281–290 of 783 posts
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It is punishment if you are intentionally engineering the roads to cost people more time using them.
Stop punishing people by widening roads! It hasn't been shown to decrease transit times, but it has been shown to harm local standards of living.
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Yes, I'm aware of how one would do it, I am questioning whether that was actually done in this case or not. Further, I would question, what other places outside of your commute have you measured air pollution? They offered it as a data point. I think it's fine form to question it.
The EPA Air Quality Index isn't everything, but it is a standard value displayed in a phone weather app. I'll notice in times and places when I suspect its bad. If you live outside a city in place without forest fires or other environmental issues you might not notice its there. Some people with respiratory issues monitor this stuff constantly.
Determining pollution exposure can be done anecdotally. I've done a number of long distance bike trips, the few times where I was next to a highway for upwards of 8 hours - having a nose bleed by the end of that is pretty common for me. In that vein, recognizing air pollution effects is not necessarily that difficult. Symptoms include: sore throat, headache, burning eyes, etc.. The other side, people do get used to low level irritants, and yeah - you don't really notice its there until you go somewhere else and realize "the air smells different."
As someone who loves trains and buses and planes, I wish that people who pushed public transport would actually engage with the reasons why people don't want to use it rather than just making alternatives worse. There are three main issues that need to be solved for even me, a train lover, to prioritise using them. 1) Undesirables need to be removed. I don't want to deal with beggars or other general hoodlums. Transp…
If 'undesirables' are part of your local area, then they'll be on the public transport. The clue is in the name. The reason Japan doesn't have them on the trains is not because the guards have removed them, it's because they weren't there to begin with.
Sounds like the Bay Area. We don't like cars but we refuse to build comprehensive transit. To build transit that works you cannot value everyone's opinion equally and have to just make it happen. Some of the worst localized pollution I have experienced in my life was while living in the Bay Area with the massive traffic jams.
There’s another huge way to put a dent it and let people live where they want: work from home works. The pandemic proved it. It’s not a 100% solution but there is seldom a 100% solution that doesn’t involve totalitarian government since not everyone wants to live in the city in concrete towers.
I live in a small country, where a lot of jobs are in the capital, A LOT of people drive to the capital daily (20, 30, 50, even 100km one way), and complain about it... and complain how everything is there, complain about centralization, etc...
..and then also complain when a company in their smaller city wants to expand or when someone wants to build something new there. Also complain against the current companies that exist there.... even though their house was built due to closeseness to that factory in the first place (like whole neighhbourhoods that were built by workers in that company nearby, and now, 30, 40 years later, their kids want the company to close, due to a lot of random reasons).
for americans: not all tech has to be in california, other states exist too
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The tax haul from a house is almost certainly higher than food grown on a semi-arid steppe like Colorado
Totally, which is why Colorado is producing less and less food. I mean towns sprouted up where people settled and people settled to grow food, so this has been happening in Colorado since farming began here. As a result the land left for farming is getting worse and worse. The good spots have all been paved. But say we have to keep that, my next question is, what's the tax haul for a house compared to an apartment co…
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If the answer is to throw up our hands and say that nothing can be done, then I'll just drive instead, because there are no beggars in my car, I don't let them in.
What I'm saying is that public transport is a reflection of the local society. You can accept it, work to improve it, or hide from it in your private vehicle. Here in London, hardly a quaint and sleepy village, everyone uses public transport, including beggars and hoodlums as you put it, and it's fine.
Nope in a waymo I don’t have to smell piss snell, get begged at, have a crackhead grab my girlfriend’s hair, have another crackhead leer at my female friend, have another crackhead catcall my female friend, etc etc etc
> If every car on the road were battery-powered and those batteries were charged entirely by renewable energy, transportation emissions would be close to zero. This is entirely false. I'm surprised to see it in the NYTimes. They're only 0 when you factor out the cost of building the car and maintaining the highway, and those are still pretty high
also people who care about EVs tend to forget about tire wear and brake dust. Both are emitted in huge quantities, esp. tire microplastics, by EVs.
I'd rather see efforts to make mass transit more attractive and encourage its use in a POSITIVE way, rather than using a stick of clogging the roads and punishing people into using mass transit. Win the market, don't just quash what you don't like. I can imagine this easily being responded to negatively in the end and the political response is to give in and the pendulum swings wildly in the other direction. In the e…
> clogging the roads
The roads already be clogged and adding more lanes is not likely to unclog them. Single occupancy vehicles at the end of the day are not a solution for moving hundreds of thousands of people around - there's an intrinsic scaling problem that can't be solved by building infinite roads.
It's kinda like trying to get high speed internet by adding more & more 56k modems.
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Tax haul for 10 houses are better than a 10 unit complex. The people also want houses opposed to apartments (hence the higher price). This seems to be an ideological conflict where some people are trying to force everyone else into options they dont want- why? The solution seems simple. relax zoning where it exists and let people who want to live in tiny urban apartments do so, and let people who want to live in subu…
That's a weird way to put that. Tax haul for 10 houses is definitely higher than the tax haul for a 10 unit complex, but how many 10 unit complexes can you fit in the space you need for 10 houses? The complex has a much better tax haul per square foot.