121–130 of 310 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Companies with an "eco" or "humanitarian" angle are rly just selling newfangled Catholic indulgences.
Except they might also actually be helping some people, or improving the environment, even if its very inefficient.
Public transportation looks awfully like a dead end in that light. If you don't have to park and drive them, cars are better in nearly every way.
But that type of analysis ignores the obvious fact that most parking is built to support peak times. Most mall parking lots sit mostly empty, except on the weekends when everyone goes to the mall or restaurants or whatever. Corporate lots sit empty on the weekends.
Cut any of these lots by 25% and you cause real problems.
You could apply the same analysis to home occupancy and conclude that since most homes are sitting empty for 8 hrs a day, we could/should reduce the number of homes by 25% and be none the wiser.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The reason that everything is so not integrated is because of the American culture of containment. You have very very different kinds of people living in close physical proximity who often want nothing to do with each other. Think East Palo Alto and Palo Alto for example, especially in the 90s when East Palo Alto had the highest murder rate per capita in the U.S. Nowadays, physical proximity means less and less. Rela…
“You have very very different kinds of people living in close physical proximity who often want nothing to do with each other.” Knowing that the US is probably one of the most segregated countries, this makes me smile :-)
I always thought it was weird how there is so much parking in the centre of US cities. When I talk to colleagues in various US cities and they say they drive to work it just Does. Not. Compute . In central London, driving to work is essentially unheard of unless you are the Prime Minister. There is parking available in London, but the prices are fairly high - I just had a quick look on parkopedia [1] and it looks lik…
> When I talk to colleagues in various US cities and they say they drive to work it just Does. Not. Compute. In central London, driving to work is essentially unheard of unless you are the Prime Minister. I get this as well. I hear Americans talk about driving into town for work being hard, and they're literally talking about somewhere like San Francisco, and I think why on earth would you even think that was a reaso…
I'm quite familiar with going into Boston from the exurbs, in part because I commuted semi-regularly for about a year.
I do often take the commuter rail if I'm going in 9-5ish and can always get a seat because I'm near the end of the line but...
1.) It's not cheap, it's about $30/day between the train, parking, and the subway on the other end.
2.) It tends to take longer.
3.) The real kicker is that I have very little flexibility on the other end. There's basically one train mid-afternoon I can catch, a number at evening rush hour (which can be very crowded), and a few later.
4.) So basically if I have an evening event or just need to go in for the morning I drive, even if just to the subway parking though that fills up extremely early so I need to leave by 5:50-6am or so.
This article tries to make the (weak) point that there is plenty of parking simply because averages show they spots sit empty most of the time. But that type of analysis ignores the obvious fact that most parking is built to support peak times. Most mall parking lots sit mostly empty, except on the weekends when everyone goes to the mall or restaurants or whatever. Corporate lots sit empty on the weekends. Cut any of…
The word, that not enough technical and non-technical people know, that describes this issue is ergodicty:
> an ergodic dynamical system is one that, broadly speaking, has the same behavior averaged over time as averaged over the space of all the system's states in its phase space.
I visited the US (particularly the bay area) for the first time recently, and I was baffled by the sparsity of buildings. Suburbs and shopping areas are so far away that you need a car to go anywhere, and in turn you need massive expanses to held all those vehicles, which means that stores are even more spread apart, which essentially becomes a snowball. Being used to high density housing and underground parking spac…
America has plenty of cities that are just like cities everywhere else...we're a big country, we hardly have need to pack everyone in like sardines. I live in a major city, downtown. And I'm starting to hate it. No personal space, no yard, shared (or no) garage, and I'm a car enthusiast by the way, which I'm sure is practically a dirty word around most city-dwellers now. I'm seriously considering moving out to the su…
As to your situation, it sounds like it's just not a good fit for your lifestyle. No one is saying that there's not pros / cons or that dense urban living is for everyone. If you want to grow all your own food and raise horses, NYC probably isn't going to be a great fit for you. Ditto if you want a garage full of cars that you work on and take out for leisurely drives all the time.
The issue in America isn't that everyone needs to be forced to live in high-density urban areas. It's that we've spent decades enacting bad policies that heavily discourage urban density while encouraging and subsidizing suburban sprawl. And it turns out that suburban sprawl is bad for the majority of people, and carries huge externalities that we're discovering we can't really afford, but it'll take many decades to reverse the damage we've done.
What makes it more difficult is that there's a lot of cultural value in America (some of it natural, some of it driven by anti-density propaganda) around being positive towards cars, driving, having lots of huge personal space, etc. And negative perceptions of density, public transit, etc.
Not an expert, that's just my read on the situation :)
This article tries to make the (weak) point that there is plenty of parking simply because averages show they spots sit empty most of the time. But that type of analysis ignores the obvious fact that most parking is built to support peak times. Most mall parking lots sit mostly empty, except on the weekends when everyone goes to the mall or restaurants or whatever. Corporate lots sit empty on the weekends. Cut any of…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Appropriation and disproportionate credit for white people is a real and serious problem, but it's not the whole story. Most of the actual musicians who were inspired by black music fully acknowledged their inspirations and were often annoyed at how no one seemed to care about the people they looked up to. The actual artists out on the stage doing the music know exactly what comes from where. Culture spreads like tha…
I have an opinionated view of American culture, and I'm daily surrounded by other musicians, artists. These are the topics we discuss. I am opinionated as a result. In my previous comment, please note when I say "hip-hop", I am not referring to music, but culture . Nonetheless... I grew up in the south. My father was literally a clogger. I'm no stranger to folk. But, I am extremely skeptical of a lot of it's history.…
We may have fundamentally incompatible perspectives if you see culture and art as separate things. I grew up surrounded by hip-hop (Atlanta), but I know better than to sing along with the n word as a white person. This is because the experience of the music is inseparable from one's experience with its culture.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Kind of a weird argument that nobody wants to take the bus or the train because it's too crowded. Very Berra.
Take the Sound Transit 550. It is the main (only direct?) busline between downtown Seattle and Bellevue. During rush hour it comes at an interval of 10 - 15 min. The bus it self is a double wagon (with an accordion connection), it fits maybe (beware I'm pulling this figure from thin air) 50 people. It is always crowded with people standing back to front. During these 10 - 15 minutes one can only imagine how many peop…