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Interchange in Houston is the same size as an entire city center in Italy

texasmonthly.com

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Re: Interchange in Houston is the same size as an entire city center in Italy

#471

Post by LoSboccacc »

ramshorns wrote: post #462
LoSboccacc wrote: post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> still works perfectly fine nowadays. Rome is all but working perfectly fine, with commuter traffic locked almost daily by the tiniest fender bender happening on the highway around it Venice is likewise a mess, situation was so bas they built an highway to go around the existing highway that corrected it to the nearby areas, and the lack of easy mobility in the city center is fuelling a severe living cost inflation

That sounds like a car problem, not a problem with cities built for foot traffic.

and how are you supposed to go to work on foot? neither the job nor the house market is flexible enough, especially now that airbnb 'disrupted' traditional renting in touristic cities.

Re: Interchange in Houston is the same size as an entire city center in Italy

#472

Post by jacobkania »

jariel wrote: post #466
Dylan16807 wrote: post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Wait until Trump supporters lock down traffic in LA all day because they legitimately believe the 'election was stolen'. Good for them? That's a valid protest. You don't have to stay out of the way in the free speech zone. (Not to say that separation is never appropriate, but not most of the time.)

"That's a valid protest." It's valid to protest things which are not true? So we can block traffic in LA to raise awareness that 'Aliens are coming'? No - absolutely not. Your arbitrary definition of what you consider to be a 'valid protest' is not relevant. You 100% do not have the right to block highways under any circumstances. Full stop. You can of course, block highways if you use force to do it, i.e. by amassin…

I firmly believe that if you have enough people who think it’s important enough to block traffic to make a point — if their belief is that aliens are coming to destroy earth — they’re allowed to do that. Sure, it’s illegal, but they’ll do it anyways. I think it’s unlikely that so many people will come together to block traffic, but if it’s so important to them, then I’m all for it. They’ll definitely get to make their argument to the news and American people, who get to decide if their point is valid or not. But that’s the point of free speech.

Re: Interchange in Houston is the same size as an entire city center in Italy

#473

Post by ashtonkem »

RangerScience wrote: post #231
tuna-piano wrote: post #55

It's interesting that protests generally happen in dense parts of cities. Now imagine a city without a dense part - protesting becomes more difficult. Myanmar's non-democratic military government actually moved their capital from a dense city to a new city so spread out and with no downtown area - potentially to prevent the ability to protest the government. https://www.independent.co.uk/travel/inside-burma-s-ghost-t…

IMO this is part of why why protests started marching down freeways. In LA, if you protest by marching down basically any freeway, you snarl up that freeway (and likely more) for tens of miles, at least (AFAIK). (the 101 between hollywood and DTLA is essentially a single thing, the 10 between DTLA and West Side, the 405 from culver city up to over the pass in sherman oaks...) AKA, the "center" isn't geographic, but..…

The transit system in Los Angeles is always so close to the edge, it doesn’t take a huge push for rush hour to turn into total gridlock.

Assuming that’s their goal, which seems probable, it’s not clear if that strategy would be reproducible in say, Ohio.

Re: Interchange in Houston is the same size as an entire city center in Italy

#474

Post by ashtonkem »

austincheney wrote: post #446
CydeWeys wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It also gives a great sense of your own power (which is very important to protest movements) in marching along and shutting down a freeway, which you could never in any other situation just calmly walk down the middle of. Critical Mass is invigorating for the same reasons.

As a commuter nothing would turn me against the protestors goals faster than clogging a freeway. I have a long and frustrating commute and the idea of that commute becoming a multi hour trapped parking adventure after a long day doing a job that is agonizingly depressing is quite souring. The experience is so decidedly wonderful that if, for example, the protest were a Black Lives Matter movement I would change from…

Protests aren’t supposed to be convenient for the uninvolved. They’re literally designed to force you to pay attention.

Re: Interchange in Houston is the same size as an entire city center in Italy

#475

Post by ashtonkem »

ucarion wrote: post #110
adolph wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Some of Haussmann's critics said that the real purpose of Haussmann's boulevards was to make it easier for the army to maneuver and suppress armed uprisings; Paris had experienced six such uprisings between 1830 and 1848, all in the narrow, crowded streets in the center and east of Paris and on the left bank around the Pantheon. These critics argued that a small number of large, open intersections allowed easy contr…

This is pretty widely thrown around, but it should be noted that the central purpose of Haussmannization was public health and beautification: tearing down the slums, building proper infrastructure like sewers and aqueducts, and pretty parks and streets. The article you link to emphasizes this. The wide boulevards did very little to prevent the Paris Commune, for instance. Napoleon III just wanted to build a second R…

The Paris commune was tripped off by a political failure, a war lost in a single battle, and the siege of Paris by the Germans followed by mass starvation. I doubt that any city design could possibly have stopped the commune from happening.

Re: Interchange in Houston is the same size as an entire city center in Italy

#477

Post by nostrebored »

rtkwe wrote: post #318
matthewowen wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The displacement effect of gentrification is potentially overstated: https://www.philadelphiafed.org/-/media/community-developmen... is an interesting study. In that case, vulnerable populations in gentrifying neighborhoods were no more likely to leave than equivalent populations in non-gentrifying neighborhoods. For me, the obvious mechanism is that, well, it's true that people who leave may often blame gentrificati…

Seems like the way to disentangle the two is to look a the people replacing those that move out. If they're roughly the same economically then it's the churn of being a poor person in a capitalist society if the income is going up particularly if it's a sharp increase and rents are rising then it's gentrification.

This is a restatement of the point you're replying to.

The question is which of these is worse for the people living in the area.

Re: Interchange in Houston is the same size as an entire city center in Italy

#478

Post by austincheney »

conro1108 wrote: post #459
austincheney wrote: post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a commuter nothing would turn me against the protestors goals faster than clogging a freeway. I have a long and frustrating commute and the idea of that commute becoming a multi hour trapped parking adventure after a long day doing a job that is agonizingly depressing is quite souring. The experience is so decidedly wonderful that if, for example, the protest were a Black Lives Matter movement I would change from…

If interrupting your commute is enough to turn you to "complete opposition in every objective they promote," I have a hard time believing you were ever a whole-hearted supporter.

That sounds like a problem with empathy.

Re: Interchange in Houston is the same size as an entire city center in Italy

#479

Post by austincheney »

ashtonkem wrote: post #474
austincheney wrote: post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a commuter nothing would turn me against the protestors goals faster than clogging a freeway. I have a long and frustrating commute and the idea of that commute becoming a multi hour trapped parking adventure after a long day doing a job that is agonizingly depressing is quite souring. The experience is so decidedly wonderful that if, for example, the protest were a Black Lives Matter movement I would change from…

Protests aren’t supposed to be convenient for the uninvolved. They’re literally designed to force you to pay attention.

I read that as designed for angst and animosity not influence, because the intention completely disparages the audience.
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