1 I think

Speaker 1 there's a connection here. So, you know, women, especially, you know, stay-at-home wives, do a lot of labor.
A lot of that labor is uncompensated, right? Yeah. Yeah.
The third shift. Absolutely.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 So in 1972, the International Wages for Housework campaign was kicked off in Manchester at the National Women's Liberation Conference by Maria Rosa, Dalla Costa,

Speaker 1 Silvia Frederici, Bridget.

Speaker 1 Okay, yeah,

Speaker 1 I'm aware of Silvia Federici.

Speaker 1 Okay, so

Speaker 1 some problems

Speaker 1 with the second wave of feminism.

Speaker 1 Good things about the second wave of feminism.

Speaker 1 what if we did some Marxism? What if we thought about like labor and wages and material conditions? Uh, bad things about second wave feminism, uh, what if we got really transphobic?

Speaker 1 What if we got really racist? Uh, but also, uh, in Silvia Federici's case specifically, what if we

Speaker 1 kind of made up a lot of history in a way that really set back a lot of study of like feminist history in order to advance that agenda? Um,

Speaker 1 so yeah,

Speaker 1 I have Silvia Federici and I have beef, also a turf second wave feminism.

Speaker 1 Right, yeah, no, there's some problems with this movement, but there are some lenses in which, you know, I think it's useful to look at. Absolutely.
Absolutely. Yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 So you look at all this shit like cleaning, cooking, washing, drying, childcare, ironing, going to get their husband a beer from the fridge, so on and so forth. That's all work, right? Yeah.

Speaker 1 Work deserves compensation.

Speaker 1 The written title, it's all it creates.

Speaker 1 When I said the third shift, if you don't get that, that is a phrase that second wave feminists and later feminists have used to describe what's now described somewhat trivializingly as emotional labor of, okay, well, you have to like running.

Speaker 1 Running a household is exhausting. But then you also have to run the household.
Yeah, exactly. Right.
Yeah. Yeah.
This is all getting the kids to soccer practice, all that shit. Yeah.
Yes. Yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 I can barely, I can barely run my own household, and I have a lot of people. Oh, tell me about it.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 This stuff's hard.

Speaker 1 Well, the good thing about being a lesbian is if you're struggling to run your household and you're all women, then it's like, okay, well, thank fucking Christ, there's no like

Speaker 1 sort of differential here. So we're all equally at fault here.
Oh, there you go. There you go.

Speaker 1 That is what it is.

Speaker 1 This, this work demands compensation. Compensation would come from the government, right? Because if you're in a situation where you can't do this individually, right?

Speaker 1 This is not going to work out for everyone to say, well, I need an allowance from my husband, right? That's

Speaker 1 back to the

Speaker 1 patriarchy shit. Yeah.
So, you know, this campaign, it still exists, right?

Speaker 1 They've organized a few strikes, campaigned for better rights for domestic workers, sex workers, subsistence farmers, so on and so forth.

Speaker 1 They're still around. I'm not sure if they've modernized too much.
Yeah, well, I do want to say that this stuff is not something that kind of... sex,

Speaker 1 sorry,

Speaker 1 I got into the feminist sex wars there and across a wire in my head. This is not something that second wave feminism owns necessarily.

Speaker 1 And it's also, I've been a bit reductive about second wave wave feminism because it contained a lot of stuff a lot of currents that were very negative but like those were never like uncontested right and there were there were trans second wave feminists um there were second wave feminists of color right like it's not like there's a lot of stuff that i think became uh more exclusionary after the fact um because of this process rewriting

Speaker 1 sex wars yeah um but yeah absolutely and and like i think if you're in any way a serious feminist, then yeah, you have to take this stuff seriously of like, yeah, there's a bunch of feminized labor that is not conceptualized that way.

Speaker 1 Yes, yes. I mean, that's the crucial thing here.
You know, I think conceiving of labor as conceiving labor outside of the workplace as labor, right? Yeah. Labor is not all hitting the big.

Speaker 1 I-beam with the hammer.

Speaker 1 No, sometimes it's hitting the child with the child care.

Speaker 1 Sometimes it's like hitting the dirty dishes with the

Speaker 1 dish soap. Sometimes it's like hitting the elderly with the elderly care.
So, yeah, there's a lot of things.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I probably don't describe it that way. If anyone asks what you do for a living,

Speaker 1 oh, hit them with it.

Speaker 1 I hit the child with the child care. When all you have is elderly care, everything looks like an elderly person.

Speaker 1 so also when you think about um labor you can think about things like labor-saving devices right

Speaker 1 um and i remember a distinct poster that said um

Speaker 1 uh don't kill your wife with work let electricity help oh god

Speaker 1 you know in the case of labor that you're being compensated for Sometimes labor-saving devices are a little complex, but I think in the case of uncompensated labor, that's an unalloyed good. So

Speaker 1 we'll look at two machines here: the washing machine and the city bus.

Speaker 1 A lot harder to get stuck in a city bus, but not impossible. Step brother, what are you doing?

Speaker 1 Or should I say step buser? What are you doing? Yeah.

Speaker 1 So, what do these two things have in common?

Speaker 1 Both contain motion.

Speaker 1 This is true.

Speaker 1 um both difficult to move by hand yes i'm sure there are others mine moves itself much like a city bus not as quick though

Speaker 1 so the washing machine was one of the most important labor-saving devices invented in the 20th century

Speaker 1 the labor it saved was uncompensated labor, right? Hours of a day that women spent washing clothing was now entirely, you know, free and clear thanks to this fantastic, hard-working device.

Speaker 1 This was now time that was open for leisure or self-improvement or, you know, whatever you wanted to do. That was your own free time.

Speaker 1 It does not show up in, you know, like GDP reports because, you know, this labor, like... everything women did in the home was uncompensated.

Speaker 1 Yeah, GDP is a very limited metric for measuring an economy or measuring economic activity. Oh, yeah.
I mean, you know, it's always like, I had a disappointing GDP report from China this year.

Speaker 1 Also, they opened 40 new high-speed train lines.

Speaker 1 Imagine that. So I think we need to apply this likewise to the city bus, right? One driver, one 40-seat bus driving for an hour.

Speaker 1 That's going to save up to 40 hours of uncompensated labor that would have otherwise been spent by those passengers driving alone, you know, not to mention capital investment of 40 cars. Sure.

Speaker 1 If you think about public transit versus the highway system in terms of raw labor time and raw capital investment, transit clearly wins out.

Speaker 1 We've just offloaded the labor of driving and the capital investment of cars onto the consumer

Speaker 1 and sold it to them as freedom and a status symbol and so on and so forth. Yeah, and clearly this works because everyone loves driving.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I, well, yeah, I mean, a lot of people do really love driving. It's frustrating.

Speaker 1 But if we bought everyone on the roads a car and compensated them for the labor of driving for all trips except for those for pure pleasure, I don't think the economics of driving a car would be so rosy as they are now.

Speaker 1 So, you know, yeah, public transit is a labor-saving device that frees us all from uncompensated drudgery.

Speaker 1 Sure. You know, but we generally don't think of it that way.
You know, driving is just free. You can just drive anywhere at any time for free, right? Yeah, you put this in a city building game, right?

Speaker 1 Like, you got to build roads and you can put in as many like nice buses and trains as you can, but like

Speaker 1 by default. And they don't take those motherfuckers.
Yeah, by default, if you don't have those or if those don't work enough, people will drive. It just shows

Speaker 1 drive, yeah. So, anyway,

Speaker 1 I think driving is generally like, you know, thought of as like,

Speaker 1 it's free, you know, you just have it. We'll see how this mindset affects decision makers later.
I like this lens.

Speaker 1 The bus is a sort of tool of feminist emancipation. Yeah, I like this a lot.

Speaker 1 Yes, the bus is the evolution of the bicycle, also a tool of feminist emancipation. Yes, literally, Absolutely.
And the mailbox. Yep.
Yep.

Speaker 1 So now we got to talk about two problems in urban transportation, which are the last mile problem and the geometry problem. We'll talk about the last mile problem here.

Speaker 1 These problems are in tension with each other, right? The last mile problem is that public transportation, right?

Speaker 1 It's an expensive investment, therefore is generally limited to high density and well-traveled corridors, which is not necessarily, at least here in the United States, where most people live, right?

Speaker 1 You know, with modern suburban development patterns.

Speaker 1 So you can provide excellent service to some of the people, but not those who live like more than a quarter or half a mile from a subway train or bus stop, right? Right.

Speaker 1 There's a lot of ways to solve this problem or try to solve this problem, which we're going to demonstrate here at Franconia Springfield Metro Station. Oh, boy.

Speaker 1 Is this like a known thing?

Speaker 1 I sense a recognition here. This used to be my Metro station.
Yeah, I was.

Speaker 1 I'm yearning for the Roz of Yor.

Speaker 1 Where are the Rozes of yesteryear?

Speaker 1 Wherefore art thou,

Speaker 1 Roz, tweeting furiously about the bus not working? Yeah. Well, I wasn't on Twitter back then.
I didn't

Speaker 1 get on Twitter as my dream.

Speaker 1 Or Or I was on Twitter, I just didn't post very much.

Speaker 1 I remember your untapped account that all you did was to check in on Yinglings, which I thought was pretty funny.

Speaker 1 Yep, it's beer.

Speaker 1 So, one of the ways you can

Speaker 1 overcome the last mile problem is, of course, to run feeder buses, right? Sure.

Speaker 1 As an example, I used to take either the 18R or the 18s from burke virginia both of those would come up here through old keen mill road and then down to the station um oh god every time i draw on this it resets the notes um the 18s uh provided a direct route to the metro while the 18r sort of meandered through neighborhoods and

Speaker 1 cul-de-sacs and so on and so forth so it could cover more area and get people closer to their homes.

Speaker 1 You know, that was a slower bus, but, you know, sometimes I took it anyway. If I was like really tired after rowing practice, I was like, I don't want to walk that extra distance, right?

Speaker 1 And it was not that much slower.

Speaker 1 And so, like, generally in the evenings, you know, there would be like a dozen people on this bus stops.

Speaker 1 And when we got down to like three or four, the driver would just yell back, Hey, what's your stop? And we'd tell him what our stop was.

Speaker 1 And he'd just drive there directly and skip a bunch of the route. Oh, yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 yeah yeah yeah because they're no one was like taking this bus outbound beyond francodia spring at this point right yeah this is a fixed route bus but practically speaking no one was boarding in the excerpts you know yeah you could get away with this everyone got home faster they were happy i i like

Speaker 1 efficient bus i like a bus or a train that's like statutorily has to be maintained and serves like three people, you know? Yeah, and the guy's just like, where are you stopping?

Speaker 1 And then he just goes goes there. It's very nice.
I had that happen when I was taking the bus in.

Speaker 1 Remember when I worked in King of Prussia and I would have to take the 125? And a lot of times the bus driver would just skip just a whole bunch of shit and I'd get there in like eight minutes.

Speaker 1 It was insane.

Speaker 1 On the far north line in Scotland,

Speaker 1 there are stations that are, you have to hail a train. You have to like.
push a button and the next one will stop because they're used so seldom. Bike stops, yeah.

Speaker 1 That like, why would would you, why would you stop at every one? And I really like that. Another option, you can see right here, you can have a parking ride, right?

Speaker 1 You drive your car to the station and you park, and then you get on the train. Problem is, you need a lot of parking, right? This is a parking is an enemy of the podcast.
Yes, this is true.

Speaker 1 Walk, you motherfuckers.

Speaker 1 This is an absolutely massive garage. It's like six or seven stories tall.
Jesus. It has 5,000 spaces, right?

Speaker 1 And obviously, probably not everyone is driving alone to this uh train station 5 000 spaces is gonna yield about 5 000 riders 5 000 riders is not a huge number when it comes to subway stations right that's like five full capacity trains which at rush hour is that that's 20 minutes of trains um

Speaker 1 jesus we got to build a shitload more parking lots that apparently yeah add like 10 or 15 more stories um well

Speaker 1 get the tower. The tower of parked cars that just sits there all day.
I forget what the world's tallest parking garage is. I think

Speaker 1 it's 14. Yeah, no, it's going to be depressing.

Speaker 1 We have another idea called the kiss and ride, right? Ooh.

Speaker 1 That's me about my Friday night. And the kiss and ride, the idea here, the husband drives the car to the transit station, gets out to go to work, and then the wife drives the car back home.

Speaker 1 Gendered labor. Yeah, gendered labor is still happening.
Yeah, no kidding. I mean, it's a cute name for it, at least.
Yes.

Speaker 1 And then, you know, you got bike share taxis, Ubers, hotel shuttles, office park shuttles all go to the station. You got infrastructure for those things.

Speaker 1 You don't really have sidewalks around this station, right? You might be able to make it to the apartment complex across the

Speaker 1 Fairfax County Parkway. I think it's still a parkway on this side of 395.
I'm not sure.

Speaker 1 You could go and walk over to the TSA headquarters down here

Speaker 1 if you really wanted to.

Speaker 1 This whole neighborhood down here, I had a friend in high school who lived here who couldn't access the metro because they didn't build the connection until like a couple years ago.

Speaker 1 So, yeah,

Speaker 1 this is one way to do these last mile connections. You can see there's a lot of infrastructure required, right?

Speaker 1 It's got its own clover leaf over here, as well as this interchange is basically dedicated to the station.

Speaker 1 You know, the big parking garage, the loops, and bullshit, but that's what you have to do if you want to move a lot of cars and buses into a station like this, right?

Speaker 1 This is how you serve effectively a low-density area like, you know, Springfield, Virginia.

Speaker 1 And on the other hand you have the geometry problem in urban areas that's so much streets

Speaker 1 yeah yeah

Speaker 1 oh for good to try gorgeous gorgeous pairs of pair of buildings though this is oh yeah it's nice out

Speaker 1 really really nice oh yeah this is this is juniper street and this is

Speaker 1 named for the podcast the wanamaker building and then i want to say this is the widener building i don't think so this one is cool i think so dude yeah um oh yeah just huge buildings.

Speaker 1 Anyway, imagine trying to shove all those cars down here. That's not going to work.
People sure do try on a Friday.

Speaker 1 Stack them vertically. There should be 11 lanes of traffic on this.

Speaker 1 But yeah, in cities, you're constrained by geometry. There's narrow streets.
They can't handle many vehicles.

Speaker 1 Widening them is difficult because you have to tear down buildings to do that.

Speaker 1 As such, it's beneficial to transport people using large vehicles and so minimize the amount of space required per person transported, or go for alternate transportation, like I don't know, bicycles or you could even walk places.

Speaker 1 Some people don't like to do that.

Speaker 1 I would prefer to make all of the cars smaller and gayer and more European. Yes.
That would be kind of funny. Everybody has to drive with their knees hunched up on their chest.

Speaker 1 I thought Trump was making the opposite happen. I want a PLP50.
Give me a P50.

Speaker 1 you have to drive a synclass c5 to work yeah an old fiat 500 i just think this dude 500 is like big so you know it's it's good to use a large vehicle um to minimize the amount of space required per person so a subway train is more space efficient than a tram tram is more space efficient than a bus bus is more space efficient much more space efficient than a car right right

Speaker 1 So yeah, you got to use the big vehicle. This is a problem in congested areas, but there's a lot of space.
You know, you can see here's the X, here's the Y axis.

Speaker 1 There's a lot of space on the Z axis, right? I was right.

Speaker 1 Stack lanes on top of each other. You should be able to lean out of your office window through someone's car window and take the drink out of the cup holder.

Speaker 1 All that stuff is currently occupied by dirt or air, right? And that's something we figured out a while back.

Speaker 1 This may look like, if you've ever seen any of those old-timey illustrations of this is what the city is. Remember the future.
Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 1 So this is not the city of the future. This is the actual current configuration of Herald Square in New York City.
Yeah, but when you walk through it, you're allowed to be like the way of the future.

Speaker 1 Yeah, this is true. This is true.
Well, okay, they got rid of the streetcars. They got rid of the L.
Everything below ground is still there. Yeah.

Speaker 1 it's very difficult to beat the speed and capacity and space efficiency of uh heavy rail rapid transit right heavy rail here being like a proper a subway right um you know and back when we were serious about things you know you could build these four-track subways that could you know transport people very quickly and efficiently places or do that anymore because of reasons because i mean the thing about underground is as I always say, that's where the pipes is.

Speaker 1 And once that's where the pipes is, and once you start putting in more pipes, it gets more expensive.

Speaker 1 You know, utility relocation is less of a big deal than people make it out to be.

Speaker 1 I don't know. That's right.
Get to work, Roz.

Speaker 1 Yeah, let me, let me, you know, unless it's like, I don't know, we're going to, we're going to hot tap a 50-inch main or something like that.

Speaker 1 I understand that was done under Aramango Avenue recently, which is a terrifying thing to think about. Yeah, buddy.

Speaker 1 When I say recently, I mean like eight or nine years ago. Um, that still counts as recent to me.
I'd be thinking about that shit on my deathbed.

Speaker 1 Yeah, just continuing to think about, oh my god, they relocated that main while it was fucking

Speaker 1 still live the whole time. How did they even do that?

Speaker 1 It's like one of the key

Speaker 1 bomb disposal, but you have, and in order to do that, you disassemble the entire bomb part by part and rebuild it at a safe location. It's, yeah, I mean, forensic bomb building, yeah.

Speaker 1 I don't understand how

Speaker 1 that's a part of like uh engineering. I'm like just astonished that you can do that.
Yeah,

Speaker 1 that's probably much more dangerous than a bomb.

Speaker 1 But yeah, so we did really aggressive public transit schemes back in the early part of the 20th century, limited part this, uh, to a limited extent the second part of of the 20th century, stuff like

Speaker 1 the Great Society subways and so on and so forth.

Speaker 1 And we had this sort of problem solved, but again, because of things we mentioned earlier,

Speaker 1 the accounting looks a lot better for highways.

Speaker 1 Well, that's way more important than stuff actually was. Yes.
So ultimately, here in the United States, I mean, also Europe, also a lot of other places.

Speaker 1 That's what we invested in and started wasting everyone's time and we're still you know stuck in that rut right right you know and and today you know the accounting again looks so bad you couldn't build something like this these days you'd see something with the transit demand like that and you would you know say okay we're gonna paint a lane red and say it's bus rapid transit but you know only Monday to Friday from 7 a.m.

Speaker 1 to 11 a.m. and 4 p.m.
to 8 p.m. and a parking lane at other times.
You have a press conference, cut a big ribbon, call it a historic and transformative investment. That's depressing, right?

Speaker 1 But there's a week. That's fucking depressing.
Jesus.

Speaker 1 And Sheryl Parker comes down to spell Eagles wrong. Yeah.
Yeah, exactly. But it's the 21st century.
We have technology, right? Oh, God.

Speaker 1 Some forward-thinking folks in the tech industry had another idea.

Speaker 1 This idea, macrotransit. This is impossible to build, right? And it turns out that when you think you've been on a subway or a bus, you've actually been

Speaker 1 gaslighting yourself and you haven't

Speaker 1 worked. Yes.

Speaker 1 We should acknowledge and embrace that. That's because while these things move a hell of a lot of people very quickly and efficiently, look, this is old-fashioned.
It's expensive.

Speaker 1 They don't respond to customers' needs. They don't provide an elevated riding experience.
Well, especially since we got rid of the L's.

Speaker 1 They're not using innovative technology to connect people to opportunities. Oh, I'm going to beat you with a.
Okay. Yeah, hit me with it.
Worst of all, there's no app.

Speaker 1 Wow. You can also

Speaker 1 tie this in.

Speaker 1 You can also tie this in with a bunch of like racist hysteria about public transport where you're like, if you get the bus, MS-13 is going to cut your limbs off with a machete.

Speaker 1 Yeah, we should be so lucky. You are going to be

Speaker 1 that's where the tattoo I regretted was on. So, you know, I.

Speaker 1 thank you for Chem S13 for cussing off my Nazi tattoo. Yeah.

Speaker 1 So, yeah, what do you do? We have to

Speaker 1 cast off this yoke of fixed route transit. That is transit that runs on a fixed line, whether it's a bus or a train or a ferry or, I don't know, what else is public transit?

Speaker 1 Oh, just basically whatever. You could do it on a dirigible if you arranged it, right? A dirigible, an airplane.
Yeah, you could have a

Speaker 1 some kind of some kind of is going to try and think of something quaint. And dirigible is unfortunately off-scale, quaint.
Tandem bicycle. Tandem bicycle.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 You know, we have to meet people where they are at any time, at any expense. What if transit was demand-responsive? What if it was more flexible? What if you, the customer, you're a customer.

Speaker 1 Don't say passenger, you're a customer.

Speaker 1 What if you told the bus where to go? I do. That's why I do jersey transit.
Have you ever taken that to Avalon? It's fucking weird.

Speaker 1 So we have to talk about demand-responsive, flexible transit. Oh, God, must wear.

Speaker 1 How's it going over there, drunky?

Speaker 1 Okay, sure. I deserve that.
Let's keep going.

Speaker 1 Look, look, look.

Speaker 1 Factually,

Speaker 1 I am probably more intoxicated than November right now. Yeah, also.

Speaker 1 Having like a course-ordered thing where we we have to do a breathalyzer by the middle before we start recording.

Speaker 1 You gotta do this drunk to ride the podcast. Yeah, I'm not drunk enough.
I have to shoot like a couple of Asahis and some shots before I start recording. Yeah.

Speaker 1 All right. Yeah.
Take this, Johnny Walker. We'll tell you when.

Speaker 1 Johnny Walker, Johnny.

Speaker 1 Yeah. All right.
Hit me with it. I'm good.
So I talked about the 18R. The driver would yell back at the three passengers and say, hey, what's your stop?

Speaker 1 And then he would express the bus to those stops, right? Everyone got home nice and quick. Some people looked at a situation like that and said, where's the part where you go on your phone?

Speaker 1 Oh my God, interaction with another human? Gross. With a human being? No, gross, nasty.
Yeah. You know, so in the broadest sense, demand-responsive transit exists, right?

Speaker 1 Yeah, a football rush hour is demand-responsive transit. Yes, or you run more buses and trains at rush hour, yeah, for special events, so on and so forth.
But sports are not so flexible, right?

Speaker 1 You know, imagine 30 people are boarding a bus that goes this way, right? Through this area of, I believe, Durham, North Carolina, right?

Speaker 1 But they're going to a place which is a block out of the way, right? Fuck them, walk.

Speaker 1 Or let's say 300 people board the train at Franconia Springfield down here on the blue line, and they're all going to,

Speaker 1 oh, God, Archives Navy Memorial Penn Quarter. Right.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 They make the names of these stations really long. No.

Speaker 1 The Washington Metro has a very long, very

Speaker 1 nasty habit of having very long station names. I believe, actually, U Street African American Civil War Memorial

Speaker 1 Cardozo is the longest metro stop name in the world. Incredible.

Speaker 1 So anyway,

Speaker 1 if that happened, you know, 200 people needed to go here. Ah, obviously, okay.
Well, in the first case, obviously we should run the bus one block over to go to this other stop, right?

Speaker 1 And turn this whole shit around.

Speaker 1 Exactly. Or we should run that train up the yellow line to serve the most people most efficiently, efficiently, right?

Speaker 1 So, anyway, what you wind up in these two cases are, number one, that bus hits the 11-foot eight bridge and decapitates everyone,

Speaker 1 right?

Speaker 1 Okay, sure. And number two, that blue line train winds up at Mount Vernon Square and no one can figure out how to reverse it and delays everyone, right?

Speaker 1 None of those things work.

Speaker 1 It's almost as if these things aren't really meant to be that demand responsive because they're meant to be timetable.

Speaker 1 Yes, they have to, you know, ultimately these sorts of high intensity things, you can't do route deviations. You can't, you know, change the destination of trains.

Speaker 1 You know, in some limited cases. That's socialism.
If you think that the public transit system gets to tell me where it's going to take me,

Speaker 1 then that's a limitation on my individual freedom. Yes, that's true.
You know, I should just be able to demand that the trolley go on a different route. It would be nice.
Take me to Cuba.

Speaker 1 Take me to Cuba.

Speaker 1 So even this idea, it's so patently stupid. That's not where the tech guys started, right?

Speaker 1 But it is sort of a goal, right? I'm sure they're going to try and do it with some kind of like flying bus or whatever the fuck, you know? Yeah.

Speaker 1 You can't make a magic AI-powered dispatching algorithm for dynamically routing large transit vehicles. So the solution clearly is to get smaller, more personalized, more decentralized.
I know.

Speaker 1 Less infrastructure, more technology. No.
Right? What we need is microtransit. Live in the pod and eat the bug.

Speaker 1 Before you get to the pod, I put in a slide just because I love talking about these things. Any excuse to.
So I know this thing as a mashrutka.

Speaker 1 However, these have been invented many times over. Basically, every country has had them at one point or another.

Speaker 1 They're typically a like poor country thing.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 they've kind of developed any number of kind of incredibly vibrant expressions. You might know this as a share taxi.
You might know it as a Grand Taxi. You might know it as a Taxi Bruce.

Speaker 1 You might know it as a Jitney or a Trotra or whatever the fuck it is, right? Like

Speaker 1 these are all over the world. And the deal is it's it's a bus, but not really for legal reasons.

Speaker 1 And so what it typically is. In New York City, you got the dollar vans.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 In New Jersey, they're jitneys, but they're actually regulated, which is kind of funny.

Speaker 1 In Hong Kong, you have a public light bus, which comes in two flavors, green and red, and is a kind of like smaller bus.

Speaker 1 And the deal is all of these typically the places that they serve, like the cities or whatever, already have public bus systems, but those are very limited in the routes they serve.

Speaker 1 So to resolve that last mile problem, your smaller routes are catered to by these privately operated mini-buses. This could be a big car.
It could be a small van.

Speaker 1 It could be this kind of like Mercedes-type beat that's a mini bus. This is a Russian one.
There are plenty of others.

Speaker 1 And basically, the way it works is it's kind of a taxi, but it runs on a fixed route. And it only starts when all of the seats are full.
Sometimes there's a guy who comes back and takes fares.

Speaker 1 Sometimes you just have to pass them forward.

Speaker 1 It's very informal.

Speaker 1 And these things are great in the sense of like, yeah, there's a lot of flexibility to them. And they're a great example of like, I don't know, the fucking entrepreneurial spirit.

Speaker 1 And they each contain a... you know, bold cultural valence or whatever.
However, they will kill you.

Speaker 1 They're incredibly dangerous and they're always, always mobbed up because

Speaker 1 this is like a quasi-legal activity. And like any quasi-legal activity, any attempt to organize it is organized crime.

Speaker 1 And so you end up with, why is the driver pointing a shotgun out of the window at a competing minibus?

Speaker 1 This is a problem. People don't tend to like it when their commute is interrupted by a gunfight or trying to like run a competing minibus off the roads.
However, they persist

Speaker 1 in a lot of the world. And

Speaker 1 so this is this is kind of, it's almost microtransit. Wikipedia calls this paratransit.

Speaker 1 And actually,

Speaker 1 sorry. I don't know if I would call this microtransit because this is a better system.
Yeah, it's just sort of like the thing that this is your actual default, right?

Speaker 1 In the sense that like where a city builder game is like everyone has a car and drives your actual thing when the distance is too long to walk what actually generates what spawns in is

Speaker 1 a mobbed up mini bus um and i if you want to read more about these i highly recommend the wikipedia article share taxi uh because that has an extensive list by location and you can see all of the different forms that this has taken all around the world which are remarkable particularly enjoy the moroccan ones which is just a big mercedes sedan.

Speaker 1 But they're all cool.

Speaker 1 Do not take them. You will die.

Speaker 1 I think another like interesting one in terms of like where this can go positively,

Speaker 1 which I didn't write in the notes, but I thought is worth talking about is the slug line.

Speaker 1 What's up?

Speaker 1 So this exists in a couple cities. It's most prominent in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., because when they built I-395, they built it with a dedicated busway in the middle.

Speaker 1 And then people got mad and they said, Well, this is now a high-occupancy vehicle lane. Right.
You need three people in your car in order to use it.

Speaker 1 So after that, people would start going to shopping centers and say,

Speaker 1 you know, I'm going to park my car here in the parking lot. And then people would drive up to a designated spot and say, well, I'm going to Roslyn.
I'm going to the Pentagon.

Speaker 1 I'm going to, you know, X and Y neighborhood of Washington, D.C. And they start picking up people so that they could take the express lanes, right?

Speaker 1 Those people were known as slugs.

Speaker 1 And this became popular enough of a way of commuting that it became semi-formalized.

Speaker 1 My dad would slug into work a lot. He would drive his horrible 1980s Chevy Nova.
That was supposed to be my car.

Speaker 1 Homeowners Association made him get rid of it.

Speaker 1 Not safe at the hole at the HOA, man. Yeah,

Speaker 1 that was a lot safer to drive that car two miles to the slug lot rather than driving it all the way into Roslyn.

Speaker 1 That was not a good car.

Speaker 1 But yeah, I mean,

Speaker 1 that's like one of these spontaneously organized thing. It eventually became semi-formalized.
And I think it's not only in Washington, D.C. now.

Speaker 1 It's in, there's a couple other places where they have high-occupancy vehicle lanes. People do it.
But yeah,

Speaker 1 this concept of like, you know i guess uh uh

Speaker 1 decentralized transit is not a bad idea it's just that you know when you're doing it like that it does not work very well if you organize it top down yeah which is what we're now going to discuss and if you organize it bottom up then what it becomes is a highly mobbed up form of transit yeah exactly exactly or or it's you know i get my car i'm going in the general direction you are yeah it's like one of the bills is about to fall off it.

Speaker 1 And it's like, whatever, man. Yeah.

Speaker 1 So if you want to do this kind of service, but you want to do it top-down, obviously what we need is cars.

Speaker 1 Why does this look AI-generated? I know it isn't because the text makes too much sense. It is, yeah.
No, it's not.

Speaker 1 No one's seen a proper checker cab in ages.

Speaker 1 There's a particular kind of

Speaker 1 there's a quiddity to this one.

Speaker 1 I don't know. I hate that.
I fucking hate AI, but one of the reasons why I hate it the most is that it makes me distrust my own eyes sometimes.

Speaker 1 They made the same model a car until like 1990. Yeah.
It's cute. I mean, listen, I like this stuff.
I like when it's idiosyncratic. I have a real weakness for the London cabs, the like black cabs.

Speaker 1 And the various attempts to like modernize them. And I'm always a bit disappointed when I have to get a cab in London and like a minivan shows up.
And I'm like,

Speaker 1 no, shows up yeah i don't want this i want the the special one so the idea of microtransit very simple rather than having a big bus that carries a lot of people you have a lot of small vehicles that carry fewer people and rather than you waiting at a bus stop you use your phone to call a car and it comes to you and drops you off somewhere

Speaker 1 I've had this experience, and one of the ways I've done that is by standing in the road, and this is a cool experience that you don't, you're decreasingly getting, sticking your arm out and yelling the word taxi to summon one of these cars.

Speaker 1 Yeah, well, you should have used your phone is the thing.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I guess. Because cab drivers love it when you do that because they, you know, get so much more money from, you know, when you book them with an app.
Oh, God.

Speaker 1 I've never successfully hailed a cab. I'm going to be honest.
Really?

Speaker 1 It's a good time. When you, when you nail it, like, it feels amazing.
You feel like you're leveling up in city. Yeah.
Well, I, the cabs don't really come to my neighborhood is the thing.

Speaker 1 I saw one. I saw one yesterday and I was like, holy shit, I didn't know they were out here.

Speaker 1 I have like fond memories of

Speaker 1 being in the city with my dad and him hailing a cab and being like, oh, yeah, this is an adult skill, you know?

Speaker 1 And you know, when you're young and your dad seems like 20 feet tall to you, and it's like, yeah, yes.

Speaker 1 He was. He just shrank a little bit.

Speaker 1 Yeah, he was a 20-foot-tall Maoist and the federal government were terrified of him. Yes.

Speaker 1 My dad was not, as far as I know, a Maoist, but he has other good qualities, so it's fine. So, yeah,

Speaker 1 the thing I described, some people may recognize as a taxi, but no, this is a new idea because there's a phone involved. Oh, okay.

Speaker 1 And some people may recognize this as an Uber or a Lyft, but again, no, this is a new idea. because the transit agency runs it.
Nationalized Uber. Wow.

Speaker 1 Now we're talking kind of like it's a bad idea, but it's a less bad idea than just Uber, maybe. So as an example, let's take an infrequent and very messy suburban bus route.

Speaker 1 Like this is SEPTA Route 206 over here, right? Goes from Paoli station, then goes

Speaker 1 all the way around.

Speaker 1 It does that. Yeah.
Yeah. It gets 86 riders a day, right?

Speaker 1 It only comes like once an hour or so and only in the peak direction. It's essentially a feeder route for the Paoli Regional Rail Station down here so that reverse commuters

Speaker 1 can get to, you know, horrible office park A, horrible office park B, and I think there's a horrible office park C around there.

Speaker 1 The Great Valley Corporate Center does sound like somewhere that would make me want to end my own life if I live if I worked there.

Speaker 1 You have to beep that as well.

Speaker 1 I have

Speaker 1 not commuted on this route, but a very similar one that goes out of Norristown. It was.

Speaker 1 Oh, the Hunted? Not the. Oh, no, I took the Hunted to the bus,

Speaker 1 which I then transferred to another bus in order to get to a job interview. Yep, been there.
And then I was like, even if they offered me the job, I was like, fuck you. No.

Speaker 1 No, I'm not doing this commute.

Speaker 1 So, yeah, I mean, to run a bus service like this, which runs one way in the morning, runs one way in the evening, you know, there's a big off time in the middle.

Speaker 1 You have to do all kinds of bullshit with like layovers and split shifts.

Speaker 1 If you're the bus driver for this route, I would hazard a guess you're pretty low seniority because this would be awful to run.

Speaker 1 It's expensive to run. You know, if you're a passenger, God help you, if you miss your bus, you're waiting there at your horrible office for another hour.

Speaker 1 But, you know, it needs to be there in our current situation, right? With microtransit, you can get rid of it. It's a thing of the past.
Yeah. You replace it with an area, right?

Speaker 1 In this area, you can order a taxi run by the transit company to pick you up, to pick you up and drop you off anywhere within this area.

Speaker 1 Although, practically speaking, here it would just be Paoli station. Great.

Speaker 1 Just give me, give me, give me the mob guy with a shotgun and a minibus. Yeah, honest to God.

Speaker 1 I don't think they would make enough money.

Speaker 1 You know, so yeah, bingo bongo. All the problems are solved because driving is free and it can happen.
You know,

Speaker 1 that person is going to show up anytime and can go anyplace through some kind of advanced dispatching system. and dynamic routing, which is a way to say the guy drives to a place, right?

Speaker 1 Yeah, and he's got like a GPS and he's got like some kind of software back end like Uber. Yeah, there's like

Speaker 1 Rideco is the one that Septa

Speaker 1 based on what I know of SEPTA's

Speaker 1 on-demand stuff. It uses a third-party app called Rideco, and it is the most useless thing I've ever had the displeasure of working with.

Speaker 1 So, what we've actually done here is created a very small, very geographically limited taxi company, which for all practical purposes has one origin point and one destination point, which is Paoli station over here, right?

Speaker 1 This is actually kind of an advantage. We'll get to the more diffuse networks in a bit.

Speaker 1 This particular service has not been implemented yet. It's scheduled to be implemented as part of SEPTA's bus revolution,

Speaker 1 right? Which is one of those revenue-neutral bus network redesigns

Speaker 1 that

Speaker 1 transit consultant Jarrett Walker likes to do for a lot of people. I got some of the information from him for this episode, but

Speaker 1 he's a bit of a mixed bag, I would say, to say the least.

Speaker 1 Somehow, despite it being revolution neutral, SEPTA didn't have the money to implement it. So this has not been done yet.

Speaker 1 How does one transit system not have zero dollars?

Speaker 1 Well,

Speaker 1 obviously, it's gotten worse now, but this was supposed to happen like a year ago. This is Sean Duffy's fault, frankly.
Yeah. They did buy the vehicles for this taxi service, though.

Speaker 1 They were optimistic about ridership, and they bought some of those Ford F-350 bus conversions for this. Oh, hell yeah.
I love those. Yeah.
But, okay, let's look at an example of one.

Speaker 1 which is in service, which is just across the river in Camden, right? In a dream. Stealing

Speaker 1 names. Yeah.
There isn't a cyber dog there. It's not Camden.

Speaker 1 So the Camden Loop is the microtransit in Camden, New Jersey. Not a loop, then, is it?

Speaker 1 No, it's not a loop. It has nothing to do with the loop.

Speaker 1 It's, it's,

Speaker 1 yeah, no, it's

Speaker 1 stupid name.

Speaker 1 I guess it's bounded by a loop in the sense that it's an area. Yeah, but there's a second loop you can go to.

Speaker 1 The Camden loops, then. The Camden Loops

Speaker 1 some kind of offense against mathematics yeah but you can also go to the Cherry Hill station here at number one so it's Camden Loops and one point

Speaker 1 how do you cross all of the bridges in Potsdam once or whatever like this is

Speaker 1 it was uh Kaliningrad yeah you're right you had to wait for that and you did yeah yeah I'm sorry to dead name Kaliningrad obviously not fond of the sort of current tenants but they you can't say they didn't earn it you know well no it was was it was konigsberg before so you can't name it but i just did

Speaker 1 we are doing so good

Speaker 1 i actually use z ear pronouns

Speaker 1 it's not even what the pronoun is anyway yeah tell me about the german and russian which is worse yeah so so this is you know microtransit in camden um this was designed uh you know as like a service to augment new jersey transit service within the city of camden

Speaker 1 We can see some statistics up here.

Speaker 1 I copied this tweet from Alex Davis. I'm just going to trust his math.

Speaker 1 Averaging 140 riders a day with eight vehicles and eight drivers compared to a previous bus route, which averaged 452 riders per day with four buses and four drivers.

Speaker 1 I like Alex's phrasing here:

Speaker 1 a half-hourly, stupid-looking, looking squiggly loop.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that's a stupid bus line. And yet, you know, it worked better.
It worked a lot better.

Speaker 1 And so, like, this demonstrates a really serious problem here with microtransit, which is it just doesn't scale. Right.
So it's stupid. Yeah, and it's stupid, you know.

Speaker 1 But it's a stop gap and the gaps keep getting bigger. So you have to have more, more stop to gap them with or whatever.
I mean, the previous bus was working fine.

Speaker 1 You actually created the gap that you had to stop.

Speaker 1 You know, we call that consultancy.

Speaker 1 Market efficiency.

Speaker 1 So one of the biggest problems here is microtransit does not scale, right? Yeah, micros in the name dummy. Yeah, that's true.

Speaker 1 If you want to move more people, you need more cars or more vans and more drivers, which is one of the reasons why like taxis are not always very reliable.

Speaker 1 They don't scale very well because there's a limited number of taxi medallions, right? Which is, is, you know, cities only allow a certain number of taxis to exist, or they used to.

Speaker 1 Uber and Lyft were able to get around this problem by ignoring it and doing illegal stuff. Yeah, because the biggest

Speaker 1 kind of like

Speaker 1 ceiling on taxi medallions or whatever was like city's own capacity to regulate taxicabs.

Speaker 1 Because they didn't want to scale that because then the city government has to spend more money hiring more taxi inspectors or whatever.

Speaker 1 Whereas Uber is just like, yeah, what if we just don't get regulated in any meaningful way? But also, like, taxi medallions were theoretically a traffic mitigation thing, right?

Speaker 1 You know, you're, if you had, people realized, you know, 80 years ago, ah, damn, we might have too many taxis. We should probably limit these.

Speaker 1 And then Uber said, what if we were unregulated? Haha, motherfucker. Exactly.

Speaker 1 Without even creating a cool-looking car that then gets to be in a bunch of Ikea, like, wall photos of Manhattan, you know.

Speaker 1 So then, yeah, Uber and Lyft they get around this by just ignoring it and hiring massive amounts of drivers, paying them sub-minimum wage, uh, trying to convince you that the reason they're so efficient is because of some kind of, I don't know, magical,

Speaker 1 really high-tech algorithm that does dispatching better. No, they just have more drivers.
Um, and this situation is barely sustainable for Uber and Lyft.

Speaker 1 Um, but doing doing this as a transit agency where where you rely on fare revenue and taxes as opposed to Saudi petro dollars,

Speaker 1 completely unsustainable, right? Yeah,

Speaker 1 Uber's, like, I remember it took them years to actually become profitable and still it's like not great.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I don't, I don't, I, I, I think they, I think, well, their finances say they're profitable. Well, quite.

Speaker 1 I, I am, I am getting, I am skeptical of those numbers, you know, for a wide variety of reasons.

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Back to the show.

Speaker 1 But yeah, let's look at some other aspects. Here's the biggest microtransit system in the country.
It's in Los Angeles. Oh,

Speaker 1 fuck the Dodgers and fuck you, Noah.

Speaker 1 Antagonistic relationship with Jays for bringing it home.

Speaker 1 Jays are going to bring it home. That's right, baby.
America's team. America's team, the Toronto Blue Jays.

Speaker 1 Do it again, Canada. That's right.
They're going to have to rename it the Gulf of Canada after this.

Speaker 1 So Metro Micro in Los Angeles, right?

Speaker 1 Metro Micro. They have nine microtransit zones around the city, which bring you to various light rail stations because Los Angeles went all in on light rail.

Speaker 1 They They get something like 2,300 riders per day on this whole system, which is a little less than half the goal of this pilot program.

Speaker 1 About the same ridership as a single mediocre suburban bus route.

Speaker 1 Incredible work, boys. Yeah, yeah, I was about to say

Speaker 1 a very heavily used bus route might have, you know, 10 or 15,000 riders a day. You know, there's some which are crazy and they're like 50,000.
I was going to say 300. 42 gets or something.

Speaker 1 Yeah, 42 gets. I looked up the 23 and I think it's 15,000.

Speaker 1 That makes sense. Okay.
I'm not sure. No, that's fine.
I was just thinking about what's a big bus route. Yeah.
Well, you know, I would have to have looked both because they used to be the same route.

Speaker 1 Anyway,

Speaker 1 the operating subsidy on these taxis is something like $23 per rider. You're kidding.

Speaker 1 As opposed to $8

Speaker 1 for a comparably underperforming bus route according to streets block i'll link that article in the description man i assume the city of los angeles has that kind of money to splash around right well you know they're the only people still aggressively expanding transit so you know

Speaker 1 but also no this this is a terrible return it's awful i mean you know okay i i guess it's good because theoretically low-income people could use this this because you're paying a normal transit fare for this.

Speaker 1 But also, you know,

Speaker 1 for reasons we'll get into later, that's not who's using it. And also

Speaker 1 that's a lot of subsidy. It's a lot of subsidy, yeah.
Yeah. When you could have something a lot easier.

Speaker 1 So this is financially unsustainable. So rather than.
ending this pilot program and saying, wow, guys, I don't think this worked that good.

Speaker 1 You know, we tried, we failed, go on to something else.

Speaker 1 Going back to regular fixed route transit, they're going to try outsourcing the drivers to a third party so they don't have to pay benefits.

Speaker 1 Oh, what if we made it more like Uber by treating the drivers way worse? Subhumanity.

Speaker 1 Yeah, exactly. Exactly.
We need more vectors for extracting profit, which is weird for a publicly owned transit agency. Now your tax dollars go to exploiting drivers.

Speaker 1 I don't know.

Speaker 1 Maybe they could go and get some funny money from Mohammed bin Salman, too.

Speaker 1 You know,

Speaker 1 this is another one of those. It's like everything these days.
It's all a scam to get around labor laws, right? Sure. Yeah.
The only kind of innovation you're still allowed to make. Pretty much.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 It's the last frontier, you know.

Speaker 1 You know, when they extract the last dollar out of the last worker, then they can finally go to Mars.

Speaker 1 But yeah, fundamentally, to some extent, this is a convenience problem, right?

Speaker 1 If I have to order a taxi from the transit agency to get to the train, why don't I just take a taxi the whole

Speaker 1 way there? Right. Right.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 I mean, yeah, microtransit is going to be cheaper than the taxi, but you know, you're trying to cater to the sort of clientele who want convenience more than they want things to be cheap.

Speaker 1 You know, the so-called choice riders who choose to

Speaker 1 use transit as opposed to captive riders who are

Speaker 1 poor people who are forced to use transit, right? This is, this is not, this is not for those people.

Speaker 1 It does not make sense.

Speaker 1 It's kind of, none of this makes sense. It's, it's stupid.

Speaker 1 It's not as classist as it's supposed to be, you know? Yeah.

Speaker 1 So then, how have some other cities implemented this?

Speaker 1 Other cities, other locales?

Speaker 1 So.

Speaker 1 Oh, I tell you what, this is this is a subsidy for graphic designers. Yeah, apparently.

Speaker 1 So up here is Iris. This is in Kansas City, right?

Speaker 1 They, they, they rideco, you motherfuckers.

Speaker 1 Yeah, Rideco does, I think, a lot of the back end for all of this stuff. Yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep.
Worst system I've ever used in my life. So

Speaker 1 in Kansas City, they wound up buying just cars for this service. A lot of people get vans.
They just got cars.

Speaker 1 I mean, at that point, you're sort of admitting defeats and being more honest about the ride capacity you need, right?

Speaker 1 This is probably one of the reasons why they had to end free fares in Kansas City, was paying for this bullshit.

Speaker 1 You know, but

Speaker 1 they have a pretty wide service area in Kansas City for microtransit.

Speaker 1 They have their own cars with their own drivers, but apparently sometimes if you call in or if you go on the the iris app it just forwards it to Uber and an Uber picks you up. Incredible.

Speaker 1 That is the market at work, baby.

Speaker 1 The iris of last result. So they were a little bit more optimistic here in Montgomery County, Maryland, right? But they got a big service area with these

Speaker 1 microtransit vehicles, which you can see are small like

Speaker 1 buses, right? These tiny transit buses, right?

Speaker 1 You know, so you have relatively diffuse like like origin and destinations, right?

Speaker 1 And it turned out, this is according to Amalgamated Transit Union, um, there's fairly limited opportunities for people to efficiently share rides if they're going from lots of different places to other lots of different places

Speaker 1 in a suburban context. So these buses run with a single occupant or less 90% of the time.
Wow, that's the first thing I said about liking inefficient buses when they're like this.

Speaker 1 And this is also according to Amalgamated Transit Union. I'll link the report in the description.

Speaker 1 Ottawa, Ontario found a fun economy when they started their microtransit system.

Speaker 1 What if you take the paratransit buses that are reserved, you know, largely for disabled people, right, and use them as microtransit buses?

Speaker 1 Yeah, because those disabled people, they've had it too good for too long, right? I was going to say exactly.

Speaker 1 what if we started using these for real people who mattered you know yeah exactly exactly and so i invented a really inefficient bus system and all it took was me throwing all of these useless wheelchairs into a garbage

Speaker 1 you can book i think in limited areas you can book one of these paratransit buses in minutes with an app and it will show up within hours

Speaker 1 but

Speaker 1 oh that's british ambulance response times

Speaker 1 if you need paratransit outside of the normal areas but inside the normal paratransit area you got to book it a day in advance still

Speaker 1 that is

Speaker 1 finally

Speaker 1 you you you too able-bodied person can experience the joys of disability accommodation

Speaker 1 when we make the whole service as bad

Speaker 1 Spoiler alert, it sucks. No, no.
We made the service for able-bodied able-bodied people worse, but we made the service for disabled people much worse. No longer exists.

Speaker 1 Oh, great. Fantastic.

Speaker 1 That's called equity right there.

Speaker 1 So I think another aspect of this is you might be asking, okay, but, you know,

Speaker 1 what if we just get autonomous vehicles? How's that doing? Shut up. And this is a callback to an earlier episode where we had Marcus on to talk about

Speaker 1 the ultimate urban circulator, right? And this is all autonomous vehicles, right? It's going to be the labor costs we talked about earlier would be irrelevant. The subsidy would be much lower.

Speaker 1 And then, you know, I don't know. Maybe it's easier to do an autonomous car than an autonomous bus.
Maybe sort of. I don't know.

Speaker 1 Because from everything I've talked to with bus drivers, bus driving requires very defensive driving. And the best defense is a good offense.

Speaker 1 That's right. Or as I've also

Speaker 1 as I've also heard, drive it like you stole it.

Speaker 1 Autonomous vehicles are not capable of that right now.

Speaker 1 See,

Speaker 1 I think we're all autonomous vehicle skeptics.

Speaker 1 Waymo still hasn't released. Waymo doesn't really exist.
It's just guys.

Speaker 1 Yeah, but they've announced that they're coming to London anyway. Yeah, they're still there, supposedly.
I'm going to do stuff to a car that hasn't been seen since Burnout Paradise.

Speaker 1 They have not released, to my knowledge, statistics about how often humans take over driving their cars,

Speaker 1 which I, yeah. Why would you? They're autonomous.
Do you remember that?

Speaker 1 He got stuck in a Waymo that was just going in circles and he couldn't even get into the

Speaker 1 front to like take control of it. I think this is a beautiful technology in terms of comedy, in terms of the kind of slapstick quotient of our cities.
I think it's going up a lot.

Speaker 1 Like, you get another good round of riots and some things are going to happen to some Waymos, the likes of which we've never seen before.

Speaker 1 In terms of

Speaker 1 being a good idea to have around, absolutely not. No, well,

Speaker 1 what if the transit agency was in charge of it? And that's where we have to talk about the ultimate urban circulator in Jacksonville, which is

Speaker 1 intended to. Yeah, we talked about this a while back.
There's a whole episode about it. It's open now, right? Oh, is it?

Speaker 1 So here's the ultimate urban circulator, which is this Ford Transit van. Oh, that's depressing.
It's beautiful. Yeah.
Here's a shot from the inside.

Speaker 1 It looks like an ambulance where they don't treat you. They just kill you and throw you up.
They just dump you out. Yeah.

Speaker 1 It's

Speaker 1 one of those Chinese mobile execution vans.

Speaker 1 You hate to call an ambulance and the execution van shows up and you're just like, well, I guess it's hit quicker, but

Speaker 1 is it that bad?

Speaker 1 So note first, here's the large brain box that controls the whole thing, right? Some of the time, right?

Speaker 1 You've got like... a wheelchair lift over here that presumably has to be manually operated because these are high floor vehicles.

Speaker 1 Note also the brain box that also controls the thing, which is there's a driver in this. Um, that's not ultimate, that's just an urban circulator.
I was logged in

Speaker 1 at least you have someone to operate the wheelchair left, and how is that true? Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 Um, it's important to note that the people mover this is designed to replace was actually driverless and automatic, but this is sometimes

Speaker 1 this is sometimes autonomous, which is better somehow, right? Okay, cool.

Speaker 1 God, the future of the future. Also, they've given this thing a dedicated lane.
You can see here.

Speaker 1 It looks like it's had about 20 years of road salt put down. We're in Florida.
What the fuck?

Speaker 1 Yeah, and also it's brand new. I don't know how they manage that.
There's already like mud all over it. It's like sinking into the ground.

Speaker 1 Incredible. I'll link.
I'll link Marcus's article below. I got to take notes on what I'm saying.
I'm going to link below.

Speaker 1 The ride is apparently so jerky that you need to wear a seatbelt. You should probably wear a seatbelt regardless, man.
When I

Speaker 1 go into a transit bus, you don't wear a seatbelt? I don't have to wear a seatbelt. I was just thinking for a van.
Yeah, but for a transit bus, there's no, you don't need a seatbelt on it. Point taken.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Apparently, the drivers have to take over pretty frequently because the route is really janky.

Speaker 1 It's the autonomous software cannot handle crossing four lanes in one block. You're in Florida.
How can you not handle that? It's just bad route design.

Speaker 1 In the couple months that this thing has been open, it's carried about 60 people. 16 people have died

Speaker 1 and has managed to override the safety driver in order for it to crash into a light pole.

Speaker 1 But, you know, okay, this autonomous technology, right, clearly day now.

Speaker 1 Any day now. No, it doesn't work well yet.
So when we have real microtransit, obviously we're going to have pods. Yes.
Live in the pod, drive the pod to work, eat the bug. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Look, look at all these.

Speaker 1 For a while, these were going to be the replacement for the cancelled rail link from Glasgow to Glasgow airports, and then they cancelled that too. So we can't even get pods.

Speaker 1 I mean, because they don't work.

Speaker 1 We could have had something that didn't work. And instead, now we don't have something that can't work because we can't even have something that doesn't work.

Speaker 1 So, if if you look at the van that was in the previous image, right? What if we change the body work?

Speaker 1 No crumple zones. Yes, no crumple zones.
Uh, it is at least low floor, so it'd be easier, easier to get a wheelchair in there.

Speaker 1 Um, it does have fewer seats, however, but that's fine because it's a pot, right? Also, easier, but not easy. You have to ollie the thing, like, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 And if the thing doesn't work, there's no attendant there. I mean,

Speaker 1 in practice, there would have to be an attendant there. I'll get to that in a few slides.

Speaker 1 You know, but when you

Speaker 1 show these

Speaker 1 pods to like decision makers and people go, you know, bananas for them. It's incredible.
It's the future. It's inevitable.
This is what we have to do, right? We're going to get rid of these big.

Speaker 1 clunky transit buses, you know, and and and you know, that that's that's that's old. What we need is a pod, it's going to be a pod of some kind, right? And it's just a fucking van.

Speaker 1 It's just it's just a van, yeah, but it's a futuristic looking van. Yeah, Roz, it's a future brought to you by Rideco, those motherfuckers.

Speaker 1 But yeah, I,

Speaker 1 in terms of what you just said, November, about like using these for the Glasgow airport link, because these things, most of them are limited to about 25 miles an hour.

Speaker 1 That's a, that's a, that's a, that's a, that's

Speaker 1 well if i remember it wasn't going to go from glasgow to glasgow airport it was going to go from the airport to paisley the city like southeast of glasgow where you could then get a train and they were going to build like an overpass for them um this was also stupid you've just built a golf cart congratulations yeah you would get on the kind of golf cart overpass that would take you over a bunch of fields and stuff to a train station where you could then get a train like 20 minutes into the center of town it's a golf cart with an air conditioner

Speaker 1 and a computer but yeah these these pods are particularly insidious because people you know unlike a van people see these as a serious replacement for a lot of transit services even like high ridership bus lines even though it's it's a van right it's just a van i think they're supposed to do like some kind of magic stuff like platooning That's where they can all, you know, get up close to each other at speed on the road, right?

Speaker 1 Thus saving space. But

Speaker 1 that's a bus. That's a disassemble.
It's a deconstructed bus. It's a deconstructed bus.
Clay art bus. We're doing molecular astronomy, but with trans.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that was the word I wanted. There we go.
You guys see the menu? It's going to be like that, but with tires. Yeah, no,

Speaker 1 this bus comes with expensive foam. That's from the fire suppression system.

Speaker 1 But yeah, in practice,

Speaker 1 at least this one in this image is an actual production vehicle that exists in a few places, and it's limited to 25 miles an hour, as I said, and it runs on a fixed route. It's a golf cart.

Speaker 1 You know, it's usually like, well, this is a shuttle from one building to another. Cool.
Yeah. The features are so goddamn stupid.
But yeah, that's a kind of vanity project for your tech campus.

Speaker 1 Yeah, pretty much. I don't know.
Maybe we could fix it with other stuff,

Speaker 1 more expensive infrastructure.

Speaker 1 How's the loop doing?

Speaker 1 I love when you get to taunt people. So, yeah,

Speaker 1 we've had an episode on the Las Vegas loop a while back. It's not doing any better now than it was back then.
At least not on non-convention days.

Speaker 1 There was a good video that City Nerd. Was it City? No, it was the other guy.
Wait, no, I forget if it was. Hold on.
Let me double check this real quick. I don't want to.

Speaker 1 You tell me we've been drinking, folks

Speaker 1 right it is city nerd i forgot if he was the same guy i was like okay yeah but he he he just rode this and a uh did a youtube video about it um hold on let me get back to the notes here um so i understand what i'm talking about um so the loop if you've been living under a rock which Sounds like a great idea right now.

Speaker 1 Yeah, under a rock. Yeah.
You know, this type of microtransit where there's cars in tunnels, right? And you go in the car and it goes somewhere else in the tunnels, right?

Speaker 1 Which, you know, right now they still, every car has a driver.

Speaker 1 They don't go very fast in the tunnels, all this kind of other stuff.

Speaker 1 It's just another kind of microtransit. I mean, granted, this is privately owned.
So other people, the Saudis are losing money on this one. Yeah.

Speaker 1 You know, that's again petro dollar recycling works. That's so good at investment.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 So they call them Muhammad bin dollars. Yeah.
So they,

Speaker 1 this is just, you know, the same bullshit, but add a bunch of tunnels. Um, they claim very high ridership numbers on this thing.
I think they fudge the numbers.

Speaker 1 There's, there's, there's got to be something, but, you know, a lot of these, you know, even the private sector can't invest in this properly because a good chunk of the expansion to the Las Vegas loop since they built the convention center section has all been single tunnels, right?

Speaker 1 Which means each segment of the loop can handle, on average, a little less than one car at a time. Hell yeah.

Speaker 1 Beautiful. So, yeah, this is this is,

Speaker 1 I think, the ultimate manifestation of microtransit is we're going to spend a lot of money to build the worst piece of infrastructure possible. I mean, you know, when we put in the Soviet time capsule

Speaker 1 that,

Speaker 1 you know our ancestors will look at in the future will be like you're not going to be like

Speaker 1 we address you're not going to be like descendants who do not know what a bus is

Speaker 1 yeah no we address you comrade descendants we apologize for being such morants

Speaker 1 We tried to warn them, please find and closed on this thumb drive a bunch of episodes of our podcast. And then a bunch of our bits leak forward into the future.
But yeah, so in conclusion,

Speaker 1 the fact is here that in nearly every single case imaginable, microtransit just doesn't work. That's crazy.
What?

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 It sounds cool, though. And people who run transit agencies like to drive cars.

Speaker 1 Very few of them take transit to work. At least in the United States.
We are forced to conclude that not only is car bad, but van bad. No,

Speaker 1 no, you'll never have it from me.

Speaker 1 Rideco bad, though. I'll get on board with rideco bad.
So everyone sort of forgot that driving cars costs money, right?

Speaker 1 And ordering a car is, at least in my opinion, much less convenient than waiting for a bus.

Speaker 1 You know, these, these things are, they're expensive to run. They do not attract many riders.
They cannot attract riders because if they did, you couldn't scale it.

Speaker 1 Like if they became popular, they wouldn't work.

Speaker 1 And they're essentially providing the same service as a taxi or an Uber or a Lyft, but in limited areas, right?

Speaker 1 A big bus that can carry a lot of people is always going to be cheaper to run than several cars that only carry a few people just in terms of raw labor hours.

Speaker 1 You know, maybe you can pay the car drivers less, but, you know, that's unethical. Maybe the cars will become autonomous.
They probably won't.

Speaker 1 This thing doesn't scale. It doesn't make any sense.

Speaker 1 That's not going to stop anyone in a position to decide from trying to make it happen. Yeah, yeah, that's the problem.

Speaker 1 I also doubt that autonomous vehicles would change this balance too much because even if they did work as well as advertised, you're still running a public service, right?

Speaker 1 So you probably have like a van or a small bus, which means you have to, you know, you have to cater to disabled people, right?

Speaker 1 Which means you need a wheelchair lift and an attendant to run said wheelchair lift and, you know, strap in the wheelchair and so on and so forth, right?

Speaker 1 You know, public safety is also a concern.

Speaker 1 Having an attendant or, you know, a bus driver is a nice deterrent to anti-social behavior, generally speaking. Yeah,

Speaker 1 stop MS-13 from hacking off all your limbs or whatever people are worried about this week. Yeah, unless it's a limb I want hacked off, obviously.
Because it's Nazi tattoo.

Speaker 1 Actually, for Rob, it's just a tattoo that says H-T-T-R.

Speaker 1 What's that? Hail to the team, the Slurs. Oh, I see.
I see. This is novel to me.
Okay, whatever. Don't worry about it.
The Washington football team.

Speaker 1 You so called something else.

Speaker 1 Sure, sure.

Speaker 1 Yes. The Washington Glee Club.

Speaker 1 And also, this is to say nothing of the other goals, you know, reducing pollution, reducing vehicle miles traveled. You know, that's the fancy statistic for all the cars on the road.

Speaker 1 Better to have fewer of them and not more, right?

Speaker 1 Reducing the overall amount of labor that a society must perform, which I think is a laudable goal. People should have more leisure time.
Oh, yeah.

Speaker 1 Microtransit fails on every one of these accounts. It doesn't make any sense sense from like any aspect.

Speaker 1 It's a bad idea. It's time for everyone to dump it.
But because we live in a stupid world,

Speaker 1 of course, transit agencies are forging ahead anyway. Yeah, they got to funnel a bunch of money to consultants to come up with a cute name for it and put a vinyl wrap on a Mercedes Vito or whatever.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 And then make Liam's life worse with Rideco. That's right.
Well, I mean,

Speaker 1 what is the future if not people saying we must make Liam's life worse? And then there's

Speaker 1 well, what do we learn? Burn it.

Speaker 1 I don't think we learned anything. I think this is a lesson for other people who have also learned nothing, but for different reasons.

Speaker 1 Your credit certificate is in the mail. If you are the sort of like

Speaker 1 person at a transit agency who gets to decide on this stuff, just don't fucking do this. Give us money.

Speaker 1 Run the bus. Run a bus.
Just run the bus. Bus is good.
I like bus. Maybe if it's it's crowded, I don't know.
Make it a trolley bus. Make it a tram.
Ooh,

Speaker 1 a bus.

Speaker 1 Ooh, articulated bus. Those things.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Well, those things caught fire a lot and also killed a few cyclists, but you know, in principle. I like a bandy bus.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 No bandy bus ever killed me.

Speaker 1 It would have to be well out of its kind of normal habitat for one thing. Oh, we got bandy buses.
Yeah, we do. Yeah, we do.
Okay. Yeah, they're on like the 17.

Speaker 1 I have no idea how they go around the corners. It's insane, dude.
The 48 just hauling ass and those guys

Speaker 1 are miracle workers. They are.
Every SEPTA driver is a fucking miracle worker.

Speaker 1 I am surprised when the rapture happened a few weeks ago, they didn't all go to heaven. Right.
Well, that's what the Republicans were. Every one of them is a saint.

Speaker 1 But yeah, well. We learn nothing.
We learn nothing. Same as always.
No, we're here to educate you. That's right.
This is a lecture, not a discussion. That's right.

Speaker 1 Anyway, we have a segment on this podcast called Safety Third.

Speaker 1 Shake hands with danger. Hello, Justin, Liam, November, Devon, Gareth, Victoria, Joe, and June, among others.
This cast is getting too big. I don't even remember hiring some of these people.

Speaker 1 I don't mention them, Sam. That's terrible.
Yeah, what the fuck? Yeah. My tale of woe

Speaker 1 comes to you from my childhood growing up in the small Central American country of Costa Rica. It's supposed to be one of the most beautiful places on earth, and I want to go very badly.

Speaker 1 This is a story of child endangerment,

Speaker 1 school-sponsored spelunking, and broad mismanagement. So I think you'll be okay, Liam, so long as you don't go in a cave.
Yeah, don't go in a cave. I wasn't not in a million years.

Speaker 1 As the story is from my own childhood so long ago, some of the details are fuzzy, and I do not have pictures of the events themselves, but the trauma remains deep within me.

Speaker 1 And I do have pictures of the fucking cave, so I know in my heart my experience was real. What do they do to this child? Yeah, good God.
A little background.

Speaker 1 Costa Rica is a small Central American country bordered by Nicaragua and Panama. It has no army and amazing nationalized health care.
It is 30% protected rainforest. The rest is also rainforest.

Speaker 1 Googling Boston Records. That's the BT rights in Costa Rica.

Speaker 1 Googling Costa Rica immigration.

Speaker 1 I understand it's very easy to immigrate to Panama, at least.

Speaker 1 It has some of the best beaches in the entire world. And when I remember those parts of my childhood, I genuinely almost forget the bad.
But there is the bad, as we will see.

Speaker 1 My family moved to Costa Rica to escape the oncoming Great Recession and lived there for about five years afterwards. While there,

Speaker 1 we attended a small private school out in the jungle called Homeschool Beach Academy.

Speaker 1 I attended the first day the school was open, and at that time the entire student body consisted of me and three other students in a large home in the middle of the jungle that had been renovated into a school.

Speaker 1 The school did expand rapidly though, and by the time of our story, the student body was around 150 between the ages of eight and twelve.

Speaker 1 Hang in there, bud, you're almost done. Yeah.
I will spare you a long diatribe about the many peculiarities of that school to cut to the point of today: the field trips. Oh, okay.

Speaker 1 This is where the cave go in the hole. Oh, yeah.
Miss Frizzle shows up with the magic school bus, and you're like, oh,

Speaker 1 god damn it.

Speaker 1 Of course, now it's a microtransit. Yeah, now it's a magic microtransit bus brought to you by Rideco.

Speaker 1 Dirty motherfuckers. I hate those guys.

Speaker 1 Yeah,

Speaker 1 they neoliberalized the magic school bus.

Speaker 1 Fuck.

Speaker 1 They took the magic school bus and they scrapped them in the same scrapyard as all those engines from Thomas the Tank engine.

Speaker 1 Sodored up.

Speaker 1 All right, get on with that.

Speaker 1 Taking the acetylene torch to the magic school bus

Speaker 1 that show up next day. The magic Ford Transit fan.
Okay.

Speaker 1 You fucker.

Speaker 1 It's painted yellow, at least.

Speaker 1 Oh my God, they killed him with his eyes open.

Speaker 1 Homeschool Beach held one field trip a year, and each was its own kind of both amazing and harrowing experience. Our main story is the very last one I went on.

Speaker 1 I'll recount the others to the best of my ability. Number one, going to see a parade where a random drunk guy ran from his car into the parade directly in front of my school group.

Speaker 1 The last thing I remember is my six and a half foot tall, normally placid surf instructor/slash gym teacher charging at the crashed car and pulling the driver out of the pavement through the window of the car.

Speaker 1 Number two, loading dozens of children onto tour boats that didn't have handrails and touring around a beautiful mangrove swamp that was visibly full of crocodiles and large carnivorous snakes. Good.

Speaker 1 Did you die? Yeah, did you? No, you didn't, asshole. Nah, you're fine.

Speaker 1 Number three, going to see a lab developing plasma rockets, then walking four miles along a dirt road to swim at a waterfall, then walking four miles back in the heat, stopping for 30 minutes to pull out a Jeep that had been nearly swallowed by a part of the road.

Speaker 1 I got to be honest, this sounds like paradise on earth. And

Speaker 1 the state healthcare system funds hormones, so I will be moving to Costa Rica All right, cool. Get a better, you'll still have better internet somehow.

Speaker 1 Yeah, but the last field trip I went on was a trip to the Barra Honda National Park and Cave. Nope.
Seen here in images I managed to find on the Google.

Speaker 1 Our story begins at the top of the hour, 8 a.m., unlike the previous field trips. The parents had badgered the principal into allowing them along to chaperone.

Speaker 1 I want to accompany my child into the cave to die.

Speaker 1 So, in total, about 15 children, six parents, and at least three teachers.

Speaker 1 I dimly recall some ineffable scheduling fuck-ups and buses getting lost along the way to Barrahonda, but the details have lost me.

Speaker 1 All that means is we actually arrived at the park hours later than intended. Barrahonda itself is set in a beautiful mountainous jungle.
The walk to the cave at the time,

Speaker 1 the walk to the cave that at the time I did not know was our destination, was a blur of the normal, amazing jungle scenery you get used to when you live in costa rica but i still you can't open this by being like yeah i'm from this shithole named costa rica where everything is fantastic by the way and beautiful you fucker i still recall enjoying it and the various critters we saw yeah i'm sure you like i don't know befriended a leopard or something

Speaker 1 congratulations dickhead and then we got to the cave as a child the cave mouth seems so much larger than the images i have here but if you all have an ounce of sense in your heads, you can plainly see that it's an open hell mouth right into a deep cavern.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I'm not getting into this. I'll be honest with you.
So far, paradise on earth, not hitting that ladder. Yeah.
A poorly welded, rusty, and moistened by the jungle humidity.

Speaker 1 God-forsaken metal ladder extended, nearly horizontal for part of the way, then dips down, down straight some 40 feet into the cavern below. Fuck that.
No,

Speaker 1 absolutely not. Yeah.
actually, that's not a terribly long ladder. Well, I don't like how it looks.
Fuck you, Rodson. Costa Rican cuisine is generally not spicy.
Okay, that's another big tick. Yeah.

Speaker 1 What none of these pictures will show you is the one and single piece of safety equipment afforded to interp interpret it afforded to climbers, right?

Speaker 1 A small Costa Rican man with a bungee rope tied to a stree tied to a tree stands by the pit.

Speaker 1 While there were some complaints by the parents at this point, the derangement field of Costa Rica apparently prevented anyone from stopping the proceedings. And it's got a derangement field.

Speaker 1 Better still. Yeah, that'll make your podcast better.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 The order of the day is this. The small Costa Rican man has a slipknot in his rope.
He will wrap that rope around you before you begin your harrowing descent.

Speaker 1 And as you climb, manually feed the rope down after you. Did I mention I have a fear of heights? No.

Speaker 1 It's fine. You're underground.
It doesn't matter.

Speaker 1 Your honesty is actually negative. It's actually negative.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 I think the only reason anyone went there went through it was because it was nearly impossible to see how deep the hole was from where we stood around it.

Speaker 1 The long process of being lowered or climbing repeatedly for each child and adult took absolutely ages, and I was near the middle of the pack.

Speaker 1 The ladder, again, is made of partially welded old scrap metal and partially of old hardware store bladders, which had ended their life being recycled into a child endangerment device in a cave.

Speaker 1 All of it was wet and slightly slippery. The worst part was the rope guy.
The small Costa Rican man with the rope does not know or really care how fast you are climbing down. He has a set speed.

Speaker 1 He is lowering the rope down through a slipknot to you. If you go slower than him, the rope falls onto you, and that means any fall will be worse for the drop.

Speaker 1 If you go faster than him, it's worse because of the way the rope is tied around your chest. It tightens painfully as you attempt to navigate a giant fucking rusty cave ladder.

Speaker 1 There was a harrowing spot on the ladder where the cave fully meets it on a thin welded metal rung, leaving about two inches of space to place your feet as you climb down.

Speaker 1 Then, of course, the rope runs out before the ladder does.

Speaker 1 The safety rope runs out about four to six feet before you reach the end of your journey, meaning that in the case of the children climbing down, you needed an adult to help you climb the last few wettest steps onto the slick cavern floor.

Speaker 1 The fact that no one was injured in the two hours it took to get the whole group down that fucking hole was a miracle. Once inside, the cave was quite nice as they go.

Speaker 1 While quite slimy, the cavern's mouth is large enough to be well lit. And even while we were corralled into a smaller area, we could see plenty of interesting rock formations.

Speaker 1 And then we went a little deeper. Oh, no, no, No.
Nope. Our second hellmouth of the day presents as a dark, wet hole, a little smaller than a normal manhole.

Speaker 1 It's the only way to go deeper into the cave, and it's just a little too small. Not all it over, but fuck now.

Speaker 1 It's just a little too small to carry a decent light source down with you.

Speaker 1 I do not precisely remember the instructions shouted at me as I clambered down, but it involved a precise sequence of hand and foot placements for natural and extremely wet handholds to navigate four feet down onto another ladder.

Speaker 1 So it is second place.

Speaker 1 We sweat the next four feet down. This part of the tour has some really cool looking stalagmites and stalactites, which is picture six.
I didn't number these.

Speaker 1 I don't remember which one I put where.

Speaker 1 Please, when you are sending in your safety thirds, wtyppod.gmail.com, remember they are the thing we will do last and we will be sleepy and also kind of drugs. Exactly.
Yeah. And also

Speaker 1 don't send weird formats of pictures. I had to re-save a bunch of these in Irfin Beal in order that I could get them in here.
Anyway. I feel great.

Speaker 1 And also a part where the cave guides switch off all their lights so you can experience true and complete darkness. Then you have to climb back up.

Speaker 1 I don't want to experience true and complete darkness. And I especially don't want to climb.

Speaker 1 Well, I do want to climb back up in the sense that I want to be out of the cave, but I don't want to climb the fucking snakey.

Speaker 1 I don't want to be in a situation where I have to climb back up because i you know it's like uh it's like an escape room i've already beaten all of them because i have to go in the

Speaker 1 yeah i feel good yeah

Speaker 1 as i understand it the tour was meant to go on for longer but it didn't because my own mother finally put her foot down it had taken us so long to get everyone down and it was getting late the children were already getting tired no one but her apparently thought climbing up the big stupid ladder was going to take longer

Speaker 1 and we ran out of water down there which quickly became its own problem. And so up we went.
Even with the dim assistance of gravity, climbing up that fucking ladder was torture.

Speaker 1 Remember the rope guy, the

Speaker 1 way you have to keep pace with him, where he dropped the rope down after you? Now you were climbing up.

Speaker 1 He doesn't know or really care that a dehydrated and exhausted child is down at the bottom of fucking Tartarus. He's pulling his rope up until he feels it stop.
The climb down is hard enough

Speaker 1 with the fickle assistance of gravity, but now the children must fight up 40 fucking feet of rusted ass ladder while having the life squeezed out of them. I was crying my eyes out halfway up.

Speaker 1 Oh, buddy. The invocation of another miracle prevented any injuries here, too.

Speaker 1 And because I was obviously distraught and severely dehydrated by that point, me and a few other students got to ride a truck back to the start of the trail instead of walking back, which is my last real memory of these events.

Speaker 1 The fact that I do not have a phobia of caves or some kind of panic disorder

Speaker 1 about these events in my childhood is honestly astounding. They never held another field trip in the time I was at Homeschool Beach, which we might imagine is for the better.

Speaker 1 I do not know if the school still exists, as I have checked and never found it online. It's a good sign.
Yeah, it's part of the better. The past is a joke, and we can't see the punchline.

Speaker 1 The past is a joke, we can't see the punchline to, and misery does not make us stronger people. Peace be with you all from Leaf.
Thanks, Leaf. Thank you, Leaf.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I'm not seeing any evidence that suggests to go in the cave from this. Don't go in the cave from the

Speaker 1 cave. Yeah, I was safety third.

Speaker 1 Shake hands with danger. I guess that wasn't a workplace injury.
Although, I guess, hold on. Is going to school the workplace? Well, we're getting into like other forms of labor again, right?

Speaker 1 So we're not time for that.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I don't know,

Speaker 1 fuck homework. Hate that shit.
It's pointless.

Speaker 1 Anti-bedtime action. Let's fucking go.
Yeah, exactly. Exactly.
I mean, to be fair, this podcast kind of is anti-bedtime action in that we routinely keep me up until like 3 a.m. Yeah, that's true.

Speaker 1 That's because you were out drinking.

Speaker 1 It's not my fault.

Speaker 1 It is 14 minutes past midnight, which is to say that the world has been nuked a lot and I am ready for bed. Speaking of nukes, our next episode episode will be on Chernobyl.

Speaker 1 Does anyone have any commercials before we go? Yeah, stay tuned for a special announcement. Yeah, and stay tuned for that.
Yeah, special announcement will be coming.

Speaker 1 A couple of them, actually, because

Speaker 1 I've been thinking often in my life that I really want to hear about buildings more.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah. Well, that's going to talk about that.
That's going to be a whole thing. We're working on how to do that.

Speaker 1 It's going to be, that's not going to come out for a while because that's not a podcast. That's

Speaker 1 something. I'm really excited about it, Rod.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 So,

Speaker 1 yeah.

Speaker 1 Also,

Speaker 1 I want to put out this call just because this is not immediately important, but

Speaker 1 because of the way United States immigration law works,

Speaker 1 if there were hypothetically another live show, obviously with the current political climate, it would be very difficult. But the next Democrat is also not going to fix these problems.
No.

Speaker 1 It's very difficult to get Nova over here. It's true.
I keep saying things like goddamn America, and I keep spelling America with three Ks and I keep posting memes of JD Vance with the propeller hat.

Speaker 1 So yeah.

Speaker 1 But even then, one of the things we do need for that to hypothetically happen in the future is for journalists to write articles about us. That is absolutely.

Speaker 1 If you are a journalist, if you are a journalist, please write some articles about us.

Speaker 1 I'm going to, so anyway. Yeah, thanks.
Yeah. We make a lot of money.
We have no press.

Speaker 1 We're a sleeper hit. We're your favorite podcast's favorite podcast.
Yeah, exactly. Exactly.
We're like the velvet underground of podcasts.

Speaker 1 Much less heroin use. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 There's some dark stuff in there. That's all right.

Speaker 1 Yeah, end this so I can have my nice bourbon. All right.
Good night, everyone. Good night.
Good night. Good night.
That was fucking fun as hell. That was nice.
I

Speaker 1 enjoyed that one.