231–240 of 324 posts
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Doesn't help that drivers act incredibly entitled to the road and view pedestrians and bicycles as obstacles.
Otoh, drivets are also the ones taking the traffic regulations most seriously. Pedestrians are inclined to jaywalk, and that’s pretty much it, but don’t get me started on bicycles…
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Time is money. He is saving about 5 hours each round trip. If his time is worth $50/hour, then $8000 for car ownership gets him 32 trips. Add a few more to account for the cost of rail ticket prices. He breaks even if he takes that trip about 3 times per month and never finds any other use for a car.
> Time is money. Consider that this way: the time you spend sitting at a desk to earn the money to pay for your car is commute time. How long does it take the average person to earn 8-9k (after tax)? I think at $50/h that might be an additional 5 hours work per week or an extra hour on your daily commute. For many people it might be more like 2+ hours. Given this, I would be very surprised if most urban dwellers woul…
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Uber has a lot of negative press, but if there's one way for them to turn all of that around, it's to pander to the older generation and to provide senior citizens either heavily subsidised or a subscription-based system. They won't do it because it'll hit their bottom line, but being the ride option of both the young AND the old would go a long way towards repairing their reputation.
More importantly, old people actually vote in local elections.
Regardless of their "political" power, it'd just be a nice thing to do. Getting old sucks, and if Uber could do something as simple as making sure that an older person doesn't have to sacrifice their freedom then it's something a lot of people would get behind.
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That's extreme. I have a car in NYC. The subway system here is amazing, while also being an embarrassment. But, the car provides the freedom to visit friends and family for a day or weekend. The cost is $200 per month parking and $150 per month insurance, plus the cost of the car, which is relatively low as we drive less than 500 miles per month. We can visit family in 45 minutes or 2 hours (depending on destination)…
When I lived in Sydney I found that my car was sitting idle for the majority of the time. I did the sums and even with free parking at my apartment, it would have been cheaper for me to just rent a car for the days that I needed it (like a weekend trip, a shopping trip to the suburbs/ikea, etc) than to own it outright. I had coworkers that did that any it was fine. If you look at it financially, you owning a car is t…
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I, and several of my friends when I used to live in Phoenix, were big walkers. Its evening? go for a walk around the neighborhood. Walk to work, even though it was like 1.5 miles...just...walk. Each of us were stopped at least once by police for being suspicious...near as I can tell (we were all >middle class white people) all that was suspicious was us walking on sidewalks. Outside of the biggest cities America is a…
Disagree with the antagonism, though my sample is of course very small. Coming from North Europe, where it's fairly natural to walk distances of a few hundred meters to do an errand, I and colleagues used to walk from a hotel in Rohnert Park to a Wal-mart on the other side of highway 101, whenever visiting the place and needing to do some shopping. And each time there were people driving by who would stop at us and a…
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> Time is money. Consider that this way: the time you spend sitting at a desk to earn the money to pay for your car is commute time. How long does it take the average person to earn 8-9k (after tax)? I think at $50/h that might be an additional 5 hours work per week or an extra hour on your daily commute. For many people it might be more like 2+ hours. Given this, I would be very surprised if most urban dwellers woul…
Most people don't have the freedom to choose to work however much or little they want. The time you spend at a desk is more or less fixed.
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Given the difficulty and expense associated with going to Japan, perhaps you could describe it to us here using words.
I live in Japan and actually live in rural enough area that there is no train. Well, there was a train until 1968 when the bus company convinced the fishermen that the reduced fish stocks were due to the train scaring away the fish (not over fishing, of course!). Now there are no fish and no train :-( Before I extol the virtues of the train system in Japan, there is one thing that you have to understand first. It is…
You should try one in the Western Japan. My daily commute on Hankyu line during rush hour is generally 2-3 minutes late every day that I usually plan for it to be late. And JR West is not faring very better either. But we do look at our watches, the departure board, and back at our watches in disbelief, yes.
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It's hard for a non-American to appreciate just how different their urban environments are compared to the US, and vice versa. It was certainly a shock to me when I first arrived to the USA... "Why is everything so far away? Why does every building have a bunch of empty space around it? (i.e. mandated setbacks)" etc. The lack of real cities is probably my least favorite thing about the USA.
The USA is so big and diverse it's silly to say that the it doesn't have any "real cities". I suspect New York City, Seattle, Chicago, Boston, Portland and others would be proof otherwise.
Comparing Seattle's transit system to, say, Munich's (where I currently live) is a sick joke. Munich is far more walkable and bikable, too. Of course, a big part of this is that a majority of the land in Seattle is zoned exclusively for, you guessed it, nothing but detached single-family homes.
As an example, I sometimes visit smaller cities (< 50k) here, and even then they still are highly walkable, moderately dense, and they usually have pretty good transit connections to other places.
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Saftey in this case doesn't refer to the risk of dying in a crash, but rather the risk of being mugged/robbed or even just harassed.
It's very convenient to exclude everything from the definition that doesn't support your argument.
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Doesn't help that drivers act incredibly entitled to the road and view pedestrians and bicycles as obstacles.
Otoh, drivets are also the ones taking the traffic regulations most seriously. Pedestrians are inclined to jaywalk, and that’s pretty much it, but don’t get me started on bicycles…