581–590 of 689 posts
On the other side, try and offer me a solution which takes me to work faster than current crowded street, and you won't need any toll to push my car off of the road.
Clarification: "faster" meaning a lower commute time from door to door. Station-to-station doesn't matter, not at all!
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I completely disagree about the reusability of time. I live in Boston and my commute on the train is only about 20 minutes, but that's plenty of time to read a few pages or catch up on the news. I see plenty of commuters reading books as well, so I'm definitely not a special case. Reading a book while standing on a crowded train is not that hard...
It's not hard, and I see 10-20 people per train car on the R going between Brooklyn and Manhattan. I've seen people standing and reading kindles in body-to-body crammed trains.
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> despite the fact that everything you've said contradicts what I've heard from LEOs and other trained firearms users. Really? 1) Muggers The LEO's I deal with are normally "Just give them your wallet and phone. Do not fight back." Now, admittedly, most of this advice is from the US and being near big cities. In the US, we don't tend to have kidnappings--normally muggers will take your wallet and phone and run unless…
Certainly, a wallet (or a jewel!) isn't worth anyone's death, even a criminal's. One doesn't carry in order to defend a wallet. Any decent person would gladly lose $100 and some credit cards, not to have a death on her conscience. A criminal should know, however, that by violating the norms of polite society, he places himself in a fraught situation. It's very easy to cross the line between credibly threatening prope…
The best jurisdiction is one where it's hardly considered necessary to carry arms, or use deadly force. Gun ownership and the murder rate (and gun murder rate) seem roughly correlated here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_in_the_United_States_by...
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I don't know. I am from europe and visited a few north american cities in the past, including LA. No or bad public transport was the norm but LA was a whole other level. You get out of the airport and there is a endless line of car rental places after each other. That makes it clear to you that you won't get far without a car. Going into the city or out takes you on a ridiculous wide highway which is basically a perm…
Yes car is king in LA. In recent years though Lyft/Uber have changed the game a lot. I'd say it's cost effective to not have a car at this stage, especially when you add in the cost of parking.
Do Lyft/Uber not operate with cars as well?
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I completely disagree about the reusability of time. I live in Boston and my commute on the train is only about 20 minutes, but that's plenty of time to read a few pages or catch up on the news. I see plenty of commuters reading books as well, so I'm definitely not a special case. Reading a book while standing on a crowded train is not that hard...
> Reading a book while standing on a crowded train is not that hard... I can read a book or a newspaper while in a tramway or a bus only if I'm standing up, otherwise I get car sickness. I very rarely choose to sit down when using public transport for exactly this reason (strangely enough I can read while sitting down when riding the train).
It's particularly bad in the top of double decker buses, can't read there but still like to got there for the extra space and the view.
The true solution to LA traffic will never happen. And that solution is buses. But not the current underfunded system that barely limps along. A massive number of buses, like 5x the current number. And combined with tolls for cars to get cars off the road. The large number of buses is critical because it greatly reduces wait time between transfers. It also allows adding express bus lines between major areas. But buse…
I'm not convinced. I live in Berlin and hardly ever have to take the bus to get anywhere. In the city center, there is usually a subway or S-Bahn station within 500m.
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> Because they're not paying for the cost of the road capacity they're using. Suppose it costs $3000/month for an apartment near where you work, because supply is constrained by bad zoning regulations etc. If it costs $1500/month + $400/month travel expenses to live an hour's drive away, lots of people will do that instead. If you add $1100/month to the cost of driving to discourage that, all that happens is that the…
If you add $1100/month to the cost of driving to discourage that, all that happens is that the $3000/month apartment goes up to $4000/month because you've increased demand for closer housing but not supply. That's not all that happens. You also see an increase in the population living close to work (even without zoning changes, you'll have more people living in the same set of units) and employees demanding higher wa…
> You also see an increase in the population living close to work (even without zoning changes, you'll have more people living in the same set of units)
Everyone gets squeezed into a tin can in probable violation of zoning and fire codes, when instead we could build nice new housing for everyone.
> employees demanding higher wages for working in inaccessible parts of town
Which some of them would get but it would only go directly to rent. Which prices the existing occupants without higher wages out of the space, and makes high housing costs even stickier because landlords never like to see rent decrease and now have more incentive and resources to fight against it.
> companies responding by moving offices to places where they can get cheaper workers (i.e., places which are more accessible).
Another way of saying less density and more sprawl.
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New York's public transit commuters have some of the worst commute times in the country, at 7.5-11 hours/week (45 minutes each way on the low end). For LA's drivers, even 37 minutes is pretty bad. [1] Public transit mitigates the environmental and public safety effects of traffic, but the "wasting your life in a slow-moving vehicle" problem is much worse with public transit (even rail). And no, that time is not reusa…
I'm going to have to disagree with the "wasting your life in a slow-moving vehicle" comment. I'd rather spend an hour and a half on a bus to work where I can take calls and work from my laptop/read a book/nap or whatever, than spend 45 minutes sitting in and/or dodging traffic where I am getting NOTHING done. Granted, if the bus is packed it can be difficult or impossible to get anything useful done also.
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New York's public transit commuters have some of the worst commute times in the country, at 7.5-11 hours/week (45 minutes each way on the low end). For LA's drivers, even 37 minutes is pretty bad. [1] Public transit mitigates the environmental and public safety effects of traffic, but the "wasting your life in a slow-moving vehicle" problem is much worse with public transit (even rail). And no, that time is not reusa…
I completely disagree about the reusability of time. I live in Boston and my commute on the train is only about 20 minutes, but that's plenty of time to read a few pages or catch up on the news. I see plenty of commuters reading books as well, so I'm definitely not a special case. Reading a book while standing on a crowded train is not that hard...