As another Massachusetts native (from the exurbs, not the Hub of the Universe), currently living in SF, I agree with most of this. However, you’re seriously underrating the significance of blizzards. Even in ordinary times without global warming driving the extremes higher, blizzards sufficient to shut down the subway for a day or two were roughly annual. Now you get even worse storms every year or three, and that may increase. Hurricanes also have increased in severity and frequency IIRC (nope, checked, that’s false; neither severity nor frequency has increased.)
Other drawbacks over the West Coast:
Boston summer sucks. Firstly, mosquitos; if you’ve lived there your whole life you are underrating how nice it is to have no mosquitos, and also probably underestimating how mosquito-free the West Coast is. Secondly, humidity. On the West Coast you can step into the shade and have the temperature instantly drop ten degrees or more (°F). No such luck in New England; you can’t escape the heat from a Boston summer without air conditioning or a properly-enclosed basement. Open a window and you’re hosed.
Prudishness. Norms around public intimacy are way more restrictive. None of it is given legal force, but the Puritan culture is still around. “Do what you want, but don’t make me pay attention to it” is the puritanical liberal ethos and it’s still the prevailing view in New England. (Probably less bad in the big city than in the subdivisions or in Worcester, where I spent most of my time, but it’s still there.) This also means that the ‘weirdness point budget’ is lower, but I’m unsure quite how much lower due to urban/rural confounders on the anecdata I have. (This is a pretty significant adjustment for the other direction as well; my best friends on the West Coast have almost all been East Coast transplants.)
Rudeness. I am pretty certain this is substantially, though not entirely, a result of the previous point. In Massachusetts, it’s considered impolite to waste stranger’s time with pleasantries, rude to involve yourself in stranger’s problems or conversations, and generally normative to assume other people are looking out for themselves and won’t appreciate you getting involved. At its more extreme, this produces the terrifying pedestrian dynamics, where the accepted way to cross in a crosswalk is to look carefully for speeding cars and if none of them look like they’re speeding too much to be capable of stopping for you, walk out into the crosswalk and dare them to blink first. This is a hard cultural shift to navigate and will probably produce isolation in people who are used to West Coast norms. (This is actually one where I still prefer the East Coast norms after a decade on the Left Coast, but it’s a flaw for most people considering the move.)
Important corrective to the pedestrian dynamics. You do not check to see if the cars are capable of stopping for you—you assume that the cars will keep going straight at their current speed. Only if you can cross safely under that circumstance do you cross. Assuming the car will actively change what it is doing is a way to get killed.
And it’s super frustrating when it is clear that a car will be well past you by the time you reach them, then you start to cross, then they slow down, and now you have to stop too because you don’t know if it’s safe. This happens all the time outside of the east coast, and even happens in small towns in the east sometimes, and it’s maddening.
Also note that you can do what SF people do and wait for the light even when no cars are coming, I mean, if you think your life is too long and you want to give away some of it for no reason and never get it back. As you do. You can eventually cross that way.
You do not check to see if the cars are capable of stopping for you—you assume that the cars will keep going straight at their current speed.
Hmm, I feel like there are actually two different modes? In one of them, yes, you assume the car will continue on at its current speed, and you start walking expecting to pass ahead or behind it. On the other hand, when there’s enough traffic that you would have to wait indefinitely with that method (and there’s no light etc) there’s a mode where you stare at the car and start walking out, and then they slow down to let you cross. You do this with enough leeway that if they don’t see you (or are a jerk) you still have time to stop before you would get run down?
It is my experience that in Massachusetts cities (and even semi-urban towns), only attempting to cross if you will make it without the cars slowing down is only possible when waiting for the light. If you wait for the light, you then have the luxury of only attempting to cross if no car will interrupt you at its current speed and heading. Enough drivers treat red lights as guidelines that pedestrians must assume that all drivers will, so this is a nontrivial requirement. (I’d say ‘imagine NYC except everyone’s a taxi driver’, but last I was in NYC that was nearly true already.)
It’s unwise and uncommon to go full Schelling—i.e. performatively blindfolding yourself and then walking backwards into traffic—and it is normal and advisable to leave substantial safety margin, probably 3x-5x the technical minimum stopping distance, rather than assume they will detect it instantly. But you essentially must have to dare them to blink first, or you’ll never get to cross.
if you’ve lived there your whole life you are underrating how nice it is to have no mosquitos, and also probably underestimating how mosquito-free the West Coast is.
I spent 4½ years in my 20s in Berkeley CA and pretty much the rest of my life in Boston, and it never occurred to me that Boston had more mosquitos than Berkeley, until I read this post a couple months ago. I mean, yeah it’s true, it’s just that the thought hadn’t crossed my mind. That’s how little the mosquitos impact my life. :-P Everyone’s different!
What that primarily means, probably, is that you are not tasty to mosquitoes. This is an axis along which people differ but not the one you probably meant.
I’m rarely a typical example of anything, but I never noticed anything in the dimension of prudishness or rudeness (I grew up in the Seattle area, now live in Boston). Also there definitely are some communities of “weird people” in “Camberville” (as they call it) too, though they perhaps don’t define the predominant culture [I think it’s easier for people to feel like they’re out of place if they too weird]
I noticed the prudishness, but “rudeness” to me parses as people actually telling you what’s on their mind, rather than the passive-aggressive fake niceness that seems to dominate in the Bay Area. I’ll personally take the rudeness :).
(This is a pretty significant adjustment for the other direction as well; my best friends on the West Coast have almost all been East Coast transplants.)
after the prudishness part but I could definitely be misentangling that. And, well, you are someone who is one of my best friends on the West Coast. (Well, was. RIP Delmarva.)
terrifying pedestrian dynamics, where the accepted way to cross in a crosswalk is to look carefully for speeding cars and if none of them look like they’re speeding too much to be capable of stopping for you, walk out into the crosswalk and dare them to blink first.
On the other hand, when I’ve been in the Bay Area walking around with friends, if we get to an intersection where the light is against us and you can clearly see there are no cars, I’ll be halfway across the street before I realize that my friends are still waiting for the light to change.
As another Massachusetts native (from the exurbs, not the Hub of the Universe), currently living in SF, I agree with most of this. However, you’re seriously underrating the significance of blizzards. Even in ordinary times without global warming driving the extremes higher, blizzards sufficient to shut down the subway for a day or two were roughly annual. Now you get even worse storms every year or three, and that may increase.
Hurricanes also have increased in severity and frequency IIRC(nope, checked, that’s false; neither severity nor frequency has increased.)Other drawbacks over the West Coast:
Boston summer sucks. Firstly, mosquitos; if you’ve lived there your whole life you are underrating how nice it is to have no mosquitos, and also probably underestimating how mosquito-free the West Coast is. Secondly, humidity. On the West Coast you can step into the shade and have the temperature instantly drop ten degrees or more (°F). No such luck in New England; you can’t escape the heat from a Boston summer without air conditioning or a properly-enclosed basement. Open a window and you’re hosed.
Prudishness. Norms around public intimacy are way more restrictive. None of it is given legal force, but the Puritan culture is still around. “Do what you want, but don’t make me pay attention to it” is the puritanical liberal ethos and it’s still the prevailing view in New England. (Probably less bad in the big city than in the subdivisions or in Worcester, where I spent most of my time, but it’s still there.) This also means that the ‘weirdness point budget’ is lower, but I’m unsure quite how much lower due to urban/rural confounders on the anecdata I have. (This is a pretty significant adjustment for the other direction as well; my best friends on the West Coast have almost all been East Coast transplants.)
Rudeness. I am pretty certain this is substantially, though not entirely, a result of the previous point. In Massachusetts, it’s considered impolite to waste stranger’s time with pleasantries, rude to involve yourself in stranger’s problems or conversations, and generally normative to assume other people are looking out for themselves and won’t appreciate you getting involved. At its more extreme, this produces the terrifying pedestrian dynamics, where the accepted way to cross in a crosswalk is to look carefully for speeding cars and if none of them look like they’re speeding too much to be capable of stopping for you, walk out into the crosswalk and dare them to blink first. This is a hard cultural shift to navigate and will probably produce isolation in people who are used to West Coast norms. (This is actually one where I still prefer the East Coast norms after a decade on the Left Coast, but it’s a flaw for most people considering the move.)
Important corrective to the pedestrian dynamics. You do not check to see if the cars are capable of stopping for you—you assume that the cars will keep going straight at their current speed. Only if you can cross safely under that circumstance do you cross. Assuming the car will actively change what it is doing is a way to get killed.
And it’s super frustrating when it is clear that a car will be well past you by the time you reach them, then you start to cross, then they slow down, and now you have to stop too because you don’t know if it’s safe. This happens all the time outside of the east coast, and even happens in small towns in the east sometimes, and it’s maddening.
Also note that you can do what SF people do and wait for the light even when no cars are coming, I mean, if you think your life is too long and you want to give away some of it for no reason and never get it back. As you do. You can eventually cross that way.
Hmm, I feel like there are actually two different modes? In one of them, yes, you assume the car will continue on at its current speed, and you start walking expecting to pass ahead or behind it. On the other hand, when there’s enough traffic that you would have to wait indefinitely with that method (and there’s no light etc) there’s a mode where you stare at the car and start walking out, and then they slow down to let you cross. You do this with enough leeway that if they don’t see you (or are a jerk) you still have time to stop before you would get run down?
It is my experience that in Massachusetts cities (and even semi-urban towns), only attempting to cross if you will make it without the cars slowing down is only possible when waiting for the light. If you wait for the light, you then have the luxury of only attempting to cross if no car will interrupt you at its current speed and heading. Enough drivers treat red lights as guidelines that pedestrians must assume that all drivers will, so this is a nontrivial requirement. (I’d say ‘imagine NYC except everyone’s a taxi driver’, but last I was in NYC that was nearly true already.)
It’s unwise and uncommon to go full Schelling—i.e. performatively blindfolding yourself and then walking backwards into traffic—and it is normal and advisable to leave substantial safety margin, probably 3x-5x the technical minimum stopping distance, rather than assume they will detect it instantly. But you essentially must have to dare them to blink first, or you’ll never get to cross.
I spent 4½ years in my 20s in Berkeley CA and pretty much the rest of my life in Boston, and it never occurred to me that Boston had more mosquitos than Berkeley, until I read this post a couple months ago. I mean, yeah it’s true, it’s just that the thought hadn’t crossed my mind. That’s how little the mosquitos impact my life. :-P Everyone’s different!
What that primarily means, probably, is that you are not tasty to mosquitoes. This is an axis along which people differ but not the one you probably meant.
I’m rarely a typical example of anything, but I never noticed anything in the dimension of prudishness or rudeness (I grew up in the Seattle area, now live in Boston). Also there definitely are some communities of “weird people” in “Camberville” (as they call it) too, though they perhaps don’t define the predominant culture [I think it’s easier for people to feel like they’re out of place if they too weird]
I noticed the prudishness, but “rudeness” to me parses as people actually telling you what’s on their mind, rather than the passive-aggressive fake niceness that seems to dominate in the Bay Area. I’ll personally take the rudeness :).
… huh, is that the thing that makes it mysteriously easier for me to talk to people from the East Coast?
Yes.
Seems plausible. I put
after the prudishness part but I could definitely be misentangling that. And, well, you are someone who is one of my best friends on the West Coast. (Well, was. RIP Delmarva.)
:-(
On the other hand, when I’ve been in the Bay Area walking around with friends, if we get to an intersection where the light is against us and you can clearly see there are no cars, I’ll be halfway across the street before I realize that my friends are still waiting for the light to change.
These are actually very large benefits of the East Coast over the West Coast.
(Humidity and mosquitoes are definitely terrible, though.)
In what way is the prudishness a benefit?
It leads directly to their being fewer PDA and otherwise overt sexuality. I prefer that, hence the prudishness is a benefit.