Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Attack of the Fifty-Foot NIMBYs

i.stanford.edu

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 95 posts

Re: Attack of the Fifty-Foot NIMBYs

#81

Post by Spooky23 »

guylhem wrote: post #4
guylhem wrote: post #3

Excellent analysis of the situation - very interesting and could be with other consequences and applications, whenever the minority can be the one to both benefit on, propose, and vote on a change that the majority will have to bear and pay - all the while using a false pretense like safety. The proposed solution to study the consequences could also be returned and simplified - to mesure the impact of the proposed ch…

Wow that's luck - just when I was browsing around I found the perfect analysis on overcoming bias : senior voters and their healtcare - paid for by the majority, but since seniors vote more, they favour the candidate serving their interest - at the expanse of the majority http://www.overcomingbias.com/2012/09/us-politics-of-medicin... Very interesting indeed- it seems to be the simplest pitfall of democracy : when th…

You're really off base in that assessment. The original case for Medicare was driven by the realities of life in the 50's and early sixties when medicine started advancing.

Middle class people found themselves in situations where they were forced to make choices that were either morally questionable or difficult to bear. What do you do when your parents lose their faculties and require care?

Before Medicare and Medicaid, you had three basic choices: pay for nursing care at great expense and impact you ability to provide for your kids, care for them yourself to the degree that you can (ie, cramming the kids into one bedroom and doing what you can, probably destroying your marriage in the process), or essentially discard them and allow them to die, which is morally reprehensible and hard in the soul.

Forget about the bunkum of modern politics. Do you think it is ethically or morally sound to cut off access to healthcare to the elderly? Should my father die of congestive heart failure because my family doesn't have $30k for a cardiac stent?

In my opinion, the answer is no. Society as a whole should provide some rational level of quality health care to all.

Re: Attack of the Fifty-Foot NIMBYs

#82

Post by natrius »

jamieb wrote: post #56
balloot wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perfect example of NIMBY-ism. You bought a house at the bottom of a hill. You got a price that likely had this negative quality priced in, because cars drive fast downhill. Now, you act like people just started driving fast downhill in the last few years, and that this problem needs to be resolved immediately to suit you.

Well I guess I explained the history too briefly. Our neighbors don't drive down the hill too fast. Unfortunately, the new gated community that was built recently has a primary exit at the top of our street. The fastest way for these SUV drivers to get to the freeway is through our neighborhood. Our street is no longer a dead-end for our neighbors. Its now the primary traffic route for an entire community. So I'm "ac…

For what it's worth, your complaint seems legitimate to me. However, if there are only two routes to get to a freeway, that sounds like poor urban design to begin with. Street connectivity is a virtue, and suburbs are designed to avoid it at all costs. You want fewer routes to the freeway to fix your problem, but having more routes would probably be the optimal solution to balance both your street's interests and your city's. Given your description of the neighborhood, I'm guessing that's not even possible anymore.

Anyway, take a video of people barreling down the hill and send it to a city council member. Newspapers also like this sort of thing when it's egregious enough.

Re: Attack of the Fifty-Foot NIMBYs

#83

Post by mahyarm »

luser001 wrote: post #35

I actually support "vicious" speedbumps. People regularly drive 40 mph on my road which has official speed limit of 25 mph. Instead of spending money policing main streets, I support draconian camera-driven enforcement on side streets. Make unmarked google-maps-like cars with high quality cameras and software. Park it on streets and watch for traffic. Send tickets remotely to speeders (equivalent to running a red lig…

I can do 25mph on my road bike on a flat road for 10 minutes, and i'm not that good of a cyclist. 25 mph is way too slow for city speed limits and nobody drives it as a result. The minimum standard should be 30mph. In Canada the standard city speed limit is 50km/h, which converts to about 31mph. I find in Canada that people tend to follow the 50km/h speed limit far more readily. Nobody really follows the 25mph limit in the USA.

Since people like even numbers, the standard speed limit in america should be 30mph, not 25mph.

Re: Attack of the Fifty-Foot NIMBYs

#84

Post by mahyarm »

luser001 wrote: post #54
EricDeb wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I will only support this when we are all required to use self-driven cars that can go twice the normal speed limit safely :)

Not going to happen imho: how will a self-driving car change the fact that stopping distance increases with speed? Consideration for (unexpected) pedestrians (children etc) and cyclists seems to the primary motivation for low speed limits on residential side streets. I think that makes sense.

Better brakes. A porsche boxster will stop a lot sooner than your same weight honda civic.

Re: Attack of the Fifty-Foot NIMBYs

#85

Post by jdietrich »

aes256 wrote: post #45
michaelochurch wrote: post #29

High house prices are a moral and economic disaster, as the post-2008 recession has shown us. The problem at the root of NIMBY is that real estate prices and behaviors have a few positive-feedback loops: 1. Because real estate "always goes up", and because Americans are delusional in general and seem to have a housing fetish, people have the deluded belief that they aren't paying for housing but investing in somethin…

> The end result of all this is that NIMBYism creates scarcity (due to transportation inefficiency and by retarding new development) that makes houses expensive, and that causes people to be economically extremely sensitive to real estate changes (which are out of their control) which causes more NIMBYism. It's also yet another generational fuck-over of which we're on the losing side, the assholes pulled the ladder u…

It is an amazingly intractable catch-22 - if the government increase housing supply then a whole generation who are just about to retire lose almost all of their wealth; If they don't increase supply, a whole generation are unable to afford a home in which to raise a family. Whatever happens, it is almost inevitable that hundreds of billions of pounds will be funneled towards the baby boomers from the young or the yet-unborn.

You know things are seriously broken when a senior Tory minister writes a book entitled "The Pinch: How the Baby Boomers Took Their Children's Future – And Why They Should Give It Back.".

Re: Attack of the Fifty-Foot NIMBYs

#86

Post by eli_gottlieb »

forensic wrote: post #49
Anechoic wrote: post #30

I've been on both sides of public project hearings, representing proponents who want to build or expand a project, and project opponents who want to block or reduce the expansion of a project. NIMBYism is very real, from folks who may just oppose a project on principle unrelated to actual negative effects (I see this a lot on transit projects from folks who are just opposed to public transportation) to folks who may…

Thanks for your comment. One thing I take away from what you said is that the solution to problems like this is BETTER government, not ZERO government. All the libertarians want to use any government problem as an excuse to just scrap the whole government. But you make it clear that the problem is not ALL government, the problem is BAD government, and government CAN be improved.

There is no way to get zero government for urban issues. Urban living naturally means an overlap between private property rights, public commons, and governmental infrastructure efforts.

The question is whether you have a democratically-run municipal or regional/county government with the power to make urban-planning decisions, or whether you instead resolve everything through a tangled network of property-rights lawsuits.

Re: Attack of the Fifty-Foot NIMBYs

#87

Post by eli_gottlieb »

jdietrich wrote: post #85
aes256 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The end result of all this is that NIMBYism creates scarcity (due to transportation inefficiency and by retarding new development) that makes houses expensive, and that causes people to be economically extremely sensitive to real estate changes (which are out of their control) which causes more NIMBYism. It's also yet another generational fuck-over of which we're on the losing side, the assholes pulled the ladder u…

It is an amazingly intractable catch-22 - if the government increase housing supply then a whole generation who are just about to retire lose almost all of their wealth; If they don't increase supply, a whole generation are unable to afford a home in which to raise a family. Whatever happens, it is almost inevitable that hundreds of billions of pounds will be funneled towards the baby boomers from the young or the ye…

No, the solution sounds obvious to me: build more housing stock. Otherwise, the established real-estate values of the Baby Boom owners can never be realized as sales. A commodity that's too pricey won't sell, and the prospective seller will go broke. Only way is to lower the prices.

Re: Attack of the Fifty-Foot NIMBYs

#88

Post by JoeAltmaier »

TDL wrote: post #36
luser001 wrote: post #35

I actually support "vicious" speedbumps. People regularly drive 40 mph on my road which has official speed limit of 25 mph. Instead of spending money policing main streets, I support draconian camera-driven enforcement on side streets. Make unmarked google-maps-like cars with high quality cameras and software. Park it on streets and watch for traffic. Send tickets remotely to speeders (equivalent to running a red lig…

Speed bumps are great up until you need an ambulance or fire truck to get to you quickly.

You can ramp normal speed bumps pretty easily. Hit them at 35-40 and bah-bump you're over them.

So its only the 'vicious' ones that have any effect at all.

Re: Attack of the Fifty-Foot NIMBYs

#89

Post by eli_gottlieb »

chris_wot wrote: post #64
guylhem wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow that's luck - just when I was browsing around I found the perfect analysis on overcoming bias : senior voters and their healtcare - paid for by the majority, but since seniors vote more, they favour the candidate serving their interest - at the expanse of the majority http://www.overcomingbias.com/2012/09/us-politics-of-medicin... Very interesting indeed- it seems to be the simplest pitfall of democracy : when th…

In Australia, this isn't such a problem. Voting is mandatory. I'll now await to hear the almost universal condemnation or be downvoted by American participants...

Of course, in Australia you can cast a null ballot. Given that, I quite like the Australian system.

Re: Attack of the Fifty-Foot NIMBYs

#90

Post by JoeAltmaier »

jawns wrote: post #2

Also frustrating is when a local municipality lowers the speed limit on a section of highway that runs through it to produce a speed trap, as a way of generating revenue.

I've wondered if having dendritic, branching neighborhood streets would stop the issue. Main highways would be bigger; all roads leading to neighborhoods would end in cul-de-sac. Only residents and visitors would ever drive into neighborhoods.

Its a minima of road-per-house, thus a minima of cost. More greenspace, quieter neighborhoods.

This American habit of gridding roads everywhere has a huge impact on quality-of-life, costs a bundle, and stems from what? Some surveyors' sense of symmetry?

Post reply on HN