Elon Musk is boring a tunnel to skirt gridlock

Elon Musk is boring a tunnel to skirt gridlock
bloomberg.com

Not that I don't get what he's saying, and I do get that existing and well proven systems aren't sexy, but I feel like either of those is going to be an easier sell, and a much faster implementation, than an underground system. There's infrastructure down there! That's what "infra" means. Easier not to have to work around that, if you can.

>The social and physical construction of suburban America really was quite complex. It was a very elaborate system, and clearly a massive social engineering project that has changed US society enormously. [27] Incidentally, I don’t have a personal objection to suburbs, in fact I live in one, but suburbanization is a different question. [28] It starts back in the 1940s with a literal conspiracy. I mean a conspiracy that went to court. The conspirators got a minor pat on the wrist however.

>They were General Motors, Standard Oil of California and, I think, Firestone Rubber. The origins of suburbia reveal an attempt to take over a fairly efficient mass-transportation system in parts of California — the electric railways in Los Angeles and the like — and destroy them so as to shift energy use to fossil fuels and increase consumer demand for rubber, automobiles and trucks and so on. [29] It was a literal conspiracy. It went to court. The courts fined the corporations $5000, or something like that, probably equivalent to the cost of their victory dinner.[30]

>But what happened in California started a process that then expanded — and in many ways. It included the interstate highway system. That was presented as part of the defense against the Russians. It was launched under the Interstate Defense Highway Act of 1956, and was intended to facilitate the movement of people and goods, troops and arms, and, allegedly, to prevent overpopulation in specific areas that could become the focus of nuclear attack. [31] The slogan of defense is the standard way of inducing the taxpayer to pay the cost of the next stage of the hi-tech economy of course.[32] That’s true whether it be computers, the Internet or, as in this case, a car-based transportation system.[33]

>From the late 1940s, into and through the 50s, there developed a complex interaction between federal government, state and local government, real-estate interests, commercial interests and court decisions, which had the effect of undermining the mass transit system across the country. It was pretty efficient in certain areas. If you go back a century ago for example, it was possible to travel all around New England on electric railways. The first chapter of E. L. Doctorow’s Ragtime documents it.[34] Subsequently, we saw the elimination of the mass transport system in favor of fossil fuel use, automobiles, roads and airplanes, which are also an offshoot of federal government.

https://chomsky.info/20131001/

And as we leave fossil fuels behind, the incentives will realign around what some forward-looking people (and a few contrary oafs like me, too) are already doing - that is, using public transit for the bulk of daily travel, and keeping a car or using hire cars only on those occasions when public transit isn't well suited to a need for heavy haulage, or close timing, or the like.

And, honestly, I can't wait. I'm really sick and tired of people, in some cases colleagues, assuming that because I take the light rail, I must be impoverished, or barred from driving for medical or other reasons, or possessed of an unusually high tolerance of danger, or whatever.

Not that they're not well-meaning, and I do appreciate them looking out - but I find it an irritating set of assumptions to overcome, especially when it takes a solid year to get it through people's heads that yes I commute as I do by choice and preference and no I do not need anyone to organize any car pools and yes I own a car and no I'm not suffering some kind of privation that forces me to take the train every day.

Ironically, what really put it over was an offhand joke I made during one of these conversations, to the effect that it saves on gym membership because, when your commute involves three miles on foot, every day is leg day. Why it should be that that'd get the point across and put an end to the questions, I've no idea, but it works, so I'll take it. It'll be nice to see the use of public transit normalized a bit, among professionals, if only to make one a little less odd-man-out to use it.