'Gagging' and 'dry-heaving': The left's love affair with public transit collides headlong into its homeless problem in Seattle

It's well-known that the left is all-in for forcing the public out of their cars and into public transit.

Green New Deal co-author Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, for example, is a big champion of public transit and calls for greater investment and spending on it to get the public to ride it, though in New York, she's taken flak for not doing it. She didn't mean herself.

Well, now we come to the reality of public transit, in ultra-blue Seattle, home to one of the nation's largest homeless communities. Jason Rantz at conservative 770 KTTH radio writes what it's like, quoting an actual complaint:

Every morning, I get off the bus at this stop to a line of tents and horrible smells. Other than the space the tents occupy on the sidewalk, I’ve actually never been bothered by the people. What kills me beyond anything I would have imagined however, is the smell.

Behind the tents is a sitting pool of water filled with garbage and most likely human waste. It has always bothered me, but upon getting off the bus one morning, I immediately began dry-heaving and gagging, as I couldn’t bear even finishing the bite of food I had in my mouth. It is completely disgusting and makes me sad to know people are living right there among it.

Homelessness is a blue-city problem. Not just because of the high cost of housing and taxes, which are indeed factors. But as Roger Simon notes, blue cities refuse to enforce their own quality of life laws, such as the laws against rampant public drug use. That argument can be extended to vagrancy, petty "broken window" crimes, public drinking, and undoubtedly, public defecation. Zero enforcement to these "non-violent offenses" as the left famously calls them, amounts to an incentive to violate those laws. That's a dinner triangle for some of the homeless to set up tents in city streets and on public transit instead of move into homeless shelters, where drug use is forbidden. Seems at least some of the homeless seek to live like Bill Gates and Howie Schultz even if they can't have those billionaires' money: always relying on someone else to clean up after them.

So now that that's made public transit a living hell, (and many subway systems, such as New York's, have lost 25% of their riders on precisely these quality of life issues), it's pretty obvious public transit is a revolting proposition. For normal people who clean up after themselves, it's an invitation to get as far away from public transit as possible. The repugnant smells and the sanitation issues are something the left and all its blue-city governments refuse to address, even as they sell socialism as the be-all and end-all of citizens trusting everything to government. What happens when someone doesn't bother to clean up the excrement and can't be fired for being "unwilling to work."

Nothing - as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has it in her orthodoxy. The public just has to get used to it and prepare to gag and dry heave. 

Which is one reason at least why people worldwide flee socialism rather than run toward it. The virtue-signaling of public transit is no match for the sanitation and smell problems that come of the left's championing of the interests of the homeless. The causes collide. Just as there's no compatibility between open immigration and the welfare state, two other causes the left champions, there's also no compatibility between mass public transit and quality of life issues. For Seattle, it's one or the other, up to Seattle to choose. Rantz's piece is a brilliant and detailed investigation, well worth a click here.

Image credit: DaveyNin, via Flickr // CC BY-SA 2.0

 

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