Episode 188: Microtransit

it's so smallyou can't even see it Our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/wtyppod/ marcus's article: https://www.thejaxsonmag.com/article/experiencing-navi-the-ultimate-urban-circulator/ the ATU study: https://www.atu.org/pdfs/ATU_FalsePromiseofMicrotransit.pdf?link_id=0&can_id=cd24f759fa3e8cdb724f5115b807a48f&source=email-not-your-average-joe-the-atu-applauds-president-biden-for-fulfilling-promise-to-protect-transit-workers-from-brutal-attacks&email_referrer=email_2312122&email_subject=new-report-the-false-promise-of-microtransit Send us stuff! our address:Well There's Your Podcasting CompanyPO Box 26929 Philadelphia, PA 19134DO NOT SEND US LETTER BOMBS thanks in advance in the commercial: Local Forecast - Elevator Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Liam McAnderson?

  There you go. Now it's recording.

• 0:01November Kelly?

  Weirdly, the Zen caster doesn't look like it failed to me, but the OBS looked like it did because I can't see the slides.

• 0:07Liam McAnderson?

  I also can't see the slides, fuckface.

• 0:09Justin Roczniak?

  Well, yeah, that's because I haven't started the thing yet.

• 0:12November Kelly?

  Oh, okay.

• 0:13Liam McAnderson?

  You incognito buffoon.

• 0:14Justin Roczniak?

  Virtual.

• 0:15Liam McAnderson?

  Ah, yes.

• 0:16November Kelly?

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

• 0:22Justin Roczniak?

  There's a magical reason.

• 0:24November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 0:24Liam McAnderson?

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

• 0:27November Kelly?

  When you, when you feel, when you hear the reason.

• 0:28Liam McAnderson?

  You're probably wondering why I had to say.

• 0:29November Kelly?

  You have to say bandwidth because my fucking internet is extremely bad and it's, it's 4G.

• 0:37Liam McAnderson?

  Yes.

• 0:37November Kelly?

  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.

• 0:49Liam McAnderson?

  Just says.

• 0:49November Kelly?

  Which means.

• 0:50Liam McAnderson?

  Frowny face.

• 0:51November Kelly?

  The lag is atrocious.

• 0:53Liam McAnderson?

  All right. Well, the Sig point's gonna be a hoot.

• 0:54November Kelly?

  Yo, yeah.

• 0:55Justin Roczniak?

  I was about to say, I'm gonna, gonna, gonna do a three, two, one mark.

• 0:59Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:00November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 1:01Justin Roczniak?

  Three, two, one, mark.

• 1:04Liam McAnderson?

  It didn't sound that bad, actually.

• 1:06November Kelly?

  Yeah. See, it's, 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.

• 1:17Liam McAnderson?

  Uh, yeah. Uh, my favorite part of Tor was just running around looking for Corinne saying, has anyone seen Born At Voice My Wife? And without fail, Roz would go, my wife. And I'm like, not your wife, bud.

• 1:28Liam McAnderson?

  For all intents and purposes, I'm your wife.

• 1:31November Kelly?

  Your work wife. Yeah.

• 1:33Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:34Liam McAnderson?

  Well, I, listen, we've been over this. I would marry Roz if I had to.

• 1:37November Kelly?

  You have, you have the married couple energy.

• 1:40Justin Roczniak?

  What is, what is this podcast but a polycule?

• 1:45Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:45Justin Roczniak?

  It's iconic.

• 1:46November Kelly?

  Don't, don't, don't talk to me about polycules right now. So, um, the reason, the reason why 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 like you're dying? Is because my girlfriend's wife, love that woman, deeply, deeply fond of her, um, took.

• 2:10November Kelly?

  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. 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 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.

• 2:43Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, I thought you were sad. No, kill her. Kill her.

• 2:51November Kelly?

  I was having too good of a time. This is what I've been doing with your Patreon. That's not even true. She paid.

• 3:00Liam McAnderson?

  No, no, no sympathy. I thought you weren't feeling good. No, kill her then. Kill her then.

• 3:06November Kelly?

  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.

• 3:20Justin Roczniak?

  I had a similar experience to this in Pittsburgh, at least the running up the hill part.

• 3:25November Kelly?

  Yep, it's just 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? And I, knowing that what this means for me is drinking two limoncellos, go, yes.

• 3:44Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, it's, it's not like physically possible and is also very rude to refuse a limoncello.

• 3:52Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah.

• 3:52November Kelly?

  Free limoncello.

• 3:54Liam McAnderson?

  Although that said, no, no, I thought you weren't feeling good. I thought you were sad. I, I, all my sympathy is gone.

• 4:01November Kelly?

  No, first time in a minute I haven't been. Okay, let's go. Let's fucking go.

• 4:07Justin Roczniak?

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

• 4:09Liam McAnderson?

  Fuck you, buddy.

• 4:15Justin Roczniak?

  Fuck you for being happy.

• 4:18Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah.

• 4:20November Kelly?

  It's a podcast that thrives on shared misery.

• 4:23Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 4:24Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, it sure does, November.

• 4:26Justin Roczniak?

  Hello and welcome to Well, There's Your Problem. It's a podcast about engineering disasters with slides. I'm Justin Rosneck. I'm the person who's talking right now. My pronouns are he and him. Okay, go.

• 4:41November Kelly?

  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. But in this case, the circumstances are beyond my control. Yay, Liam.

• 4:54Liam McAnderson?

  No, they weren't beyond your control.

• 4:56Justin Roczniak?

  They were beyond my control.

• 4:58Liam McAnderson?

  They were beyond her control. All right, fine. I'll take that. I've been I've been I've been hammered drunk recording this before. That's no big problem.

• 5:07Liam McAnderson?

  Fuck, what's my name? Hi, I'm Liam McAnderson. My pronouns are he and him, right?

• 5:13November Kelly?

  Yeah. It already has bonus episode energy.

• 5:18Justin Roczniak?

  Well, I 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.

• 5:26Liam McAnderson?

  That's a van, dumbass.

• 5:27November Kelly?

  It's a minivan. This is a this is a minivan.

• 5:29Justin Roczniak?

  A minivan is a type of car.

• 5:31Liam McAnderson?

  No, a minivan is a type of van.

• 5:34November Kelly?

  Smort.

• 5:35Liam McAnderson?

  Smort.

• 5:36Justin Roczniak?

  Smort. Yes, it says smort.

• 5:40Liam McAnderson?

  This is a car. It says it in the notes. No, it's not. This is a I've got a oh, you already downloaded the PowerPoints. I can't interfere with you.

• 5:46November Kelly?

  S M Q R T.

• 5:49Justin Roczniak?

  There's a subtle line here. It's actually says smart, but it looks like smort.

• 5:55November Kelly?

  Line's coming out at an angle that says smort.

• 5:58Liam McAnderson?

  Squirt.

• 6:02November Kelly?

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

• 6:08Liam McAnderson?

  I gotta leave. I gotta bounce. Let me squ- squirt. Yeah.

• 6:11Justin Roczniak?

  Even better than the the South Lake Union Trolley.

• 6:15November Kelly?

  Yeah, I get my.

• 6:16Justin Roczniak?

  Remembers that one.

• 6:17November Kelly?

  I I get my I get my burrito taxi to my house by a by a squirt eat.

• 6:22Liam McAnderson?

  Via squirt.

• 6:24November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 6:25Liam McAnderson?

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

• 6:34November Kelly?

  But this squirt, this.

• 6:37Justin Roczniak?

  This is a car branded as a transit vehicle.

• 6:42Liam McAnderson?

  It's a van.

• 6:43Justin Roczniak?

  It's not supposed to look like.

• 6:44Liam McAnderson?

  I feel like it very much is supposed to look like that.

• 6:47November Kelly?

  Where we could do one billion, I actually identify as a bus jokes, but we're woke, so we're not gonna do that.

• 6:56Liam McAnderson?

  No, I identify as one of those nice conversion vans from Explorer with the, with the, with the, with the, with the TV in the back and the, and the, and the couch, and I bet their couch works, motherfuckers. But they didn't have rods.

• 7:10November Kelly?

  I actually identify.

• 7:11Liam McAnderson?

  Fucking Amish.

• 7:13November Kelly?

  I identify as a car made by a communist country that no longer exists, uh, that had to make like the headlights in a separate part of it for representation reasons and doesn't work at all.

• 7:24Justin Roczniak?

  I don't, I haven't figured out my van sona yet. Um, I gotta work on that.

• 7:28November Kelly?

  You need to study the sacred texts of cars, cars too, and planes.

• 7:32Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 7:33Liam McAnderson?

  Not cars, sorry.

• 7:35Justin Roczniak?

  The esoteric, like Pixar's metros.

• 7:39November Kelly?

  I almost, yeah, almost made it. I saw the concept art too.

• 7:44Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, yeah, it looked dope. Um, oh, well, but anyway, so a bunch of people figured out how we could take some cars and say they were public transit.

• 7:54November Kelly?

  It's an ancient technique called lying.

• 7:57Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 7:59Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, yes. With this newfound technology called speeding.

• 8:02Justin Roczniak?

  Yes. Well, that does speed up the transit. On today's episode, we're gonna talk about micro transit. But first we have to do the goddamn news.

• 8:20November Kelly?

  I want the record to show that there was a crispy timing on the news drop for a drunken woman.

• 8:25Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, yeah. No, you did a good job there.

• 8:28November Kelly?

  Thank you.

• 8:28Justin Roczniak?

  Um, so, so does anyone, does anyone remember the California forever people who are gonna build a new city, uh, somewhere in the middle of nowhere?

• 8:37November Kelly?

  Solano, yes.

• 8:39Justin Roczniak?

  Yes. The, the, their, their final, uh, plans came out recently, um, before they hold the big referendum, you know, the idea being, okay, if we just change the zoning, we can build the perfect community.

• 8:52Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, okay.

• 8:53Justin Roczniak?

  We're gonna be the ones to do it, right?

• 8:55Liam McAnderson?

  Can you, uh, Devin, can you flash up in the edit, uh, uh, Ironimus Bosch's The Harrowing of Hell, please?

• 9:02Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, right. The California housing policy.

• 9:05November Kelly?

  Yeah, cuz I mean, the yeah, California Central Valley, most impoverished part of California um, has had no investment in it. But what these guys want to do notably isn't investment. It's just kind of vibes, as I understand it.

• 9:21Justin Roczniak?

  It 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.

• 9:31Liam McAnderson?

  The less you know about California, the happier you are, my guy.

• 9:34Justin Roczniak?

  Uh, whatchamacallit. Um, uh, I want to say Richmond, something like that. Um, it's supposed to be this like sort of new, like dense, like housing thing. And then there's going to be businesses and there's going to be, you know, we'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. Um.

• 9:58November Kelly?

  It's interesting.

• 9:59Justin Roczniak?

  Things I've I've noticed. Oh, you go first.

• 10:01November Kelly?

  Okay, sure. Uh, it's it's interesting reading, reading these people's tweets. It gets a bit Andoril and they get a bit NatSec brained because if you see on the sort of bottom left of this plan here, technically this has uh, access to the Pacific in the form of a bunch of like boggy swamps or whatever. Um, yeah, and all of them are like, hey, we could build like an AI shipyard downstream and like dredge this and you could you could use this for some like NatSec stuff, which is strange.

• 10:35Justin Roczniak?

  Big shipyard. Um, 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. This is just pasture land right now. Um, I don't know what they do with it. I've never been to this part of California.

• 10:55Liam McAnderson?

  Don't go to California, that's a rule, my guy.

• 10:57Justin Roczniak?

  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. Uh, guess what they did not put in?

• 11:10Liam McAnderson?

  A train station?

• 11:11Justin Roczniak?

  That's right, a train station.

• 11:14November Kelly?

  Don't need it, you know, just walk there.

• 11:16Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 11:17Liam McAnderson?

  Say it's white.

• 11:17November Kelly?

  Do have you seen the long walk? Well, now you can replicate it by going to Solano.

• 11:23Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 11:23November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 11:25Justin Roczniak?

  Well, it's weird. There is a railroad line here, um, which they plan to use, uh, as like a spur to bring freight in. I maybe they get two or three cars a week to whatever tech industries are over there. I don't think those guys, uh, use a lot of material in a way that a railroad would make sense. Uh, you know, who owns this railroad is, uh, 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.

• 11:54November Kelly?

  Okay, sure.

• 11:55Justin Roczniak?

  That's their only access in and out.

• 11:57November Kelly?

  Talk about living history, you know? You're gonna get a really like curated list of locomotives working on it.

• 12:04Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, you're gonna have, uh, you, you, they're gonna 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.

• 12:14Liam McAnderson?

  Such that it is, yes.

• 12:17Liam McAnderson?

  Roz and I could've.

• 12:17Justin Roczniak?

  I think they got a steam locomotive too, but they gotta, they gotta restore it.

• 12:21Liam McAnderson?

  Really covering their bases, yeah.

• 12:23Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 12:24November Kelly?

  Just reaching a kind of compromise between these tech chuds and these FOMAs 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.

• 12:37Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, like once a week.

• 12:38Liam McAnderson?

  Nike jackets that weighs 30 ounces.

• 12:41Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. We go up to the Union Pacific, uh, interchange once a week and pick up five box cars at graphics cards.

• 12:48November Kelly?

  The question is.

• 12:49Liam McAnderson?

  I'm not opposed to that.

• 12:49Justin Roczniak?

  Not even box cars. It's just like hoppers.

• 12:52Liam McAnderson?

  Bring back SLI, you fucks.

• 12:55November Kelly?

  How, how do like your coal cinders respond to, uh, the fabric of an acronym jacket, you know? Like, I assume, well.

• 13:03Justin Roczniak?

  Uh, you gotta wear only cotton on the footplate.

• 13:07November Kelly?

  No, what if I'm wearing this like cool tech fabric, you know? But it is fine. It's fine. It's the future. You, you know, my funniest example of this is, um, there's this one brand called, I think Volabak. I don't know how they want me to fucking pronounce that, but they make like, uh, kind of like jerk off motion future clothes, right? And one of the things that they make is a jacket that costs like a thousand dollars because it's made in like, uh, with like. Copper fibers woven through it. So I will say this.

• 13:39Liam McAnderson?

  It's just a big compression sock. Okay.

• 13:41November Kelly?

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

• 13:57Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, I think that or you get like a, you get like a hot sim, a very small hot cinder. It's the, uh, it's the, the, the clothing and then immediately the heat is transferred to your entire body.

• 14:09Liam McAnderson?

  Or you get skin poisoning like Goldfinger. Yeah.

• 14:12November Kelly?

  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. So if, if you want a jacket that you could be like electrocuted in and have a thousand dollars to spend.

• 14:31Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 14:31Liam McAnderson?

  Copper jacket. Oh, I like when I search copper jacket and searches, it comes up with Palmer Lucky.

• 14:38November Kelly?

  Oh God, of course he's the kind of person who's into this.

• 14:41Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah. Yeah. Ball about copper jacket Palmer Lucky edition. Yeah.

• 14:46November Kelly?

  Yeah. Oh God. He's going to be the first guy who's copper jacket gets like Statue of Liberty colored just because he doesn't wash.

• 14:53Liam McAnderson?

  Ugh, well.

• 14:55Justin Roczniak?

  I, I will say this. I, I don't know what's going to happen with the, the whole, uh, the whole, you know, tech bro, Greenfield city situation. I will say, uh, go to Western Railway Museum before they either get destroyed by tech bros or receive a huge windfall of money. I don't know. One of those two things is going to happen.

• 15:16November Kelly?

  I, I kind of back them to, I, I back them as a kind of fallout style faction or a new order style faction. Primarily train based who are going to defeat Solana.

• 15:29Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, that'd be really funny. That'd be, you know, you gotta, you gotta start out, you do like a Mad Max style, like, uh, war rig, but with old interurbans.

• 15:38Liam McAnderson?

  Train city. Miles will have a field day. Yes.

• 15:42Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, but, uh, in, in, in other news.

• 15:48Justin Roczniak?

  Uh, new Federman rising.

• 15:50Liam McAnderson?

  This fucking dipshit.

• 15:52November Kelly?

  I, uh, I said this on Twitter. 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?

• 16:11Justin Roczniak?

  Apparently, yeah.

• 16:13Liam McAnderson?

  No. They want $175 for a t-shirt?

• 16:19November Kelly?

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

• 16:23Liam McAnderson?

  Fuck you.

• 16:24November Kelly?

  Graham, Graham Platner.

• 16:27Justin Roczniak?

  He's a, he's, he's a, a Maynor. He, uh, he, he's, he's running for senate in Maine.

• 16:35Liam McAnderson?

  He is a dipshit.

• 16:36Justin Roczniak?

  He was a.

• 16:37Liam McAnderson?

  And possibly a Nazi. Who's to say?

• 16:39November Kelly?

  He's, he's the woke troop.

• 16:41Justin Roczniak?

  He's the woke troop who also worked for Blackwater. He's the woke PMC. Not professional managerial class, the other kind.

• 16:52November Kelly?

  The PMPMC stands for pronouns now.

• 16:55Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. Pronoun, military contractor.

• 17:01November Kelly?

  Just on the, on the Tacvest, 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. Yeah, maybe a guy who joined Blackwater back in the day isn't that woke or maybe he's woke in an inherent way.

• 17:18Liam McAnderson?

  Was it like 2017?

• 17:19November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 17:20Justin Roczniak?

  Or I think, I think he's, he's, he's definitely like, I would say, you know, currently, he's woke, probably, I think. But I could see this guy pulling a Federman, right? You know, fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice.

• 17:38November Kelly?

  They, they found a bunch of his.

• 17:40Justin Roczniak?

  I can't vote in Maine.

• 17:41November Kelly?

  They found a bunch of his old Reddit posts, which never post on Reddit, but in fairness, 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. Um, they found a bunch of his old Reddit posts, a bunch of which were like, yeah, I wish I could have fought.

• 17:59Justin Roczniak?

  The implications for the space program.

• 18:01November Kelly?

  Yeah, my God. Um, like, I wish I could have fought in like the US in like secret invasion of Nicaragua or some shit like that, where I'm like, man, what?

• 18:15November Kelly?

  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? Um, what's it called? The, the like, the like, the left gun people. I, I, I wanna say socialist majority caucus, but that's a DSA, SRA, thank you.

• 18:36Liam McAnderson?

  Socialist, the SRA.

• 18:38Justin Roczniak?

  Socialist rifle.

• 18:39November Kelly?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. He was an SRA instructor. Um, and if you've ever had a criticism of the SRA that they were kind of like, um, politically incoherent. This here is your example number one as well. Um, so this is cool.

• 18:54Liam McAnderson?

  People who belong to the SRA are very stinky.

• 18:56November Kelly?

  But most of all, most of all, I mean, we're gonna 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 Vaffen SS Tottenkopf tattoo.

• 19:16Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, it was, uh, very, very much a toten coffin. He seemed to be aware that it was.

• 19:23November Kelly?

  Yeah, of course he was.

• 19:24Justin Roczniak?

  This is one of the things I, I could, I could understand if you're a stupid marine and 19, getting that tattoo. But like, you know, you should probably get that lasered off.

• 19:35Liam McAnderson?

  You should have covered that up regardless.

• 19:37Justin Roczniak?

  Right, right, exactly.

• 19:39November Kelly?

  He said, he said that he got it drunk on shore leave.

• 19:42Liam McAnderson?

  Get the, get the Punisher logo, you fucking idiot.

• 19:46November Kelly?

  Well, that's cop, that's cop coded. And one thing you do learn from his Reddit is that he does authentically hate cops, which cool. Um, but like, apparently he, he said he got this on shore leave in Croatia drunk, which I believe instantly. Um, the problem is.

• 20:02Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 20:03November Kelly?

  I, of, of like a.

• 20:05Liam McAnderson?

  Collaborative city, baby.

• 20:06November Kelly?

  Of a marine getting a tattoo of an SS logo in, in Croatia. I believe that that's something you could do my mistake. I also believe that's something you would do on purpose. 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.

• 20:26Liam McAnderson?

  Yep.

• 20:26Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 20:27Liam McAnderson?

  Yup.

• 20:28Justin Roczniak?

  Also, since it seems again from the old Reddit posts that at some point he became aware of what it was.

• 20:35November Kelly?

  Yeah, just having.

• 20:38Liam McAnderson?

  Not a great look.

• 20:39November Kelly?

  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, and I would.

• 20:53Justin Roczniak?

  Probably chop off my arm. I wouldn't wait for like.

• 20:56November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 20:57Justin Roczniak?

  For, for like lasering off. I'd be like, all right, we gotta. It's three AM.

• 21:02November Kelly?

  Drunk driving to the nearest tattoo place, holding someone at gunpoint to make them cover it up.

• 21:08Liam McAnderson?

  Give me your lasers.

• 21:12November Kelly?

  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.

• 21:21Liam McAnderson?

  Knocking on the door, basically. Yeah.

• 21:23November Kelly?

  Just black it out, you sick fuck. Like, um, but so again, I would say.

• 21:29Liam McAnderson?

  That accent came in heavy and strong there.

• 21:32November Kelly?

  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, Jesus Christ. Um, he's ahead in the polls.

• 21:48Justin Roczniak?

  I don't think anyone. Yeah, he's ahead in the polls. I mean, you know, I don't, I don't think this guy should be, you know, the, the great white hope of the left emphasis on white.

• 21:58November Kelly?

  Yeah. I mean, I don't know. Cause like main, main localism, they've all fucking, they all have some kind of pre on disease you can only get from lobsters out there. And so they're like, fuck, yeah, give me, give me the woke stone ban Fura or whatever. And I'm happy for him to, to represent Ensmith in, in the Senate, you know?

• 22:19Justin Roczniak?

  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 gonna.

• 22:25Liam McAnderson?

  Well, I don't think we've ever been wrong.

• 22:26Justin Roczniak?

  Guy is gonna Fetterman hard.

• 22:28November Kelly?

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 22:29Liam McAnderson?

  No, it's gonna be worse because at least Fetterman when we elected him was like not, I don't know.

• 22:35Justin Roczniak?

  He wasn't that bad. Signs.

• 22:37Liam McAnderson?

  We made a mistake. Oh, we made a mistake. I'll be the first to tell you, but like.

• 22:42November Kelly?

  Yeah. Well, I mean, here's the thing. We've always on Federman been like, okay, sure. He seems cool or whatever at the time, but Liam doesn't like him. So they, we were saved from total embarrassment by that. Um, so thank you, Liam.

• 22:56Justin Roczniak?

  No, I don't think so. We were, we were not saved from total embarrassment.

• 22:59November Kelly?

  Were we not? I remember us being like Liam doesn't like him. Fuck. Okay.

• 23:03Liam McAnderson?

  No, I did like him. That's the worst part.

• 23:06Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, no, I, yeah, you got a picture with him.

• 23:08November Kelly?

  Oh.

• 23:09Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah.

• 23:10November Kelly?

  Okay.

• 23:11Liam McAnderson?

  I ran after him to get it. That was before he went full fuckface. I.

• 23:15November Kelly?

  At least Zoran's always gonna be good. At least Zach Polanski's always gonna be good. You can always trust all politicians to do the right thing always forever.

• 23:26Justin Roczniak?

  Yes. Yeah.

• 23:27November Kelly?

  Under no circumstances attempt to build like a broad based party thing that doesn't rely on individual personalities. Don't do that.

• 23:35Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, no, no, we need, we need individual personalities. Individual action is how you do politics. That's.

• 23:42November Kelly?

  That's right.

• 23:42Justin Roczniak?

  That's, that's a factual truth.

• 23:44November Kelly?

  You, you, you kind of wait until the counter ticks up and you generate a JFK.

• 23:50Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, exactly. Never build a broad based movement. Just do individual action. Or I don't know. You can, well, the weird thing about this guy is I, I keep hearing stuff about, uh, why is the left supporting this guy? And it doesn't really seem to be the left that's supporting this guy.

• 24:06November Kelly?

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

• 24:15Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 24:15Liam McAnderson?

  They seem to go the bat for this motherfucker.

• 24:17November Kelly?

  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.

• 24:29Justin Roczniak?

  They've been, they've been, uh, they've been disestablished.

• 24:32November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 24:32Justin Roczniak?

  I think that's wrong. That's why I'm a anti-disestablishmentarianist.

• 24:37November Kelly?

  The long years in exile for the pod save Johns. Did you see the um, uh, Washington Post review of Karine Jean-Pierre's book? Um, which was just like,

• 24:46Justin Roczniak?

  Did not, no.

• 24:47November Kelly?

  I highly recommend this to anyone who enjoys schadenfreude 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. Um, and that's why question mark, question mark, question mark. And for once, she actually gets called on this stuff 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.

• 25:11Liam McAnderson?

  I hate these fucking people.

• 25:13Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. Speaking of individual action.

• 25:19Justin Roczniak?

  The east wing of the White House is gone.

• 25:21Liam McAnderson?

  Get wrecked is pretty good.

• 25:23November Kelly?

  We've, 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. However,

• 25:36Liam McAnderson?

  Do it again, Canada.

• 25:37November Kelly?

  God damn America with three K's.

• 25:40Justin Roczniak?

  God damn America.

• 25:41November Kelly?

  Finished off the rest of it. It's a terrible building. Anyway, the White House should continue to exist only as a hitman blood money level.

• 25:50Liam McAnderson?

  That's not wrong, but I, I don't know. I, you know, I, it just, I, I like, I like the architecture of DC by and large because I'm stupid at a rube.

• 25:59Justin Roczniak?

  I do not.

• 26:00November Kelly?

  Demolish, demolish the federal government bit, 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 where Wyoming possibly, and build a beautiful modernist Oscar Nehmyer style cap as all that. That's my opinion.

• 26:21Liam McAnderson?

  Sure.

• 26:22Justin Roczniak?

  It's gonna be, it's gonna be like Denver or somewhere. No. So, uh, Donald John Trump, who is president of these United States of America with three K's, has seen fit to demolish the east wing of the White House. The east wing being a 1942 addition to the White House. Which was according to some ser- uh, sources largely built to conceal the construction of a bunker underneath the White House.

• 26:51November Kelly?

  Yeah, the East Wing hasn't been pulling its weight ever. It's where the first lady's stuff is.

• 26:56Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, this is true. The East Wing was not, it was not a very good building. Um, I will say this, I, you know, I, I'm gonna be honest, I, I was talking to friend of the podcast, June, um, a while back about this before it was like, it suddenly happened. Like, yeah, I think Trump has a few points about the whole tent situation. Um, cause we're both familiar with stupid real estate guys. Um, and you know, okay, he's demolishing it to put up this huge new stupid ballroom. Um, I didn't think it would happen so quick though. I, I, I figured they would, you know, get through some kind of process and it would, you know, stall out.

• 27:35November Kelly?

  Like permits or anything for it. They're just doing it, which, um, does not.

• 27:39Justin Roczniak?

  My question is whether they, do they legally need permits?

• 27:44November Kelly?

  I don't know.

• 27:44Justin Roczniak?

  Um, cause of federalism. I don't think there's.

• 27:47Liam McAnderson?

  They can do it anyway.

• 27:49Justin Roczniak?

  If it's, if, if it were the Capitol building, cause 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. Everything else, they can apparently just do what they want. Um.

• 28:04Liam McAnderson?

  I will say, no one's gonna get food stamps in November, so, uh, that does piss me off.

• 28:08November Kelly?

  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?

• 28:20Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, go to town, yeah.

• 28:22November Kelly?

  But I mean, listen, the, the, the East Wing, I'm not historically attached to it. You have to be the kind of person who cares about like first lady history to, to, to care about that or the kind of person who cares about the norms. I, 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?

• 28:42Liam McAnderson?

  Uh, Nazi clones.

• 28:44Justin Roczniak?

  I wonder if that's where the, uh, the, the Christmas trees were, although I think that was on the corridor to the West Wing. And then the corridor to the East Wing, I think was actually historic. Most of that is gone.

• 28:56November Kelly?

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

• 29:06November Kelly?

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

• 29:17Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 29:17Liam McAnderson?

  I would very much like, I would very much like people to get their food stamps so they stop bothering me at work.

• 29:23November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 29:23Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, this is very much sort of a symbolic situation. I mean, he did this during the ongoing government shutdown, which I don't know, at this point, maybe it just be permanent government shutdown. Who knows?

• 29:35November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 29:36Justin Roczniak?

  Going wants those Epstein files to get out. You know, so this is, I mean, symbolically, very, very disturbing, but also I think factually, it was a shitty building. Get rid of it.

• 29:52November Kelly?

  And I mean, in fairness, like as we've seen, just randomly adding or subtract or subtracting to the White House is just a kind of presidential whim historically, you know, like.

• 30:03Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, it's kind of funny.

• 30:05November Kelly?

  Yeah, and people will be like, oh, they cut down fucking Chester A. Arthur's Magnolia trees or whatever. And I'm like, okay.

• 30:13Justin Roczniak?

  Well, they got, they got rid of the, what is it? The Jacqueline Kennedy Gardens.

• 30:20November Kelly?

  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. Which, you know.

• 30:29Justin Roczniak?

  The, I mean, and also the gardens, they'll just probably replant them when they finish this project. Yeah.

• 30:35November Kelly?

  I, yeah, I, I turning, turning the kind of like rose garden into like, not that I was hugely attached to the rose garden or whatever, but turning it into like this kind of patio seating thing with where you can get like a chocolate lava cake or whatever. There's a big gold statue of George Washington. Obviously, that is bad.

• 30:57Justin Roczniak?

  That was just the lawn, you know.

• 30:58Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, I've played Bioshock, but yeah.

• 31:01November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 31:02Justin Roczniak?

  They can put that back in like, you know, 10 days if they need to.

• 31:05November Kelly?

  It's gonna be, gonna be job number one for the kind of next woke president.

• 31:10Liam McAnderson?

  That assumes we're allowed to have a woke president.

• 31:11Justin Roczniak?

  Well, that's gonna be an interesting one. It's like, you know, I, hey, I'm, I'm the woke president. I'm gonna come in. I'm gonna make a lawn. I don't know. I don't know if that's good either.

• 31:22November Kelly?

  I, listen, I, 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? I would be like, okay, cool, based.

• 31:42Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, yeah. And then you replant it with like native swamp grasses to Washington DC.

• 31:48November Kelly?

  Oh, sick. Yeah, okay. You're selling me on this.

• 31:52Justin Roczniak?

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

• 32:01November Kelly?

  Again, I'm, I'm seeing the modernism. You take all of the, the shit in the walls behind those, like between those columns, smash that out. Uh, big glass windows and you just do a kind of like fusion thing and be cool.

• 32:13Justin Roczniak?

  There you go.

• 32:16Justin Roczniak?

  All right. We have a plan for the White House now. Thank, yeah.

• 32:20November Kelly?

  A lot of next, next woke president or chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, depending on how it shakes out. Hit my line. Uh, I will be the new architect of the Capitol.

• 32:29Liam McAnderson?

  Hit her line.

• 32:31November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 32:31Justin Roczniak?

  We're going to give every major world leader ticks.

• 32:35Liam McAnderson?

  Yes. Oh, you're gonna get cryo diseases you've never heard of before.

• 32:39Justin Roczniak?

  They're all gonna get that, uh, that, uh, disease that makes you, it makes it impossible for you to eat meat.

• 32:47Justin Roczniak?

  It's gonna be very funny if we can give that to Jordan Peterson.

• 32:55November Kelly?

  How was that? Was that good? It's good, yeah.

• 32:57Justin Roczniak?

  What, what is a Jordan Peterson impression?

• 32:59November Kelly?

  It's probably how he sounds right now. Yeah.

• 33:01Justin Roczniak?

  That's probably how he sounds right now. Yeah.

• 33:06Justin Roczniak?

  Well, that was the goddamn news.

• 33:12Justin Roczniak?

  Okay, I wanted to add a disclaimer to start out. 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, um,

• 33:28Liam McAnderson?

  Right, the seniors I work with rely on CCT to get around. The drivers are nice.

• 33:33November Kelly?

  Yeah, you see what community trust, many vans that are adapted here for that.

• 33:37Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, it's scheduled the, uh, the rides for the seniors, 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 some point by my seniors. It's very unfortunate. So this is like, oh, really?

• 33:49Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, yeah. My, my upstairs neighbor also uses paratransit.

• 33:53Liam McAnderson?

  God bless this Venus.

• 33:55Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, there's also, you know, other like, yeah, we'll, we'll figure out this term, "demand responsive" later. 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. We're gonna talk about the bad stuff. Yeah. So, anyway, yeah, paratransit is good. Um, anyway, first we must ask the question, what is public transportation? What is it for?

• 34:24Liam McAnderson?

  To move a lot of people, uh, very slowly through Eighteenth and Chestnut.

• 34:29November Kelly?

  Why does, why does that train have one half of a pair of handcuffs on it?

• 34:32Liam McAnderson?

  Shut up.

• 34:33Justin Roczniak?

  Okay. Why is that there? I never noticed that before.

• 34:39November Kelly?

  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, Yeah, I don't know.

• 34:47Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, I was trying to be funny. God damn it.

• 34:50Liam McAnderson?

  All right, we're doing great.

• 34:51Justin Roczniak?

  No, but I have no fucking clue.

• 34:53November Kelly?

  Jesus, okay.

• 34:54Justin Roczniak?

  I don't, I don't know what that is.

• 34:55November Kelly?

  If you, if you know why this train is wearing one half of a pair of handcuffs, write in in the comments.

• 35:00Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 35:01Liam McAnderson?

  I didn't have to get it cut off with bolt cutters, unlike some people I know.

• 35:05November Kelly?

  Like a fugitive. Uh, maybe it's like a bondage, it's wearing a lot of chains up front as well.

• 35:10Liam McAnderson?

  I would say it's bondage gear. That was the, that was the joke I was aiming for.

• 35:13Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 35:14Liam McAnderson?

  We're not aiming for the truck.

• 35:19Liam McAnderson?

  You guys are just Toy Story, right?

• 35:21Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 35:23Justin Roczniak?

  It's falling with style.

• 35:26Liam McAnderson?

  Hopefully not on the, hopefully not on the broadside line. You don't want to be falling with style.

• 35:30Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, there's lots of ways to look at public transportation. It's a means of transportation, right? It gets you from near to point A to near to point A, point B, you know?

• 35:41Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah.

• 35:41Justin Roczniak?

  That's usually pretty good, at least for my purposes. You'd 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, bus drivers, mechanics, motormen, administrators, construction guys, so on and so forth, right?

• 36:01Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah.

• 36:02Justin Roczniak?

  On the other side of the aisle, it's a welfare program, right? Wherein we provide chauffeurs for poor people, right? That's what the Republican, Republican Pennsylvania state senators think.

• 36:15Liam McAnderson?

  They could all kill themselves. Sorry.

• 36:17Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 36:18Liam McAnderson?

  We'll believe it, it's fine.

• 36:19Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 36:20Liam McAnderson?

  Sorry, Dev. Thirty-nine minutes, thirty-six seconds ahead.

• 36:23Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, so I think there's another interesting way to look at it through the lens of, of course, second wave feminism.

• 36:33November Kelly?

  Hell, yeah, Justin, brackets with a caveat.

• 36:40Liam McAnderson?

  All right, hit me with it.

• 36:41Justin Roczniak?

  All right, all right. I think, I think there's a, there, there, 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?

• 36:54November Kelly?

  Yeah, yeah, the third shift, absolutely.

• 36:57Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, so in 1972, the International Wages for Housework Campaign was kicked off in Manchester at the National Women's Liberation Conference by Maria Rosa, Dala Costa, Sylvia Fredericci, Bridgette.

• 37:14November Kelly?

  Okay, I'm aware of Sylvia Federici. Okay, so some problems with the second wave of feminism. Good things about the second wave of feminism.

• 37:30November Kelly?

  What if we did some Marxism? What if we thought about like labor and wages and material conditions? Bad things about second wave feminism. What if we got really transphobic? What if we got really racist? But also, in Sylvia Federici's case specifically, what if we 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? So, yeah, Sylvia Federici and I have beef. Also a turf, second wave feminism.

• 38:05Justin Roczniak?

  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.

• 38:13November Kelly?

  Absolutely, absolutely, yeah.

• 38:15Justin Roczniak?

  So you look, 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?

• 38:27November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 38:28Justin Roczniak?

  Work deserves compensation.

• 38:32Liam McAnderson?

  The labor's entitled, that's all it creates.

• 38:34November Kelly?

  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-

• 38:52Liam McAnderson?

  Running a household is exhausting.

• 38:54November Kelly?

  But then you also have to run the household. Yeah, exactly.

• 38:57Liam McAnderson?

  Right.

• 38:57Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, yeah, this is all-

• 38:59Liam McAnderson?

  Getting the kids to soccer practice, all that shit, yeah.

• 39:01November Kelly?

  Yes, yeah.

• 39:03Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, I can barely, I can barely run my own household and I have a fake job.

• 39:08Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah.

• 39:10Justin Roczniak?

  This stuff's hard.

• 39:13November Kelly?

  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, sort of differential here, so we're all equally at fault.

• 39:29Justin Roczniak?

  Ah, there you go, there you go.

• 39:31November Kelly?

  This one is.

• 39:33Justin Roczniak?

  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? This is not going to work out for everyone to say, well, I need an allowance from my husband. Right?

• 39:51November Kelly?

  That's back to the old school.

• 39:52Justin Roczniak?

  That's not always gonna work.

• 39:53November Kelly?

  Patriarchy shit. Yeah.

• 39:55Justin Roczniak?

  So, you know, this campaign, it still exists, right? They've organized a few strikes, campaigned for better rights for domestic workers, sex workers, subsistence farmers, so on and so forth. They, they've, they're still around. I'm not sure if they've modernized too much.

• 40:14November Kelly?

  Yeah, I do want to say that the, this stuff is not something that kind of sex, sorry. I got into the feminist sex wars there and I crossed a wire in my head. This is not something that second wave feminism owns necessarily. And it's also, I've been a bit reductive about second 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. There were second wave feminists of color, right? Like, it's not like, there's a lot of stuff that I think became more exclusionary after the fact, because of this process.

• 40:53Justin Roczniak?

  Rerunning histories.

• 40:54November Kelly?

  Sex wars. Yeah. 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.

• 41:07Justin Roczniak?

  Yes, yes. I mean, that's the crucial thing here, you know, I, I think conceiving of labor as, conceiving labor outside of the workplace as labor, right?

• 41:19November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 41:19Justin Roczniak?

  Labor is not all hitting the big I-beam with a hammer.

• 41:25November Kelly?

  No, sometimes it's hitting the child with the childcare. Sometimes it's like hitting the dirty dishes with the, the, like, dish soap. Sometimes it's like hitting the elderly with the elderly care. So, yeah, there's a lot of things in your life. Yeah, I probably don't describe it that way if anyone asks what you do for a living.

• 41:46Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 41:48November Kelly?

  Oh, I hit him with it.

• 41:49Justin Roczniak?

  I hit, I hit the child with the childcare, yeah.

• 41:52November Kelly?

  When all you have is elderly care, everything looks like an elderly house.

• 41:59Justin Roczniak?

  So also, when you think about labor, you can think about things like labor-saving devices, right?

• 42:07November Kelly?

  Hmm. And I remember a distinct poster that said, um, uh, don't kill your wife with work. Let electricity help. Oh, God.

• 42:19Justin Roczniak?

  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, uh, we'll look at two machines here. The washing machine and the city bus.

• 42:40November Kelly?

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

• 42:48November Kelly?

  Or should I say step busser, what are you doing?

• 42:50Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 42:52Justin Roczniak?

  So what do these two things have in common?

• 42:55November Kelly?

  Both contain motors.

• 42:57Justin Roczniak?

  This is true.

• 43:00November Kelly?

  Both difficult to move by hand.

• 43:02Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 43:03November Kelly?

  I'm sure there are others.

• 43:05Justin Roczniak?

  Mine moves itself, much like a city bus. Not as quick, though.

• 43:12Justin Roczniak?

  So the washing machine was one of the most important labor-saving devices invented in the 20th century. 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. 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. 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.

• 43:55November Kelly?

  Yeah, GDP is a very limited metric for measuring an economy or measuring economic activity.

• 44:01Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, yeah. I mean, you know, it's, it's always like, ah, disappointing GDP report from China this year. Also, they opened 40 new high-speed train lines.

• 44:12Liam McAnderson?

  Imagine that.

• 44:13Justin Roczniak?

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

• 44:38Liam McAnderson?

  Sure.

• 44:39Justin Roczniak?

  If you think about public transit versus the highway system in terms of raw labor time and raw capital investment, transit clearly wins out. We've just offloaded the labor of driving and the capital investment of cars onto the consumer. And, um, sold it to them as freedom and a status symbol and so on and so.

• 45:02November Kelly?

  Yeah, and clearly this works because everyone loves driving.

• 45:05Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, I, well, yeah, I mean, a lot of people do really love driving. It's frustrating. 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. So, you know, pub, yeah. Public transit is a labor-saving device that frees us all from uncompensated drudgery. 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?

• 45:46November Kelly?

  Yeah, you put this in a city building game, right? Like you gotta build roads and, uh, you can put in as many like nice buses and trains as you can, but like, uh, by default.

• 45:56Liam McAnderson?

  And they don't take them motherfuckers.

• 45:57November Kelly?

  Yeah, but by default, like if you don't have those or if those don't work enough, people will drive. It just shows up.

• 46:03Justin Roczniak?

  Just drive, yeah. So, anyway, I, I, I think driving is generally like, you know, thought of as like, eh, it's, it's free. You know, you just have it. We'll see how this mindset affects decision makers later.

• 46:15November Kelly?

  I, I like this lens. The, the bus is a, the bus is a sort of tool of feminist emancipation.

• 46:21Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, I like this a lot.

• 46:22Justin Roczniak?

  Bus, yes, my, the bus is the evolution of the bicycle. Um, also a tool of feminist emancipation.

• 46:29November Kelly?

  Yes.

• 46:29Justin Roczniak?

  And the mailbox.

• 46:31November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 46:32Liam McAnderson?

  Yep.

• 46:33Justin Roczniak?

  So now we got to talk about two problems in urban transportation, which are the last mile problem and the geometry prob. We'll talk about the last mile problem here. These problems are in tension with each other, right? The last mile problem is that public transportation, right? 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? You know, with, with modern suburban development patterns. 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?

• 47:19Liam McAnderson?

  Right.

• 47:19Justin Roczniak?

  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.

• 47:28Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, boy.

• 47:31November Kelly?

  Is this like, is this like a known thing? I sense a recognition here.

• 47:37Justin Roczniak?

  This used to be my metro.

• 47:40Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, I was, I'm yearning for the Roz of yore.

• 47:44November Kelly?

  Where, where are the Roz's of yesteryear?

• 47:47Liam McAnderson?

  Where, wherefore art thou Roz tweeting furiously about the bus not working?

• 47:53Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. Well, I wasn't on Twitter back then. I didn't get on Twitter.

• 47:57Liam McAnderson?

  Don't get on Twitter is my advice.

• 47:58Justin Roczniak?

  After college. Or I was on Twitter. I just didn't post very much.

• 48:03Liam McAnderson?

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

• 48:11Justin Roczniak?

  Yep, it's beer.

• 48:15Justin Roczniak?

  So one of the ways you can overcome the last mile problem is of course to run feeder buses, right?

• 48:23Liam McAnderson?

  Sure.

• 48:24Justin Roczniak?

  Um, as an example, I used to take either the eighteen R or the eighteen S 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 eighteen S, uh, provided a direct route to the metro. Well, the eighteen R sort of meandered through neighborhoods and

• 48:51Liam McAnderson?

  Loop de loop.

• 48:51Justin Roczniak?

  cul-de-sacs and so on and so forth. So it could cover more area and get people closer to their homes. Um, you know, that was a slower bus, but you know, sometimes I took it anyway. If I was like really tired after rowing practices, like I don't want to walk that right? And it was not that much slower. Um, and so like generally in the evenings, you know, there would be like a dozen people on this bus tops. And when we got down to like three or four, the driver would just yell back, hey, uh, what's your stop? And, uh, we'd tell him what our stop was and he'd just drive there directly and skip a bunch of the route.

• 49:28Liam McAnderson?

  Hell yeah.

• 49:29Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. Yeah. Cause there were that, no one was like taking this bus outbound beyond Francotea, Springfield.

• 49:36Liam McAnderson?

  At this point, right?

• 49:37Justin Roczniak?

  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.

• 49:47November Kelly?

  I, I like an inefficient bus. I like a bus or a train that's like statutorily has to be maintained and serves like three people, you know?

• 49:57Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. And the guy's just like, where are you stopping? And then he just goes there. It's very nice.

• 50:01Liam McAnderson?

  I had that happen when I was, uh, taking the bus in, when I remember when I worked in King of Prussia and I would have to take the one twenty-five. 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. It was insane.

• 50:13November Kelly?

  On the, uh, on, on the far north line in Scotland, uh, 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 that's used so seldom.

• 50:27Liam McAnderson?

  Bike starts, yeah.

• 50:28November Kelly?

  That like, why would you, why would you stop at every one? And I really like that.

• 50:33Justin Roczniak?

  Another option you could see right here, you can have a park and ride, right? 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 pretty big.

• 50:46November Kelly?

  Parking is an enemy of the podcast.

• 50:47Justin Roczniak?

  Yes, this is true.

• 50:48Liam McAnderson?

  Walk you motherfuckers.

• 50:50Justin Roczniak?

  This is an absolutely massive garage. It's like six or seven stories tall.

• 50:55November Kelly?

  Geez.

• 50:56Justin Roczniak?

  Um, it has 5,000 spaces, right? 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.

• 51:14November Kelly?

  Right.

• 51:14Justin Roczniak?

  That's like five full capacity trains, which at rush hour is that, that's 20 minutes of trains. Um.

• 51:22November Kelly?

  Jesus, we gotta build a shitload more parking lots.

• 51:25Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, apparently, yeah. Add like 10 or 15 more stories.

• 51:29November Kelly?

  Oh, get the tower, the tower of parked cars that just sits there all day.

• 51:35Justin Roczniak?

  I forget what the world's tallest parking garage is. I think.

• 51:38November Kelly?

  Don't look it up, it'll be too depressing.

• 51:40Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, it's gonna be depressing. Um, we have another idea called the kiss and ride, right?

• 51:46November Kelly?

  Ooh, that asked me about my Friday night.

• 51:49Justin Roczniak?

  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.

• 52:00November Kelly?

  Gendered labor.

• 52:01Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, gendered labor is still happening.

• 52:03November Kelly?

  Yeah, no kidding. I mean, it's, it's a cute name for it at least.

• 52:07Justin Roczniak?

  Yes. And then, you know, you had bike share, taxis, Ubers, hotel shuttles, office park shuttles all go to the station. You got infrastructure for those things. You don't really have sidewalks around this station, right? You might be able to make it to the apartment complex across the, uh, um, Fairfax County Parkway. I think it's still the Parkway on this side of 395. I'm not sure. Um, you could go and walk over to the TSA headquarters down here. If you really wanted to, um, 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 of years ago.

• 52:53Justin Roczniak?

  Um, so yeah, you, you, this is one way to do these last mile connections. You can see there's a lot of infrastructure required, right? Um, it's got its own cloverleaf over here, um, as well as this interchange is basically dedicated to the station. Um, you know, the, 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? This is how you serve effectively a low density area like, um, you know, Springfield, Virginia. Um, and on the other hand, you have the geometry problem in urban areas.

• 53:34Liam McAnderson?

  Building tight, streets narrow.

• 53:37Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 53:37Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah. Oh, for good to chat.

• 53:40November Kelly?

  Gorgeous, gorgeous pair of buildings, though.

• 53:42Liam McAnderson?

  This is.

• 53:43November Kelly?

  Oh, yeah, it's nice out there. Really, really nice.

• 53:45Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, yeah. This is, this is Juniper Street and this is.

• 53:50November Kelly?

  Name for the podcast.

• 53:50Justin Roczniak?

  The Wanamaker Building. And then I want to say this is the Widener Building. I don't remember what this one is called.

• 53:56Liam McAnderson?

  I think so, dude.

• 53:57Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. Um, yeah, yeah. Just huge fucking buildings. Anyway, imagine trying to shove all those cars down here. That's not gonna work.

• 54:04Liam McAnderson?

  People sure do try on a Friday.

• 54:06November Kelly?

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

• 54:13Justin Roczniak?

  But yeah, in cities, you're constrained by geometry. There's narrow streets. They can't handle many vehicles. Widening them, widening them is difficult because you have to tear down buildings to do that. Um, 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. Some people don't like to do that.

• 54:42November Kelly?

  I, I, I would prefer to make all of the cars smaller and gayer and more European.

• 54:47Liam McAnderson?

  Yes.

• 54:48Justin Roczniak?

  That would be kind of funny.

• 54:49November Kelly?

  Everybody has to drive with their knees hunched up on their chest.

• 54:52Justin Roczniak?

  I thought Trump was making the opposite happen.

• 54:55Liam McAnderson?

  I want to peel P50. Give me a P50.

• 55:00November Kelly?

  You have to drive a Sinclair C5 to work?

• 55:02Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, old Fiat 500.

• 55:04November Kelly?

  I just take a scooter van.

• 55:05Justin Roczniak?

  500 is like big. So, you know, it's, it's good to use a large vehicle. 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, much more space efficient than a car, right?

• 55:23Liam McAnderson?

  Right.

• 55:25Justin Roczniak?

  So yeah, you gotta use the, the, 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. There's a lot of space on the Z axis, right?

• 55:39November Kelly?

  I was right. 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 their drink out of the cup holder.

• 55:53Justin Roczniak?

  All that stuff is currently occupied by dirt or air, right? And that's something we figured out a while back. This may look like, um, if you've ever seen any of those old timey illustrations of this is what the city of the future will look like. Yeah. Um, so this is not the city of the future. This is the actual current configuration of Herald Square in New York City.

• 56:17November Kelly?

  Yeah, but when you walk through it, you're allowed to be like the way of the future.

• 56:20Justin Roczniak?

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

• 56:31Justin Roczniak?

  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, 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. We don't do that anymore because of reasons.

• 56:57November Kelly?

  Well, I mean, the thing about underground is, as I always say, that's where the pipes is. And once that's where the pipes is, and once you start putting in more pipes, it gets more expensive.

• 57:06Justin Roczniak?

  Hey, you know, utility relocation is less of a big deal than people make it out to be. Um, I don't know. That's another episode. Yeah, let me, let me, you know, unless it's like, I don't know, we're, we're gonna, we're in a hot tap of 50 inch main or something like that. I understand that was done under Aramango Avenue recently, which is a terrifying thing to think about.

• 57:31November Kelly?

  Yeah, buddy.

• 57:35Justin Roczniak?

  When I say recently, I mean, like eight or nine years ago.

• 57:38November Kelly?

  That still counts as recent to me. I'd be thinking about that shit in my deathbed.

• 57:42Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, just continuing to think about, oh, my God, they, they relocated that main while it was, it was fucking, it was still live the whole time. How did they even do that?

• 57:54November Kelly?

  It's like one of the key, it's like doing bomb disposal, but you have, in order to do that, you disassemble the entire bomb part by part and rebuild it at a safe location.

• 58:04Justin Roczniak?

  It's, yeah, I mean.

• 58:06November Kelly?

  Forensic bomb building, yeah.

• 58:08Justin Roczniak?

  I don't understand how, how, that's, that's a part of like, uh, engineering. I'm like, just astonished that you can do that. Yeah.

• 58:18Justin Roczniak?

  That's probably much more dangerous than a bomb. But yeah, so we did really aggressive public transit schemes back in the early part of the 20th century. Limited part, uh, to a limited extent, the second part of the 20th century, stuff like, uh, you know, the Great Society subways and so on and so forth. And we had this sort of problem solved, but again, because of things we mentioned earlier, um, the accounting looks a lot better for highways.

• 58:45November Kelly?

  Oh, well, that's way more important than stuff actually working.

• 58:49Justin Roczniak?

  So ultimately here, here in the United States, I, I mean, also Europe, also a lot of other places. That's what we invested in and started wasting everyone's time and we're still, you know, stuck in that rut, right?

• 59:03November Kelly?

  Right.

• 59:04Justin Roczniak?

  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 going to paint a lane red and say it's bus rapid transit. But, you know, only Monday to Friday from 7:00 AM to 11:00 AM and 4:00 PM to 8:00 PM 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? But there, you know, we have.

• 59:35November Kelly?

  That's fucking depressing. Jesus. And Sherrell Parker comes down to spell Eagles wrong. Yeah.

• 59:42Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, exactly. But it's the 21st century. We have technology, right?

• 59:46November Kelly?

  Oh, God.

• 59:47Justin Roczniak?

  Some forward-thinking folks in the tech industry had another idea. This, this idea, macro transit, this is impossible to build, right?

• 59:56November Kelly?

  Turns out, when you think you've been on a subway or a bus, you've actually been gaslighting yourself, and you haven't. It doesn't work.

• 1:00:04Justin Roczniak?

  Yes. That's, 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, 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. Um, they're not using innovative technology to connect people to opportunities.

• 1:00:30Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, I'm gonna beat you with it. Okay, yeah, hit me with it.

• 1:00:33Justin Roczniak?

  Worst of all, there's no app.

• 1:00:37November Kelly?

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

• 1:00:50Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, we should be so lucky.

• 1:00:52November Kelly?

  You are gonna be acid attack.

• 1:00:53Justin Roczniak?

  That's where the tattoo I regretted was on, so, you know, I...

• 1:01:00November Kelly?

  Thank you, woke MS-13, for cutting off my Nazi tattoo, yeah.

• 1:01:07Justin Roczniak?

  So, yeah, what do you do? We have to cast off, 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 a, I don't know, what else is public transit?

• 1:01:23November Kelly?

  Oh, just basically whatever. You could do it on a dirigible if you arranged it, right?

• 1:01:27Justin Roczniak?

  Dirigible, an airplane, yeah, you can have a, some kind of, some kind of, I was gonna try and think of something quaint, and dirigible is unfortunately off-scale quaint.

• 1:01:39November Kelly?

  Tandem bicycle?

• 1:01:40Justin Roczniak?

  Tandem bicycle, yeah. 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, don't say passenger, you're a customer. What if you told the bus where to go?

• 1:02:00Liam McAnderson?

  I do, that's why I ride New Jersey Transit. You ever taken that to Avalot? It's fucking weird.

• 1:02:06Justin Roczniak?

  So we have to talk about demand responsive, flexible transit.

• 1:02:10Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, God, must we? How's it going over there, drunky?

• 1:02:17November Kelly?

  Okay, sure, I deserved that, let's keep going.

• 1:02:20Justin Roczniak?

  Look, look, look, it factually, I am probably more intoxicated than November right now.

• 1:02:27Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, also saying that.

• 1:02:28November Kelly?

  Having like a court ordered thing where we have to do a breathalyzer by the mix before we start recording.

• 1:02:33Liam McAnderson?

  Do a breathalyzer, you have to be this drunk to ride the podcast.

• 1:02:37November Kelly?

  I'm not drunk enough, I have to shoot like a couple of Asahi's in some shots before I start recording.

• 1:02:43Justin Roczniak?

  All right, yeah, take, take this Johnny Walker, we'll tell you when.

• 1:02:50Liam McAnderson?

  Johnny Walker, Johnny, yeah, all right, hit me with it, I'm good.

• 1:02:55Justin Roczniak?

  So I talked about the 18R, the driver would yell back at the three passengers and say, hey, what's your stop? 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?

• 1:03:14November Kelly?

  Oh, my God, interaction with another human, gross.

• 1:03:17Justin Roczniak?

  With the human being, no, gross, nasty. You know, so in the broadest sense, demand responsive transit exists, right?

• 1:03:26November Kelly?

  Yeah, a football special is demand responsive transit.

• 1:03:29Justin Roczniak?

  Yes, or you run more buses and trains at rush hour, yeah, for special events, so on and so forth, but not so flexible. Right, you know, imagine 30 people are boarding a bus that goes this way, right? Uh, through this area of, I believe Durham, North Carolina, right? But they're going to a place which is a block out of the way, right?

• 1:03:53Liam McAnderson?

  Fuck them, walk.

• 1:03:54Justin Roczniak?

  Or, let's say, 300 people board the train at Franconia Springfield down here on the blue line, and they're all going to, uh... Oh God, Archives Navy Memorial Pen Quarter. Right, yeah.

• 1:04:09November Kelly?

  Yeah, alright.

• 1:04:10Justin Roczniak?

  They make the names of these stations too long.

• 1:04:12November Kelly?

  No.

• 1:04:14Justin Roczniak?

  The Washington Metro has a very law, a very nasty habit of having very long station names. I believe actually U Street African American Civil War Memorial Cardozo is the longest metro stop name in the world.

• 1:04:35November Kelly?

  Incredible.

• 1:04:36Justin Roczniak?

  Um, so anyway, if, if, 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?

• 1:04:50November Kelly?

  Turn this whole shit around, like.

• 1:04:53Justin Roczniak?

  Exactly. Or we should run that train up the yellow line to serve the most people most efficiently, right? So, anyway, what you wind up in these two cases are, number one, that bus hits the 11 foot 8 bridge and decapitates everyone. Right?

• 1:05:12November Kelly?

  Okay, sure.

• 1:05:13Justin Roczniak?

  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? None of those things work.

• 1:05:25November Kelly?

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

• 1:05:33Justin Roczniak?

  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, um, you know, in some limited cases.

• 1:05:46November Kelly?

  That's socialism. If you think that the public transit system gets to tell me where it's gonna take me.

• 1:05:55November Kelly?

  Then that's a limitation on my individual freedom.

• 1:05:58Justin Roczniak?

  Yes, that's true. You know, I I should just be able to demand that the trolley go on a different route. It would be nice.

• 1:06:05November Kelly?

  Take me to Cuba.

• 1:06:07Justin Roczniak?

  Take me to Cuba. So e- even this idea, it's so patently stupid. That's not where the tech guys started, right?

• 1:06:16November Kelly?

  Hmm.

• 1:06:16Justin Roczniak?

  Um, but it is sort of a goal, right?

• 1:06:20November Kelly?

  I'm sure they're gonna try and do it with some kind of like flying bus or whatever the fuck, you know?

• 1:06:25Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, 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.

• 1:06:39November Kelly?

  Oh, no.

• 1:06:40Justin Roczniak?

  Less infrastructure, more technology, right? What we need is microtransit.

• 1:06:46November Kelly?

  Live in the pod and eat the bug. 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. However, these have been invented many times over. Basically, every country has had them at one point or another. They're typically a like poor country thing. And they've 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. You might know it as a as a jitney or a truck truck or whatever the fuck it is, right? Like, um, these are all over the world.

• 1:07:31November Kelly?

  And the deal is it's it's a bus, but not really for legal reasons. And so what it typically-

• 1:07:39Justin Roczniak?

  New York City, you got the dollar vans and you got the- In New Jersey, they're jitneys, but they're actually regulated, which is kind of funny.

• 1:07:46November Kelly?

  In in in Hong Kong, you have a public light bus, which comes in two flavors, green and red. And as a kind of like smaller bus. Uh, and the deal is all of these typically, uh, the places that they serve, uh, like the cities or whatever, already have public bus systems, but those are very limited in the- Routes they serve. So to resolve that last mile problem, your smaller routes are catered to by these privately operated minibuses. This could be a big car, it could be a small van, it could be this kind of like Mercedes type beat that's a minibus. This is a Russian one, there are plenty of others. And basically, the way it works is it's kind of a taxi, but it runs on a fixed route.

• 1:08:31November Kelly?

  And it only starts when all of the seats are full. Sometimes there's a guy who comes back and takes fares. Sometimes you just have to pass them forward. It's very informal 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 and they each contain a, you know, bold cultural valence or whatever. However, they will kill you. They're incredibly dangerous and they're always, always mobbed up because this is, this is like a quasi-legal activity. And like any quasi-legal activity, any attempt to organize it is organized crime.

• 1:09:12November Kelly?

  And so you end up with, why is the driver pointing a shotgun out of the window at a competing minibus? 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 road. However, they persist in a lot of the world. And so this is, this is kind of, it's almost micro-transit. Wikipedia calls this para-transit. And actually, I have, sorry.

• 1:09:46Justin Roczniak?

  I don't know if I would call this micro-transit, because this is a better system.

• 1:09:50November Kelly?

  Yeah, it's, it's just sort of like the thing, the, this is your actual default, right? 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 a mobbed up minibus. And 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. But they're all cool. Uh, do not take them. You will die.

• 1:10:36Justin Roczniak?

  I, I, I think another like interesting one in terms of like where this can go positively, um, which I didn't write in the notes, but I thought is worth talking about is, um, the slug line.

• 1:10:46November Kelly?

  Hmm. What's up?

• 1:10:47Liam McAnderson?

  Go on.

• 1:10:47Justin Roczniak?

  So, uh, this exists in a couple of cities. It's most prominent in the suburbs of Washington DC because when they built, uh, I three 95, they, uh, built it with a dedicated busway in the middle. 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. So after that, people would start going to shopping centers and say, um, 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. I'm going to, you know, X and Y neighborhood of Washington DC. And they start picking up people so that they could take the express lanes, right? Those people were known as slugs.

• 1:11:34Justin Roczniak?

  And this, this became, uh, popular enough of a way of commuting that it became semi-formalized. Um, my dad would slug into work a lot. He would drive his, um, horrible 1980s Chevy Nova. That was supposed to be my car. Homeowners association made him get rid of it. But, uh,

• 1:11:54Liam McAnderson?

  Fucking Nazis with the hole at the HOA, man.

• 1:11:57Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, that was a lot. That was a lot, uh, that was a lot safer to drive that car two miles to the slug lot, rather than driving it all the way into Roslyn. It was not a good car. Um, but yeah, I mean, it used, that's, that's like one of these like spontaneously organized thing. It eventually became semi-formalized. And I think it's not only in Washington DC now. Uh, it's in, uh, there's a couple of other places where they have high occupancy vehicle lanes, people do it. But, uh, yeah, this concept of like, um, you know, I guess, uh, uh, 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.

• 1:12:41Justin Roczniak?

  If you organize it top down.

• 1:12:43November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:44Justin Roczniak?

  Which is what we're now going to discuss.

• 1:12:46November Kelly?

  If you organize it bottom up, then what it becomes is a highly mobbed up form of transit.

• 1:12:51Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, exactly, exactly. Or, or it's, you know, I get my car, I'm going in the general direction you are.

• 1:12:58November Kelly?

  Yeah, it's like, one of the wheels is about to fall off it. And it's like, whatever, man.

• 1:13:03Justin Roczniak?

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

• 1:13:11November Kelly?

  Well, why does this look AI generated? I know it isn't because the text makes too much sense.

• 1:13:17Justin Roczniak?

  It is, yeah.

• 1:13:17November Kelly?

  No, it's not, but.

• 1:13:18Justin Roczniak?

  Cause no one, no one's seen a proper checker, checker cab in ages.

• 1:13:22November Kelly?

  There's a, there's a particular kind of, ah, there's a quiddity to this one that like, 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.

• 1:13:36Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, I hear you. Yeah.

• 1:13:37Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. They made the same model of car until like 1990.

• 1:13:42November Kelly?

  Yeah, it's cute. I mean, listen, I, I like this stuff. I like when it's idiosyncratic. I have a real weakness for the London cabs, the like black cabs. Um, 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, no, I don't want this. I want the, the special one.

• 1:14:03Justin Roczniak?

  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.

• 1:14:20November Kelly?

  I've had, 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.

• 1:14:32Justin Roczniak?

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

• 1:14:35November Kelly?

  Yeah, I guess. Cause cab drivers love it when you do that. Cause they, you know, get so much more money from, you know, when you book them with an app.

• 1:14:42Justin Roczniak?

  Oh God, I've never successfully hailed a cab. I'm, I'm gonna be honest with you.

• 1:14:48November Kelly?

  It's, it's a good time. When you, when you nail it, like it feels amazing. You feel like you're leveling up in city.

• 1:14:54Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. Well, I, the cabs don't really come to my neighborhood is the thing. I saw one, I saw one, uh, yesterday and I was like, holy shit, I didn't know they were out here.

• 1:15:04November Kelly?

  I have, I have, I have like fond memories of like being, being in the city with my dad and him hailing a cab and being like, oh yeah, this is a, this is an adult skill, you know, like, uh, you know, when you're, you're young and your dad seems like 20 feet tall to you. It's like, yeah, you know.

• 1:15:20Liam McAnderson?

  He was, he'd just shrug a little bit.

• 1:15:23November Kelly?

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

• 1:15:27Liam McAnderson?

  Yes.

• 1:15:30November Kelly?

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

• 1:15:35Justin Roczniak?

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

• 1:15:44November Kelly?

  Oh, okay.

• 1:15:46Justin Roczniak?

  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.

• 1:15:55November Kelly?

  Nationalized Uber. Well, now we're talking kind of like, it's a bad idea, but it's a less bad idea than, than just Uber maybe.

• 1:16:05Justin Roczniak?

  So as an example, let's take an infrequent and very messy suburban bus route. Like this is Septa Route 206 over here, right? Goes from Paoli Station, then goes all the way around.

• 1:16:19Liam McAnderson?

  Uh huh. Does that? Yeah.

• 1:16:21Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, it gets eighty six riders a day, right? Um, 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 um can get to, you know, horrible Office Park A, horrible Office Park B, and I think there's a horrible Office Park C.

• 1:16:46November Kelly?

  Yeah, the, the, 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. You can, you have to beep that as well.

• 1:16:57Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, I have um not commuted on this route, but a very similar one that uh goes out of Norristown. It was.

• 1:17:05Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, the hunted?

• 1:17:06Justin Roczniak?

  Not the hu- oh, no, I took the hunted to the bus.

• 1:17:10Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, done that.

• 1:17:11Justin Roczniak?

  I then transferred to another bus in order to get to a job interview.

• 1:17:15Liam McAnderson?

  Yep, in there.

• 1:17:16Justin Roczniak?

  And then I was like, even if they offered me the job, I was like.

• 1:17:20Liam McAnderson?

  Fuck you.

• 1:17:20Justin Roczniak?

  No, no, I'm not doing this commute.

• 1:17:25Justin Roczniak?

  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, it's, there's a big off time in the middle. You have to do all kinds of bullshit with like layovers and split shifts. Um, 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. Um, it's expensive to run, you know, if you're a passenger, God help you. If you miss your bus, you're.

• 1:17:53Liam McAnderson?

  You're walking.

• 1:17:54Justin Roczniak?

  There at your horrible office for another hour. But, you know, it needs to be there in our current situation, right? With microtransit, you can get rid of it.

• 1:18:05Liam McAnderson?

  It's a thing of the past.

• 1:18:06Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, you replace it with an area, right?

• 1:18:10Liam McAnderson?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:18:11Justin Roczniak?

  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. Although practically speaking here, it would just be Paoli uh station.

• 1:18:26Liam McAnderson?

  Great.

• 1:18:27November Kelly?

  Just give me, give me, give me the mob guy with a shotgun and a minibus.

• 1:18:31Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, honest to God.

• 1:18:34Justin Roczniak?

  I don't think they would make enough money.

• 1:18:37Justin Roczniak?

  You know, uh, so yeah, bingo bongo, all the problems are solved because driving is free. And it can hap- you know, uh, that person is going to show up anytime and can go any place through some kind of advanced dispatching system and dynamic routing, which is a way to say, uh, the guy drives to a place, right?

• 1:18:58November Kelly?

  Yeah, and he's got like a GPS and he's got like some kind of software backend like Uber.

• 1:19:04Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, there's like, uh, some, something telling them to make a wrong turn.

• 1:19:08Liam McAnderson?

  They do that now, based on what I know of, uh, Septa's, uh, 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.

• 1:19:20Justin Roczniak?

  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? This is actually kind of an advantage. We'll get to the more diffuse networks in a bit. Um, this particular service has not been implemented yet. It's scheduled to be implemented as part of Septa's bus revolution, right? Which is one of those revenue-neutral bus network redesigns. Um, that, uh, transit consultant Jared Walker likes to do for a lot of people.

• 1:20:03Justin Roczniak?

  Um, I got some of the information from him for this episode, but the, you know, he's a bit of a mixed bag. I would say, to say the least. Um, somehow, despite it being revolution-neutral, Septa didn't have the money to implement it. So this has not been done yet.

• 1:20:19November Kelly?

  Yeah, it turns out, how does one transit system not have zero dollars?

• 1:20:26Justin Roczniak?

  Well, obviously it's gotten worse now, but this was supposed to happen like a year ago.

• 1:20:31Liam McAnderson?

  This is Sean Duffy's fault, frankly.

• 1:20:33Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, they did buy the vehicles for this, uh, taxi service, though. They were optimistic about ridership and they bought some of those, uh, Ford F-350 bus conversions for this.

• 1:20:44Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, hell yeah, I love those.

• 1:20:45Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, but, uh, okay, let's look at, uh, an example of one which is in service, which is just across the river in Camden, right?

• 1:20:54Liam McAnderson?

  In a dream.

• 1:20:55November Kelly?

  Stealing of names.

• 1:20:57Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:57November Kelly?

  There isn't a cyborg there, it's not Camden.

• 1:21:01Justin Roczniak?

  So the Camden Loop is the microtransit in Camden, New Jersey.

• 1:21:06November Kelly?

  Not a loop then, is it?

• 1:21:08Justin Roczniak?

  And it it's no, it's not a loop. It has nothing to do with the loop. It's it's uh, yeah, no, it's stupid name.

• 1:21:17November Kelly?

  It's it's it's it's I guess it's bounded by a loop in the sense that it's an area.

• 1:21:23Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, but there's a second loop you can go to.

• 1:21:27November Kelly?

  The Camden Loops then?

• 1:21:29Justin Roczniak?

  The Camden Loops.

• 1:21:30November Kelly?

  Some kind of offense against mathematics.

• 1:21:33Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, but you can also go to the Cherry Hill Station here at number one. So it's Camden Loops at one point.

• 1:21:39November Kelly?

  How do you cross all of the bridges in Potsdam once or whatever? Like this is

• 1:21:45Justin Roczniak?

  I was uh, Collinengrad.

• 1:21:48November Kelly?

  Yeah, you're right. You're so right for that. And you did. Yeah.

• 1:21:51Justin Roczniak?

  Uh, yeah.

• 1:21:52November Kelly?

  I'm sorry to dead name Collinengrad. Obviously not fond of the sort of current tenants, but they you can't say they didn't earn it, you know?

• 1:21:59Justin Roczniak?

  Well, no, it was it was Konigsburg before, so you did not dead name it. But I just did, shit.

• 1:22:07November Kelly?

  We are doing so good. Actually, use ZF pronouns.

• 1:22:13November Kelly?

  It's not even what the fucking pronoun is. Anyway, tell me about this loop.

• 1:22:16Justin Roczniak?

  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. Um, we can see some statistics up here. Um, I copied this tweet from Alex Davis. I'm just gonna trust his math. Um, 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.

• 1:22:54November Kelly?

  I I like Alex's phrasing here of a half hourly, stupid looking, squiggly loop.

• 1:23:04Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, that's a stupid buzz line and yet, no, it worked better. It worked a lot better.

• 1:23:10Justin Roczniak?

  And so like this demonstrates a really serious problem here with microtransit, which is it just doesn't scale, right?

• 1:23:16Liam McAnderson?

  So it's stupid.

• 1:23:17Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, and it's stupid, you know?

• 1:23:19November Kelly?

  But it's it's a stopgap and the gaps keep getting bigger. So you have to have more more stop to gap them with or whatever.

• 1:23:25Justin Roczniak?

  I mean, the previous bus was working fine. You actually created the gap that you had to stop.

• 1:23:32November Kelly?

  You know what we call that consultancy?

• 1:23:34Liam McAnderson?

  Market efficiency.

• 1:23:37Justin Roczniak?

  So one of the biggest problems here is microtransit does not scale, right?

• 1:23:42Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, bikers in the name, dummy.

• 1:23:44Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, that's true. 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. They don't scale very well because there's a limited number of taxi medallions, right? Which is, you know, cities only allow a certain number of taxis to exist or they used to. Uber and Lyft were able to get around this problem by ignoring it and doing illegal stuff.

• 1:24:11November Kelly?

  Yeah, because the biggest, the biggest kind of like ceiling on taxi medallions or whatever was like cities own capacity to regulate taxi cabs. Because they didn't want to scale back because then the city government has to spend more money, hiring more taxi inspectors or whatever. Whereas Uber is just like, yeah, what if we just don't get regulated in any meaningful way?

• 1:24:34Justin Roczniak?

  But also like taxi medallions were theoretically a traffic mitigation thing, right? You know, if you had, people realized, you know, 80 years ago, ah, damn, we might have too many taxis. We should probably limit these.

• 1:24:50Liam McAnderson?

  And then Uber said, what if we were unregulated? Ha ha, motherfucker.

• 1:24:53Justin Roczniak?

  Exactly.

• 1:24:54November Kelly?

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

• 1:25:02Justin Roczniak?

  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, trying to convince you that the reason they're so efficient is because of some kind of, I don't know,

• 1:25:15Liam McAnderson?

  Magic algorithm.

• 1:25:16Justin Roczniak?

  Really, really high tech algorithm that does dispatching better. No, they just have more drivers. And this situation is barely sustainable for Uber and Lyft. But doing doing this as a transit agency where you rely on like fare revenue and taxes as opposed to Saudi petro dollars. Completely unsustainable, right?

• 1:25:39November Kelly?

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

• 1:25:46Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, I don't, I don't, I, I, I think they, I think, well, their finances say they're profitable.

• 1:25:51November Kelly?

  Well, yeah.

• 1:25:52Justin Roczniak?

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

• 1:26:03Justin Roczniak?

  Hi, it's Justin. Uh, so this is a commercial for the podcast that you're already listening to. People are annoyed by these, so let me get to the point. We have this thing called Patreon, right? The deal is you give us two bucks a month and we give you an extra episode once a month. Sometimes it's a little inconsistent, but you know, it's two bucks. You get what you pay for. It also gets you our full back catalog of bonus episodes. So you can learn about exciting topics like guns, pickup trucks, or pickup trucks with guns on them. The money we raise through Patreon goes to making sure that the only ad you hear on this podcast is this one.

• 1:26:45Justin Roczniak?

  Anyway, that's something to consider if you have two bucks to spare each month. Join at patreon.com/ W T Y P pod. Do it if you want, or don't. It's your decision and we respect that. Back to the show.

• 1:27:05Justin Roczniak?

  Um, but yeah, I, let's look at, um, some other aspects. Here's the biggest micro transit system in the country. It's in Los Angeles.

• 1:27:14Liam McAnderson?

  Boo, fuck the Dodgers and fuck you, Noah.

• 1:27:20November Kelly?

  Antagonistic relationship with previous guests.

• 1:27:24Justin Roczniak?

  Jays are gonna bring it home.

• 1:27:25Liam McAnderson?

  That's right, baby.

• 1:27:27November Kelly?

  America's team.

• 1:27:28Justin Roczniak?

  America's team, the Toronto Blue Jays.

• 1:27:32Liam McAnderson?

  Do it again, Canada.

• 1:27:33Justin Roczniak?

  That's right. They're gonna have to rename it the Gulf of Canada after this.

• 1:27:41Justin Roczniak?

  So Metro Micro in Los Angeles, right?

• 1:27:45Liam McAnderson?

  Metro Micro?

• 1:27:46Justin Roczniak?

  They have nine micro transit zones around the city, which bring you to various light rail stations because Los Angeles went all in on light rail. 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. About the same ridership as a single mediocre suburban bus route.

• 1:28:15Liam McAnderson?

  Incredible work, boys.

• 1:28:17Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, yeah, I was about like 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 are like 50,000.

• 1:28:30Liam McAnderson?

  I was gonna say, do you know how the 42 gets or something?

• 1:28:32Justin Roczniak?

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

• 1:28:37Liam McAnderson?

  That makes sense. Okay.

• 1:28:38Justin Roczniak?

  I'm not sure.

• 1:28:39Liam McAnderson?

  No, that's fine. I was, I was just thinking about what's a big bus route.

• 1:28:42Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, well, you know, I, I would have to have looked both because they used to be the same route. Anyway, the operating subsidy on these taxis is something like $23 per rider.

• 1:28:54Liam McAnderson?

  You're kidding.

• 1:28:56Justin Roczniak?

  As opposed to $8 for a comparably underperforming bus route. According to Streets Block, I'll link that article in the description.

• 1:29:07November Kelly?

  Man, I assume the city of Los Angeles has that kind of money to splash around, right?

• 1:29:11Justin Roczniak?

  Well, you know, they're the only people still aggressively expanding transit. So, you know, 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 because you're paying a normal transit fare for this, but also, you know, for reasons we'll get into later, that's not who's using it. And also, that's a lot of, that's, that's a lot of subsidy.

• 1:29:42Liam McAnderson?

  It's a lot of subsidy, yeah.

• 1:29:43Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, when you could have something a lot easier. So this is financially unsustainable. So rather than ending this pilot program and saying, wow, guys, I don't think this worked that good. You know, we tried, we failed, go on to something else. 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.

• 1:30:10November Kelly?

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

• 1:30:14Liam McAnderson?

  Subhuman.

• 1:30:16Justin Roczniak?

  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.

• 1:30:29Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:30Justin Roczniak?

  I don't know. I maybe they could go and get some like funny money from Mohammed bin Salman too. You know, it's this is another one of those like, it's like everything these days. It's all a scam to get around labor laws, right?

• 1:30:42Liam McAnderson?

  Sure.

• 1:30:43November Kelly?

  Yeah. The only kind of innovation you're still allowed to make.

• 1:30:46Justin Roczniak?

  Pretty much. Yeah, it's the last, the last frontier, you know? You know, when they, when they extract the last dollar out of the last worker, then they can finally go to Mars.

• 1:30:58Justin Roczniak?

  But yeah, fundamentally, to some extent, this is a convenience problem, right? 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 way there?

• 1:31:13Liam McAnderson?

  Right.

• 1:31:14Justin Roczniak?

  Right? Yeah. I mean, yeah, micro transit 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. You know, the so-called choice riders who choose to choose, uh, use transit as opposed to captive riders.

• 1:31:34Liam McAnderson?

  Poor people.

• 1:31:35Justin Roczniak?

  Forced poor people who were forced to use transit, right? This is, this is not, this is not for those people. It, it doesn't, it does not make sense. It's kind of, none of this makes sense. It's, it's stupid.

• 1:31:47November Kelly?

  It's, it's not as classist as it's supposed to be, you know?

• 1:31:51Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. So then how have some other cities implemented this? Other cities, other locales.

• 1:31:59Justin Roczniak?

  So.

• 1:32:00November Kelly?

  Oh, I tell you what this is. This is a subsidy for graphic designers.

• 1:32:03Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, apparently.

• 1:32:05November Kelly?

  Ugh.

• 1:32:05Justin Roczniak?

  So up here is Iris. This is in Kansas City, right? They, they, they.

• 1:32:11Liam McAnderson?

  Ride Co., you motherfuckers.

• 1:32:15Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, Ride Co. does, I think, a lot of the backend for all of this stuff.

• 1:32:19Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep. Worst system I've ever used in my life.

• 1:32:23Justin Roczniak?

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

• 1:32:33November Kelly?

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

• 1:32:39Justin Roczniak?

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

• 1:32:47Justin Roczniak?

  You know, but they have, they, they have a pretty wide service area in Kansas City for microtransit. They have their own cars with their own drivers, but apparently sometimes if you call in or if you, you go on the, the Iris app, it just forwards it to Uber and an Uber picks you up.

• 1:33:05November Kelly?

  Incredible.

• 1:33:06Liam McAnderson?

  That is the market at work, baby.

• 1:33:08November Kelly?

  The, the Iris of last resort.

• 1:33:10Justin Roczniak?

  So they were a little bit more optimistic here in Montgomery County, Maryland, right? But they got a big service area with these, these microtransit vehicles, which you can see are small, like buses, right? These tiny transit buses, right? You know, so you have relatively diffuse like origin and destinations, right? And it turned out, this is according to amalgamated transit union. 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.

• 1:33:47Liam McAnderson?

  That makes sense.

• 1:33:47Justin Roczniak?

  In a suburban context. So these buses run with a single occupant or less 90% of the time.

• 1:33:58November Kelly?

  Wow, that's efficient. The thing I said about liking inefficient buses when they're like this.

• 1:34:03Justin Roczniak?

  And this is also according to Amalgamated Transit Union. I'll link the report in the description. Ottawa, Ontario, found a fun economy when they started their microtransit system. What if you take the paratransit buses that are reserved, you know, largely for disabled people, right? And use them as microtransit buses?

• 1:34:22November Kelly?

  Yeah, because those disabled people, they've had it too good for too long, right?

• 1:34:26Liam McAnderson?

  I was gonna say.

• 1:34:26Justin Roczniak?

  Exactly.

• 1:34:27Liam McAnderson?

  What if we started using those?

• 1:34:30November Kelly?

  What if we started using these for real people who mattered, you know?

• 1:34:32Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, exactly, exactly. And so.

• 1:34:35November Kelly?

  I invented a really inefficient bus system and all it took was me throwing all of these useless wheelchairs into a garbage.

• 1:34:46Justin Roczniak?

  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.

• 1:34:58November Kelly?

  Oh, that's British ambulance response times.

• 1:35:01Justin Roczniak?

  If you need paratransit outside of the normal areas, but inside the normal paratransit area, you gotta book it a day in advance still.

• 1:35:11Liam McAnderson?

  That is.

• 1:35:14November Kelly?

  Finally, you, you, you too, able-bodied person can experience the joys of disability accommodation. When we make the whole service as bad.

• 1:35:24Liam McAnderson?

  Spoiler alert, it sucks.

• 1:35:27Justin Roczniak?

  No, no, we made the service for able-bodied people worse, but we made the service for disabled people much worse.

• 1:35:34Liam McAnderson?

  No longer exists effectively.

• 1:35:38November Kelly?

  Oh, great. Fantastic.

• 1:35:40Justin Roczniak?

  That's, that's called equity, right there.

• 1:35:45Justin Roczniak?

  So I think another aspect of this is you might be asking, okay, but you know, what if we just get autonomous vehicles? How's that doing?

• 1:35:53Liam McAnderson?

  Shut up.

• 1:35:54Justin Roczniak?

  And this is a, a call back to an earlier episode where we had Marcus on to talk about.

• 1:36:00Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, the Jacksonville.

• 1:36:01Justin Roczniak?

  Urban, the ultimate urban circulator, right? And if this is all autonomous vehicles, right? It's gonna be, uh, the labor costs we talked about earlier would be irrelevant. The subsidy would be much lower. 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, because uh, from everything I've talked to with bus drivers, um, bus driving requires very defensive driving. And the best defense is a good offense.

• 1:36:31Liam McAnderson?

  That's right.

• 1:36:32Justin Roczniak?

  Or as I've also, uh.

• 1:36:33Liam McAnderson?

  Hand down, hand down, Roz.

• 1:36:35Justin Roczniak?

  As I, as I've also heard, um, drive it like you stole it.

• 1:36:40Justin Roczniak?

  Uh, autonomous vehicles are not capable of that right now. Um, see, I'm, I, I think we're all autonomous vehicle skeptics. I, I mean.

• 1:36:48November Kelly?

  Yes.

• 1:36:49Justin Roczniak?

  Waymo still hasn't like released.

• 1:36:51Liam McAnderson?

  Waymo doesn't really exist. It's just guys.

• 1:36:54November Kelly?

  Yeah, but they've announced that they're coming to London anyway.

• 1:36:57Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, they say they're coming to Philly.

• 1:36:59Liam McAnderson?

  I'm gonna do stuff to a car that has been seen since burnt out paradise.

• 1:37:06Justin Roczniak?

  They have not released, to my knowledge, statistics about how often humans take over driving their cars. Um, which, uh, yeah.

• 1:37:15Liam McAnderson?

  Why would you do that autonomous?

• 1:37:16November Kelly?

  Do you remember the guy who got stuck in a Waymo that was just going in circles? And he couldn't even get into the, into the front to like, take control of it? I, 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. Like, you get another good round of riots and some things are gonna happen to some Waymos, the likes of which we've never seen before. Um, in terms of like, being a good idea to have around? Absolutely not.

• 1:37:48Justin Roczniak?

  No, well, what if the, what if the transit agency was, uh, in charge of it? And that's where we have to talk about the ultimate urban circulator in, uh, Jacksonville, which is.

• 1:37:58November Kelly?

  Oh, I remember this, yeah.

• 1:38:00Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, we talked about this a while back. There's a whole episode about it. It's open now, right?

• 1:38:05November Kelly?

  Oh, is it?

• 1:38:05Justin Roczniak?

  Um, so here, here's the, the ultimate urban circulator, which is this Ford Transit van.

• 1:38:12November Kelly?

  Oh, that's depressing. It's beautiful.

• 1:38:14Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, here's a shot from the inside. Um.

• 1:38:17November Kelly?

  It looks like an ambulance where they don't treat you, they just kill you and throw you out the back.

• 1:38:21Liam McAnderson?

  Just dump you out, yeah.

• 1:38:24Justin Roczniak?

  It's one of those, one of those Chinese mobile execution vans.

• 1:38:29November Kelly?

  We are the hate of course. Ambulance and the execution van shows up and you're just like, well, I guess it's here quicker, but.

• 1:38:36Justin Roczniak?

  Is it, is it that bad?

• 1:38:42Justin Roczniak?

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

• 1:38:48Liam McAnderson?

  Uh huh.

• 1:38:49Justin Roczniak?

  Right?

• 1:38:50Liam McAnderson?

  Hmm.

• 1:38:51Justin Roczniak?

  You've got like a wheelchair lift over here that presumably has to be manually operated because these are high floor vehicles. Um, note also the brain box that also controls the thing, which is there's a driver in this.

• 1:39:04Liam McAnderson?

  Um, that's not ultimate. That's just an urban circulator. I was lied to.

• 1:39:08November Kelly?

  At least you have someone to operate the wheelchair lift.

• 1:39:11Justin Roczniak?

  And hang out with. This is true. Yeah.

• 1:39:12Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:13Justin Roczniak?

  Um, it's important to note that the people mover this is designed to replace was actually driverless and automatic. But this is sometimes, this is sometimes autonomous, which is better somehow. Right?

• 1:39:29Liam McAnderson?

  Okay, cool. Um, God, the future is so fucking stupid.

• 1:39:32Justin Roczniak?

  Given this thing a dedicated lane. You can see here, um, it looks like it's had about 20 years of road salt put down.

• 1:39:41Liam McAnderson?

  We're in Florida. What the fuck?

• 1:39:43Justin Roczniak?

  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.

• 1:39:52Liam McAnderson?

  Um, incredible.

• 1:39:54Justin Roczniak?

  I'll link, I'll link Marcus's article below. I gotta take notes on what I'm saying. I'm gonna link below. Um, the ride is apparently so jerky that you need to wear a seatbelt.

• 1:40:04Liam McAnderson?

  You should probably wear a seatbelt regardless, man.

• 1:40:07Justin Roczniak?

  When I go into a transit bus.

• 1:40:11Liam McAnderson?

  You don't wear a seatbelt?

• 1:40:11Justin Roczniak?

  I don't have to ride, wear a seatbelt.

• 1:40:14Liam McAnderson?

  I was just thinking for a van.

• 1:40:15Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, but for a transit bus, there's no, you don't need a seatbelt.

• 1:40:19Liam McAnderson?

  Point taken.

• 1:40:20Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. Um, apparently the, the drivers have to take over pretty frequently because the route is really janky. Um, it's the autonomous software cannot handle crossing four lanes in one block.

• 1:40:33Liam McAnderson?

  You're in Florida. How can you not handle that?

• 1:40:37Justin Roczniak?

  It's just bad route design. Um, in the couple of months that this thing has been open, it's carried about 16 people a day. And has managed to override the safety driver in order for it to crash into a light pole.

• 1:40:55Justin Roczniak?

  But you know, okay, this autonomous technology, right?

• 1:40:59November Kelly?

  Any day now.

• 1:41:00Justin Roczniak?

  Any day now. No, it doesn't work well yet. So when we have real micro transit, obviously, we're gonna have pods.

• 1:41:07November Kelly?

  Yes. Live in the pod, drive the pod to work, eat the bug.

• 1:41:12Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, look, look at all these pods.

• 1:41:14November Kelly?

  For a while, these were gonna be the replacement for the cancelled rail link from Glasgow to Glasgow Airport. And then they cancelled that too. So we can't even get pods.

• 1:41:25Justin Roczniak?

  I mean, because they don't work, is the thing.

• 1:41:27November Kelly?

  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.

• 1:41:33Justin Roczniak?

  So if, if, if, if you look at the van that was in the previous image, right? What if we change the bodywork?

• 1:41:41November Kelly?

  Hmm. No crumple zones.

• 1:41:43Justin Roczniak?

  Yes, no crumple zones. Uh, it is at least low floor, so it'd be easier, easier to get a wheelchair in there. Um, it does have fewer seats, however, but that's fine because it's a pod, right?

• 1:41:55November Kelly?

  Also easier, but not easy. You have to ollie the thing, like.

• 1:41:58Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, yeah. And if the thing doesn't work, there's no attendant there. I mean, I, in practice, there would have to be an attendant there. I'll get to that in a few slides. Um, you know, but when you, you, you, you show these, these, these 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 gonna get rid of these big, 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 gonna be a pod of some kind, right? And it's just a fucking van. It's just, it's just a van.

• 1:42:37November Kelly?

  Yeah, but it's a futuristic looking van.

• 1:42:39Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, Roz, it's the future. Brought to you by RideCo, those motherfuckers.

• 1:42:44Justin Roczniak?

  But yeah, I, I, 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.

• 1:42:56Liam McAnderson?

  That's a, that's a, that's a, that's a, that's.

• 1:43:00November Kelly?

  Well, if I remember right, it wasn't gonna go from Glasgow to Glasgow Airport. It was gonna go from the airport to Paisley, the city like southeast of Glasgow where you could then get a train and they were gonna build like an overpass for them. This was also stupid.

• 1:43:14Liam McAnderson?

  You've just built a golf cart. Congratulations.

• 1:43:16November Kelly?

  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.

• 1:43:27Justin Roczniak?

  It's a golf cart with an air conditioner.

• 1:43:31Justin Roczniak?

  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? Thus saving space.

• 1:44:01November Kelly?

  But it's a bus. That's a, that's a, that's a bus and that's a disassemble. It's a deconstructed bus.

• 1:44:08Justin Roczniak?

  It's a deconstructed bus.

• 1:44:09Liam McAnderson?

  It's a play on a bus.

• 1:44:11Justin Roczniak?

  We're doing molecular gastronomy, but with transit.

• 1:44:14Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, that was the word I wanted. There we go. You guys see the menu? It's gonna be like that, but with tires.

• 1:44:20Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, no, that this, this bus comes with expensive foam. That's the fire suppression system.

• 1:44:28Justin Roczniak?

  But yeah, in practice, I, I, 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.

• 1:44:41Liam McAnderson?

  It's a golf cart.

• 1:44:42Justin Roczniak?

  You know, it's usually like, well, this is a shuttle from one building to another.

• 1:44:47November Kelly?

  Cool.

• 1:44:48Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:48Liam McAnderson?

  The future's so goddamn stupid.

• 1:44:50Justin Roczniak?

  But yeah.

• 1:44:51November Kelly?

  This is a kind of vanity project for your tech campus.

• 1:44:54Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, pretty much. I don't know. Maybe we could fix it with other stuff, uh, more expensive infrastructure. Um, how's the loop doing?

• 1:45:03Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:45:03Liam McAnderson?

  I love when you get to, I love when you get to taunt people.

• 1:45:06Justin Roczniak?

  So, yeah, that, uh, 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. Um, at least not on non-convention days. Um, I, there was a, a good video that, um, City, 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 wanna.

• 1:45:29Liam McAnderson?

  You tell we've been drinking, folks.

• 1:45:30Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. Right, it is City Nerd. I forgot if he was the same guy. I was like, okay, yeah. But he, he, he just wrote this in 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.

• 1:45:55Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:55Justin Roczniak?

  We're living under a rock. Yeah, you know, this type of micro-transit where there's cars in tunnels, right? And you go in the car and it goes somewhere else in the tunnels, right? Which, you know, right now they still, every car has a driver. Um, they don't go very fast in the tunnels, all this kind of other stuff. Um, it's just another kind of micro-transit. I mean, granted, this is privately owned, so other people, the Saudis are losing money on this one.

• 1:46:23Liam McAnderson?

  Yay.

• 1:46:24Justin Roczniak?

  You know, that's how petrodollar recycling works.

• 1:46:27Liam McAnderson?

  They're, they're so good at investment.

• 1:46:29Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:30Liam McAnderson?

  So they call Mohammed bin Dollars.

• 1:46:32Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, so they, they, 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. There's, there's, there's gotta be something, but, you know, a lot of these, um, you know, even the private sector can't invest in this properly because, uh, a good chunk of the expansion to the Las Vegas Loop, since they built the convention center section, has all been single tunnels, right? Which means each segment of the Loop can handle, on average, a little less than one car at a time.

• 1:47:08Liam McAnderson?

  Hell, yeah.

• 1:47:12Liam McAnderson?

  Beautiful.

• 1:47:12Justin Roczniak?

  So yeah, this is, this is, uh, I, I think the ultimate manifestation of microtransit is we're gonna 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, um, that, uh, you know, our ancestors will look at in the future will be like, it's not gonna be like.

• 1:47:36November Kelly?

  We address you, comrade descendants, who do not know what a bus is.

• 1:47:42Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, no, we address you, comrade descendants. We apologize for being such morons.

• 1:47:50November Kelly?

  We tried to warn them, please find enclosed on this thumb drive, a bunch of episodes of our podcast, and then a bunch of our bits leak forward into the future.

• 1:48:00Justin Roczniak?

  But yeah, so in conclusion, um, the fact is here that in nearly every single case imaginable, microtransit just doesn't work.

• 1:48:09Liam McAnderson?

  That's crazy. What?

• 1:48:11Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, it sounds cool, though, and people who run transit agencies like to drive cars. Very few of them take transit to work, at least in the United States.

• 1:48:23November Kelly?

  We are forced to conclude that not only is car bad, but van bad.

• 1:48:28Liam McAnderson?

  No, no, you'll never have it from me. Rideco bad, though. I'll get on board with Rideco bad.

• 1:48:34Justin Roczniak?

  So everyone sort of forgot that driving cars costs money, right? And ordering a car is, at least in my opinion, much less convenient than waiting for a bus.

• 1:48:46November Kelly?

  Hmm.

• 1:48:46Justin Roczniak?

  Um, 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. Like, if, if, if they became popular, they wouldn't work. Um.

• 1:49:04Justin Roczniak?

  And they're essentially providing the same service as a taxi or an Uber or a Lyft, but in limited areas, right? 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. 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. This thing doesn't scale. It doesn't make any sense.

• 1:49:38November Kelly?

  That doesn't, that's not going to stop anyone in a position to decide from trying to make it happen.

• 1:49:43Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, yeah, that's the problem. 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? 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? 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? You know, public safety is also a concern. Having an attendant or, you know, a bus driver is, is a nice deterrent to antisocial behavior, generally speaking.

• 1:50:24November Kelly?

  Yeah, stop, stop MS-13 from hacking off all your limbs or whatever people are worried about this week.

• 1:50:29Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, unless it's a limb I want hacked off, obviously.

• 1:50:35Liam McAnderson?

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

• 1:50:40Justin Roczniak?

  What's that?

• 1:50:41Liam McAnderson?

  Hail to the team, the slurs.

• 1:50:44Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, I see, I see.

• 1:50:45November Kelly?

  This is novel to me. Okay, whatever.

• 1:50:47Liam McAnderson?

  Don't worry about it.

• 1:50:48Justin Roczniak?

  The Washington Football Team.

• 1:50:50November Kelly?

  Oh.

• 1:50:53November Kelly?

  Sure, sure.

• 1:50:54Justin Roczniak?

  Yes, the Washington Glee Club.

• 1:50:58Justin Roczniak?

  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. Better to have fewer of them and not more, right? Um, reducing the overall amount of labor that a society must perform, which I think is a laudable goal. People should have more leisure time.

• 1:51:23Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:51:23Justin Roczniak?

  Right? Microtransit fails on every one of these accounts. It doesn't make any sense. It from like any, any aspect. Um, it's a bad idea. It's time for everyone to dump it. But, you know, because we live in stupid world.

• 1:51:41Justin Roczniak?

  Of course, transit agencies are forging ahead anyway.

• 1:51:44November Kelly?

  Yeah, they got to funnel a bunch of money to consultants to come up with a cute name for it and put a, put a vinyl wrap on a Mercedes veto or whatever.

• 1:51:52Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:52Liam McAnderson?

  And then make Liam's life worse with RideCo.

• 1:51:55November Kelly?

  That's right. Well, I mean, what it, what is, what is the future if not people saying, we must make Liam's life worse and then there's nothing to do about it.

• 1:52:05Justin Roczniak?

  Well, what did we learn?

• 1:52:06Liam McAnderson?

  Burn it.

• 1:52:07November Kelly?

  I think, I think, 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.

• 1:52:14Liam McAnderson?

  Your, uh, your credit certificate is in the mail.

• 1:52:16November Kelly?

  If you are the sort of like, uh, person at a transit agency who gets to decide on this stuff, just don't fucking do this.

• 1:52:23Liam McAnderson?

  Give us money.

• 1:52:24Justin Roczniak?

  Bus. Run the bus.

• 1:52:26November Kelly?

  Run a bus.

• 1:52:26Justin Roczniak?

  Run the bus. Bus is good. I like bus.

• 1:52:29Liam McAnderson?

  He does like bus.

• 1:52:30Justin Roczniak?

  If it's crowded, I don't know. Make it a trolley bus. Make it a tram.

• 1:52:34Liam McAnderson?

  Ooh, articulate bus.

• 1:52:36November Kelly?

  You know?

• 1:52:37Justin Roczniak?

  Ooh, articulated bus.

• 1:52:39November Kelly?

  Those things, yeah, um, well, those things caught fire a lot and also killed a few cyclists. But, you know, in principle.

• 1:52:46Justin Roczniak?

  I like a bendy bus. Bendy buses are nice.

• 1:52:48November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:49Justin Roczniak?

  No, no bendy bus ever killed me.

• 1:52:54November Kelly?

  It would have to be well out of its kind of normal habitat, for one thing.

• 1:52:58Liam McAnderson?

  Right.

• 1:52:58Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, we got bendy buses.

• 1:53:00Liam McAnderson?

  Did? Yeah, we did. Yeah, we do.

• 1:53:01Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:01Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, okay.

• 1:53:02Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, they're on like seventeen. I have no idea how they go around the corners.

• 1:53:05Liam McAnderson?

  It's insane, dude. The forty-eight just hauling ass and.

• 1:53:09Justin Roczniak?

  Those guys are miracle workers.

• 1:53:11Liam McAnderson?

  They are.

• 1:53:12Justin Roczniak?

  Every SEPTA driver is a fucking miracle worker. I, I, I am surprised when the rapture happened a few weeks ago, they didn't all go to heaven.

• 1:53:22Liam McAnderson?

  Well, that's what the Republicans were counting on.

• 1:53:24Justin Roczniak?

  Every one of them is a saint.

• 1:53:26Justin Roczniak?

  But yeah, well.

• 1:53:27November Kelly?

  We learned nothing.

• 1:53:28Justin Roczniak?

  We learned nothing.

• 1:53:28November Kelly?

  Same as always.

• 1:53:29Justin Roczniak?

  No, we're here to educate you.

• 1:53:31November Kelly?

  That's right.

• 1:53:32Justin Roczniak?

  This is a lecture, not a discussion.

• 1:53:34November Kelly?

  That's right.

• 1:53:35Justin Roczniak?

  We have a segment on this podcast called Safety Third.

• 1:53:41Justin Roczniak?

  Hello, Justin, Liam, November, Devon, Gareth, Victoria, Joe, and June, among others.

• 1:53:49November Kelly?

  This cast is getting too big. I don't even remember hiring some of these people. I don't imagine of Sam. That's terrible. Yeah, what the fuck?

• 1:53:57Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. My tale of woe.

• 1:54:01November Kelly?

  Oh, all right.

• 1:54:01Justin Roczniak?

  Comes to you from my childhood, growing up in the small, Central American country of Costa Rica.

• 1:54:09Liam McAnderson?

  Supposed to be one of the most beautiful places on earth, and I want to go very badly.

• 1:54:12Justin Roczniak?

  This is a story of child endangerment.

• 1:54:15November Kelly?

  Neat.

• 1:54:16Justin Roczniak?

  School-sponsored spelunking and broad mismanagement.

• 1:54:20November Kelly?

  So I think you'll be okay, Liam, so long as you don't go in a cave.

• 1:54:22Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, don't go in a cave.

• 1:54:23Liam McAnderson?

  I wasn't, not in a million years.

• 1:54:26Justin Roczniak?

  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, and I do have pictures of the fucking cave. So I know in my heart, my experience was real.

• 1:54:41November Kelly?

  What do they do to this child?

• 1:54:43Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, good God.

• 1:54:44Justin Roczniak?

  A little background. Costa Rica is a small Central American country bordered by Nicaragua and Panama. It has no army and amazing nationalized healthcare. It is 30% protected rainforest. The rest is also rainforest.

• 1:54:56November Kelly?

  LGBT rights in Costa Rica.

• 1:55:00November Kelly?

  Googling Costa Rica immigration.

• 1:55:04Justin Roczniak?

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

• 1:55:08Justin Roczniak?

  It is 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. My family moved to Costa Rica to escape the oncoming Great Recession and lived there for about five years afterwards. While there, we attended, we attended a small private school out in the jungle called Homeschool Beach Academy. 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. 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 12.

• 1:55:54Liam McAnderson?

  Hang in there bud, you're almost done.

• 1:55:56Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. I will spare you a long diatribe about the many peculiarities of that school that got to the point of today, the field trips.

• 1:56:05Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, okay. This is where the cave, they go in the hole.

• 1:56:08Justin Roczniak?

  Oh yeah, Miss Frizzle shows up with the magic school bus and you're like, oh.

• 1:56:12Liam McAnderson?

  Fuck. God damn it.

• 1:56:18November Kelly?

  Of course, now it's a micro transit.

• 1:56:20Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, now it's a magic, magic micro transit bus. Brought to you by RideCo.

• 1:56:25Liam McAnderson?

  Dirty motherfuckers. I hate those guys.

• 1:56:29Justin Roczniak?

  They neoliberalized the magic school bus.

• 1:56:43Justin Roczniak?

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

• 1:56:52Liam McAnderson?

  Son or no.

• 1:56:55Liam McAnderson?

  All right, get on with it.

• 1:56:56Justin Roczniak?

  Taking the acetylene torch of the magic.

• 1:57:00Justin Roczniak?

  They show up next day, the magic Ford Transit van. Okay.

• 1:57:06Liam McAnderson?

  You fucker.

• 1:57:08Justin Roczniak?

  It's painted yellow at least.

• 1:57:11Liam McAnderson?

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

• 1:57:14Justin Roczniak?

  Homeschool Beach held one field trip a year and each was, was its own kind of both amazing and harrowing experience. Our main story is the very last one I went on. I'll recount the others to the best of my ability. Number one, going to the Sea Parade where a random drunk guy ran from his car into the parade directly in front of my school group. 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. Number two, loading dozens of children onto tour boats that didn't have handrails and touring

• 1:57:54Justin Roczniak?

  around a beautiful mangrove swamp that was visibly full of crocodiles and large carnivorous snakes.

• 1:58:01November Kelly?

  Good. Did you die?

• 1:58:02Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, did you? No, you didn't, asshole.

• 1:58:04Justin Roczniak?

  Nah, you're fine. Number three, going to see a lab developing plasma rockets, then walking four miles along a dirt road, swim at a waterfall, then walking four miles back in the heat, stopping for thirty minutes to pull out a jeep that had been nearly swallowed by a part of the road.

• 1:58:21November Kelly?

  I gotta be honest, this sounds like paradise on earth and the state healthcare system funds hormones, so I will be moving to Costa Rica.

• 1:58:30Liam McAnderson?

  All right, cool. Get a better, you'll still have better internet somehow.

• 1:58:34Justin Roczniak?

  But the last field trip I went on was a trip to the Barra Honda National Park and Cave.

• 1:58:39Liam McAnderson?

  Nope.

• 1:58:40Justin Roczniak?

  Seen here in images I managed to find on the Google. Our story begins at the top of the hour, eight AM, unlike the previous field trips. The parents had badgered the principal into allowing them along to chaperone.

• 1:58:54November Kelly?

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

• 1:58:59Justin Roczniak?

  So in total, about fifteen children, six parents, and at least three teachers. I dimly recall some ineffable scheduling fuckups and buses getting lost along the way to Barra Honda, but the details have lost me. All that means is we actually arrived at the park hours later than intended. Barra Honda itself is set in a beautiful mountainous jungle. The walk to the cave at the time, 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.

• 1:59:33November Kelly?

  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.

• 1:59:41Justin Roczniak?

  And beautiful.

• 1:59:43November Kelly?

  You fucker.

• 1:59:44Justin Roczniak?

  I still recall enjoying it and the various critters we saw. Ah, yeah, I'm sure you like, I don't know, befriended a leopard or something.

• 1:59:51November Kelly?

  Yeah, congratulations dickhead.

• 1:59:53Justin Roczniak?

  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 and plainly see that is an open hell mouth right into a deep cavern.

• 2:00:07November Kelly?

  Yeah, I'm not getting into this. I'll be honest with you. So far, paradise on earth, not hitting that ladder.

• 2:00:12Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. A poorly welded, rusty and moistened by the jungle humidity, godforsaken metal ladder extended nearly horizontal for part of the way, then dips down, down straight some forty feet into the cavern below.

• 2:00:27November Kelly?

  Fuck that. No, absolutely not.

• 2:00:29Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, actually, that's not a terribly long ladder. Well, I don't like how it looks.

• 2:00:33November Kelly?

  Fuck you, Roz. Costa Rican cuisine is generally not spicy. Okay, that's another big tick.

• 2:00:40Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. What none of these pictures will show you is the one and single piece of safety equipment afforded to, um, interpret, interpret, it afforded to climbers, right? A small Costa Rican man with a bungee rope tied to a tree, tied to a tree, stands by the pit. While there were some complaints by the parents at this point, the derangement field of Costa Rica apparently prevented anyone from stopping the proceedings.

• 2:01:08November Kelly?

  And it's got a derangement field, better still.

• 2:01:10Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, that make your podcast better, yeah.

• 2:01:15Justin Roczniak?

  The order of the day is this, the small Costa Rican man has a slip knot in his rope. He will wrap that rope around you before you begin your harrowing descent. And as you climb, manually feed the rope down after you. Did I mention I have a fear of heights?

• 2:01:30November Kelly?

  No.

• 2:01:31Justin Roczniak?

  It's fine, you're underground, it doesn't matter.

• 2:01:34November Kelly?

  Your altitude is actually negative.

• 2:01:36Justin Roczniak?

  It's actually negative, yeah. 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. 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. The ladder, again, is made of partially welded, old scrap metal and partially of old hardware stored ladders, which had ended their life, being recycled into a child endangerment device in a cave. 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. He is lowering the rope down through his slip knot to you.

• 2:02:20Justin Roczniak?

  If you go slower than him, the rope falls onto you, and that means any fall will be worse for the drop. 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.

• 2:02:39November Kelly?

  Ugh.

• 2:02:40Justin Roczniak?

  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. Then, of course, the rope runs out before the ladder does. 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. 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. While quite slimy, the cavern's mouth is large enough to be well lit, and even while we were corralled into a

• 2:03:22Justin Roczniak?

  smaller area, we could see plenty of interesting rock formations. Then we went a little deeper.

• 2:03:28November Kelly?

  Oh, no. No. No.

• 2:03:30Justin Roczniak?

  Nope. Our second hell mouth of the day presents as a dark, wet hole, a little smaller than a normal manhole. It's the only way to go deeper into the cave, and it's just a little too small.

• 2:03:42November Kelly?

  Not only no, but fuck no.

• 2:03:44Justin Roczniak?

  It's just a little too small to carry a decent light source down with you. 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 on natural and extremely wet handholds to navigate four feet down onto another ladder. So what a second place. 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. Um, I don't remember which one I put where.

• 2:04:17November Kelly?

  Please, when you are sending in your safety thirds, [email protected]. Remember, they are the thing we will do last, and we will be sleepy.

• 2:04:25Liam McAnderson?

  And also kinda drunk.

• 2:04:27Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. And also, uh, don't, don't send weird formats of pictures. I had to re-save a bunch of these in earphone view in order that I could get them in here. Anyway.

• 2:04:38Liam McAnderson?

  I feel great.

• 2:04:40Justin Roczniak?

  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.

• 2:04:48November Kelly?

  I don't want to experience true and complete darkness and I especially don't want to climb. 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's ladder.

• 2:04:56Justin Roczniak?

  I don't want to be in, I don't want to, I want to be in a situation where I have to climb back up because I, you know, it's like, it's like an escape room. I've already beaten all of them because I have to climb.

• 2:05:04Liam McAnderson?

  And there we go, I think, yeah, I feel good.

• 2:05:07Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:09Justin Roczniak?

  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. 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. Remember the rope guy, the, the, the, the way you'd have to keep pace with him or he dropped the rope down after you? Now you were climbing up. He doesn't know or really care that a dehydrated and exhausted child is down at the bottom of fucking Tartarus. He's pulling

• 2:05:54Justin Roczniak?

  his rope up until he feels it stop. The climb down is hard enough with the, with that, 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.

• 2:06:11November Kelly?

  Oh, buddy.

• 2:06:12Justin Roczniak?

  The invocation of another miracle prevented any injuries here too. And because I was obviously distraught and severely dehydrated by that point, me and a few, 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. The fact that I do not have a phobia of caves or some kind of panic disorder these of, 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. I do not know if the school still exists as I have checked and never found it online.

• 2:06:50Liam McAnderson?

  It's a good sign. Yeah. It's probably for the better.

• 2:06:52Justin Roczniak?

  The past is a joke and we can't see the punch. 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.

• 2:07:03Liam McAnderson?

  Thanks, Leaf.

• 2:07:03Justin Roczniak?

  Thank you, Leaf. Uh, yeah, I'm not seeing any evidence that suggests some to go in the cave from this. Don't go in the cave.

• 2:07:10Liam McAnderson?

  No, don't go in the cave.

• 2:07:11Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, that was safety third.

• 2:07:17Justin Roczniak?

  I guess that wasn't a workplace injury. Although I guess, hold on, is going to school a workplace?

• 2:07:23November Kelly?

  Well, then we're getting into like other forms of labor again, right? So.

• 2:07:27Liam McAnderson?

  We don't have time for that.

• 2:07:31Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I don't know. Fuck homework. Hate that shit.

• 2:07:36November Kelly?

  Pointless. Anti bedtime action. Let's fucking go.

• 2:07:39Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, exactly, exactly.

• 2:07:41November Kelly?

  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.

• 2:07:45Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, that's true.

• 2:07:46Liam McAnderson?

  That's because you were out drinking. It's not my fault.

• 2:07:49November Kelly?

  It's, it is 14 minutes past midnight, which is to say that the world has been nuked a lot and I am, I'm ready for bed.

• 2:07:57Justin Roczniak?

  Speaking of nukes, our next episode will be on Chernobyl. Does anyone have any commercials before we go?

• 2:08:03Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, stay tuned for a special announcement.

• 2:08:05November Kelly?

  Yeah, and, and stay tuned for that.

• 2:08:07Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, special announcement will be coming.

• 2:08:09November Kelly?

  A couple of them actually, because like I, I'm, I've been thinking often in my life that I really want to hear about buildings more.

• 2:08:16Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, yeah, yeah. Well, that's gonna be.

• 2:08:17November Kelly?

  Think about that.

• 2:08:18Justin Roczniak?

  That's gonna be a whole thing. We're working on how to do that. It's gonna be, that's not gonna come out for a while because that's not a podcast. That's a, that's a show.

• 2:08:27Liam McAnderson?

  I'm really excited about it, Roz.

• 2:08:28Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. So, um, yeah, um, also I, I, I, I want to put out this call just because, uh, this is not immediately important. But, um, because of the way United States, uh, immigration law works, um, 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.

• 2:08:53November Kelly?

  No.

• 2:08:54Justin Roczniak?

  It's very difficult to get Nova over here.

• 2:08:57November Kelly?

  It's true. I keep saying things like goddamn America and I keep spelling America with three K's. And I keep posting memes of J D Vance with the propeller hat. So, yeah.

• 2:09:06Justin Roczniak?

  But even 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.

• 2:09:16November Kelly?

  That is absolutely true.

• 2:09:17Justin Roczniak?

  If you are a journalist, if you are a journalist, please write some articles about us.

• 2:09:23November Kelly?

  Hmm.

• 2:09:23Justin Roczniak?

  I'm gonna, so, anyway.

• 2:09:26Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, thanks.

• 2:09:27Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, we make a lot of money. We have no press.

• 2:09:30November Kelly?

  We're Sleepy Hit. We're your favorite podcast's favorite podcast.

• 2:09:33Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, exactly, exactly. We're like the Velvet Underground of podcasts.

• 2:09:39November Kelly?

  Much less heroin use.

• 2:09:40Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's some dark stuff in there. That's all right. Uh, yeah, uh, end this so I can, I can have my nice bourbon.

• 2:09:48Justin Roczniak?

  All right. Good night, everyone.

• 2:09:49Liam McAnderson?

  Good night.

• 2:09:50Justin Roczniak?

  Good night.

• 2:09:50Liam McAnderson?

  That was fucking fun as hell.

• 2:09:54Justin Roczniak?

  It was nice. I enjoyed that one.