Making videos about cities around the world is fascinating for a number of reasons, but one of the most interesting things I’ve learned over the better part of a decade doing YouTube is that no matter where you go, everyone thinks their transit is very bad (except perhaps for Switzerland and Japan, which truly have really good — although not perfect) transit services.
For example, any time I make a video about, say, Germany, I’m guaranteed to get lots of comments complaining about Deutsche Bahn. Now to be clear, DB does have its problems, but even compared to riding trains in other places in Europe (the UK for example) I see lots to like. The fares are more reasonable, the stations are often better, and the very quality of the rails trains ride on seems far superior. Despite the German rail system having its problems, there is a lot to like!
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The natural question this raises is why do people spend so much time complaining about something that is objectively good (and this can be said for anything from suburban rail in Australia to the Metro in Barcelona and the buses in Toronto).
Personally, I think it comes down to a large number of effects and cognitive biases.
I think the first big thing is a sort of local bias. People are often (if not always) trained by negative media coverage to have great disdain for, if not downright hate, the place they live in. Local news coverage of a transit system always seems to be biased towards problems from crime, to cleanliness, to infrastructure and funding issues. Most of these issues are issues everywhere to some extent, but people tend to only consume local media for their own locality and so they only hear about their transit in the context of these problems. People who participate in more globalized discourse around transit be it in academia or even just Twitter tend to have a better balanced perspective on the common problems transit faces.
There is also a sort of grass is greener bias where people seem to see the best in other places. I have come to really understand this one personally because it’s almost universally easy to feel good about that which you don’t have. It seems that the way our brains and desires work is that we tend to take those aforementioned negative associations that we have towards the places that we call home, and ignore them in other places — sometimes this is because we don’t know the unique way problems present themselves, and sometimes I think it’s because we don’t know where to look. I’m also certain that people are more willing to forgive problems in a transit system they are visiting as a sort of superfluous act of god, whereas we tend to place blame more directly on systems which we are intimately familiar with. There’s also an extent to which we allow novelty (consciously or subconsciously) to overshadow issues we see in front of us.
One particularly nice case I see a lot of is complaining about something that is not universal. For example, I hear Australians complaining about how bad their suburban rail is, even sometimes to North Americans who have no system on continent that competes with any of those in Sydney, Brisbane, Perth or Adelaide. Something similar happens with people from France or Germany complaining about poor intercity or rural rail service — when such services are essentially nonexistent in North America or Australia!
Such localisms can even happen from city to city, for example I hear Sydney-siders lament that Sydney Metro has “almost no” seats, even when it does actually have many seats (maybe not facing your preferred direction), and Sydney is just unusual in having an electric rail system that is all double-decker and all with dense transverse seating, which is quite uncommon globally!
In any of these cases, people are complaining that something they have isn’t satisfying them, even when many people don’t have access to that thing at all (this can obviously be thought of much more broadly than transit).
There are also elements of problem frequency and perceived severity at play. It’s the case that 1) people tend to put disproportionate weight on bad experiences, and 2) bad experiences are usually not that common. For example, most transit systems are on time most of the time (70% on time performance is seen as horrible, but that’s a solid majority of the time!), but the one time you are delayed you might have a very bad experience. This situation where bad experiences are not that common but really stick with people is naturally going to make it so that people who use a system a lot have far more negative associations. This is especially true because as mentioned earlier, someone using a system irregularly is more likely to write off a problem as a freak incident.
I also think the familiarity with local conditions that people tend to have has a huge impact on their perception of problems. For example, you’re going to notice a lack of cleanliness and it’s going to sting more when you’ve seen news coverage of a shrunken janitorial budget, or are even just aware of it. You’re also absolutely going to notice if you live in a place with good transit that is going downhill, even if the effect is slight; outsiders see good transit and you see declining transit.
It’s also just the case that problems are more real when you experience them. People can talk about how great transit in Stockholm is, but if you just got home from a commute on a particular dirty, crowded metro train, no amount of nice language and compliments are going to make you feel that the system is fundamentally good.
The natural question to ask then is: “what’s the antidote to this?”.
I think the best one, and the one I try to cultivate is… perspective. I personally believe everyone can benefit from seeing and understanding the world, and that doesn’t necessarily mean travelling! You can learn so much about other places in 2024, not only through the traditional methods of reading, watching old films, and talking to people from those places, but now by watching on the ground videos, enjoying all manner of local independent media (that’s often people like me), and of course enjoying 3D maps and street view imagery.
I think that a holistic approach to learning about places will teach you a lot about what makes them good, but also their unique challenges and struggles — People always underestimate how different other places might be and often overestimate how much they know of them. If people can gain a wide knowledge and perspective about cities, we should hope that most people would feel content because on any normal distribution most data points will fall around or above the middle! You should learn about the places that do things like transit well, and those that do it poorly, but also the wisdom and respect to understand that good ideas and good places often exist in the most unexpected settings. I talked about it in a recent video, but for example I think the 24-hour nature of New York city is amazing, and a city like Copenhagen that learned from & benefitted from it (Copenhagen has one of the world’s only 24/7/365 metro systems).
I think that once we understand the context in which we exist, we can go about trying to understand and improve the conditions. Something like bad transit sucks today, but when you understand the world, and some of the history you’ll know that it need not stay that way, and you can personally be involved in making things better.
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