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Cars took over because the legal system helped squeezed out alternatives

theatlantic.com

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Re: Cars took over because the legal system helped squeezed out alternatives

#11

Post by leecb »

dredmorbius wrote: post #2

Corollary: the biggest impacts to energy consumption lie in land use and building code changes, secondarily in consumption habits. See LLNL's 2018 energy flow chart: https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/content/assets/images/energy/us/... (PDF: https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/content/assets/docs/2018_United-... ) Of 101 quads, 28 go to transport. Industrial use. is dominated by relatively clean natural gas (methane), with a large…

Flow chart is really cool!

I wonder what the biomass used for transportation is?

Re: Cars took over because the legal system helped squeezed out alternatives

#12

Post by dalbasal »

Another way of stating this could be "transport is a policy question." How cities are built and what transport infrastructure they're built around.

Im fairly sympathetic to the overall aims of this article. I think a transport system more similar to those in the Netherlands makes for better urban landscapes.

But... this habitual style of treating everything as a conspiracy, built around a personified enemy ("They gave legal force to a mind-set—let’s call it automobile supremacy—that kills 40,000 Americans a year)... this way of thinking isn't doing us any favours.

In day-to-day political conversations and articles, it's mostly just formulaic and lazy. Name the conspiracy, point to vested interests that have been influencing policy, find a link to established personifications of evil.. big oil and segregation, in this case.

I'm not saying we should never think in abstractions... but there is a formulaic pattern here that's old, paranoid and harmful.

Re: Cars took over because the legal system helped squeezed out alternatives

#13

Post by dtech »

leecb wrote: post #11
dredmorbius wrote: post #2

Corollary: the biggest impacts to energy consumption lie in land use and building code changes, secondarily in consumption habits. See LLNL's 2018 energy flow chart: https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/content/assets/images/energy/us/... (PDF: https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/content/assets/docs/2018_United-... ) Of 101 quads, 28 go to transport. Industrial use. is dominated by relatively clean natural gas (methane), with a large…

Flow chart is really cool! I wonder what the biomass used for transportation is?

Ethanol produced from biomass mixed into gasoline or diesel.

Re: Cars took over because the legal system helped squeezed out alternatives

#14

Post by inflatableDodo »

devoply wrote: post #4

Not just the legal system but also the city planners who designed all sorts of things like suburbs, malls, etc. that favour cars and are pretty much copy-pasta all over each city on the whole continent. All these people want bike lanes, I want my horse lane.

I want the majority of the road network roofed with turf into a long hill with occaisional exits, or lowered and moved completely underground.

Re: Cars took over because the legal system helped squeezed out alternatives

#15

Post by mkagenius »

devoply wrote: post #4

Not just the legal system but also the city planners who designed all sorts of things like suburbs, malls, etc. that favour cars and are pretty much copy-pasta all over each city on the whole continent. All these people want bike lanes, I want my horse lane.

Atleast things were "planned" in the US.

In my country (India), there is hardly any planning -- empty land == lets buy and build a building. No regulation even on buying cars, keep on piling and spend an hour or two for a 8 KM ride home from your office.

There is no incentive to use public transport. There is no special lanes for public transport. No one follows the "lane rules" either. They(us) got enough money to buy a car but no sense on how to use them properly.

And note that cars much costlier in India if you consider PPP. Its horrible.

Re: Cars took over because the legal system helped squeezed out alternatives

#16

Post by raquo »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #7
dredmorbius wrote: post #2

Corollary: the biggest impacts to energy consumption lie in land use and building code changes, secondarily in consumption habits. See LLNL's 2018 energy flow chart: https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/content/assets/images/energy/us/... (PDF: https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/content/assets/docs/2018_United-... ) Of 101 quads, 28 go to transport. Industrial use. is dominated by relatively clean natural gas (methane), with a large…

It doesn't seem quite the same, but your comment strongly reminded me of https://www.econlib.org/an-epic-example-of-wealth-destructio... .

That article comes so close to defeating its own argument it's painful. If that land wasn't protected with zoning, it would have been built up long ago into a typical sprawling suburbia – the opposite of what they propose. So if it had been unprotected in the past, that would have been bad. And if it stays protected that's bad because it's underused.

It is only this short sliver of time that is today that this land should be developed into their dream city. That will somehow miraculously withstand the test of time.

No, it won't, that's just greed and narcissism – thinking that we're so special today that we deserve to have that land unprotected for us but doing that for either future or past generations is a mistake.

Re: Cars took over because the legal system helped squeezed out alternatives

#17

Post by kd5bjo »

devoply wrote: post #4

Not just the legal system but also the city planners who designed all sorts of things like suburbs, malls, etc. that favour cars and are pretty much copy-pasta all over each city on the whole continent. All these people want bike lanes, I want my horse lane.

Suburbs, sure, but do malls really favor cars? Where I grew up, the mall was the only place where people would walk from one store to another instead of driving. I’ve also been in plenty of urban malls that have excellent public transit connections and are situated on busy pedestrian streets.

Re: Cars took over because the legal system helped squeezed out alternatives

#19

Post by bsimpson »

BLKNSLVR wrote: post #10
nerdponx wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's not forget that, at least in the case of New York, mass transit was deliberately pushed out, in pursuit of some kind of elitist pipe dream. The more I read about Robert Moses, the less respect I have for his legacy.

Your comment makes me think of the premise behind Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Judge Doom: Several months ago I had the good providence to stumble upon this plan of the city council's. A construction plan of epic proportions. They're calling it a freeway. Eddie Valiant: Freeway? What the hell's a freeway? Judge Doom: Eight lanes of shimmering cement running from here to Pasadena. Smooth, safe, fast. Traffic jams will be…

Today, San Francisco only has trains along Market Street, fingering out into a half dozen neighborhoods. Most of the city is served by buses. Originally, many of those buses were, in fact, trains:

> ...as SF's rail network was removed or replaced with bus lines in the mid-century, it went from 16 rail lines to five...

The reason we still have the trains we do is because they were the lines that used tunnels, so they couldn't easily be replaced by buses.

The World's Fair, which also brought us the Palace of Fine Arts, spurred the construction of many of those train routes. You used to be able to get to the Presidio by train! Imagine if, instead of spending effort digging up the tracks to replace them with buses, they buried the tracks and built an actual metro system: you could get around the city without a vehicle.

https://www.sfmta.com/blog/how-munis-streetcar-lines-got-the...

Re: Cars took over because the legal system helped squeezed out alternatives

#20

Post by Tade0 »

achow wrote: post #18

This was a revelation. ...Even so, 85 to 90 percent of toxic vehicle emissions in traffic come from tire wear and other non-tailpipe sources,... So electric cars will mitigate only 10-15% of the environmental problems of the ICE cars?

Yes and no. These sources generate rather large particles (PM10) which, as opposed to PM2.5, don't get to the bloodstream through the lungs.
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