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In Colorado, an ambitious new highway policy is not building them

nytimes.com

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Re: In Colorado, an ambitious new highway policy is not building them

#471

Post by anon291 »

pkulak wrote: post #407
mrangle wrote: post #378

Hardly anyone commenting, let alone policymakers with lifelong privilege and who are career incentivized to stay within a certain perspective, has significant if any experience taking the bus. I took the urban bus to and from school for years: at least 1.5 hours each way. Often two, with at least one transfer. Outside of the city center, reliance on buses is a massive poverty tax in terms of reduced quality of life.…

> That means cheaper and faster automotive transportation. That is… extremely silly. You can’t make an inherently expensive activity cheap because you’d like it to be. Cars take up so much space that’s expensive to build and maintain. They crash into things and people constantly. The pollute the air, and they are extremely expensive to own and repair, with a total lifetime measured in a couple decades, if you’re luck…

Is Colorado building meaningful amounts of trains?

Re: In Colorado, an ambitious new highway policy is not building them

#472

Post by anon291 »

jskrablin wrote: post #434
nox101 wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should consider experiencing living in places with good non-automobile transportation. a few off the top of my head. Amsterdam, Berlin, Paris, Barcelona, Tokyo, Kyoto, Osaka, Seoul, Singapore, Taipei, London Poor people in these cities don’t feel disadvantaged for not having a car. I fact most people in these cities don’t have a car regardless of income level lived with a car in California for 20yrs, Lived withou…

I don't want to live in a city. It's noisy, polluted, crowded and I really like my small countryside house with plenty of land around it. Lived in a city for 20 years, got fed up with it, despite all of the alleged 'advantages' it offers. I guess I don't deserve decent infrastructure in your world view?

I think it's great to live in the country but you should not expect the government to bail you out. That's part of the deal. I myself have thought about buying country property, but as a responsible property owner, I bear the cost for adding infrastructure, and, in return, I get the sole enjoyment. That's the deal. If you want the infrastructure built for you then you need to accept public use of it. That means the government gets to decide how large that public is too.

Re: In Colorado, an ambitious new highway policy is not building them

#473

Post by throwaway2037 »

mrangle wrote: post #393
mtalantikite wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who has never had a license and admittedly doesn’t know much about car costs, aren’t they expensive? Like how much is a car payment plus insurance every month? And then gas and maintenance? It seems like requiring car ownership to survive is also not great. But yeah I’m sorry your commute was so bad. No one should need to spend two hours on a bus commuting to school, that sounds like a failure of local pub…

Public transportation isn't exactly cheap when used every day. Then factor in your time and frustration. Nothing is as expensive as your time. Cars are amazing at their current cost, comparatively. And as I said, we should work on making them cheaper. Toward an ultimate goal of making everyone "richer". Which begins with reducing hidden poverty taxes like unavoidable multi-hour public transportation commutes. My ulti…

    > Instead, everyone should have access to private, fast, and cheap transportation as a human right category.
This is insane. How would any dense city work without mass transit?

Re: In Colorado, an ambitious new highway policy is not building them

#474

Post by anon291 »

em-bee wrote: post #225
SSJPython wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You live in a country with the wrong type of political system for that. Valuing everyone's opinion equally is called democracy. Infrastructure should not be subject to peoples' opinions. Like utilities and defense, infrastructure is crucial for security and commerce. People simply don't know better.

but there is a solution to this problem: education. and i don't mean propaganda, but teaching people not to be selfish, to care for others and consider others needs, to contribute to the betterment of society. to have compassion, remove prejudice, etc. if these values were taught in schools, then the next generation would make better choices and they would know better and vote for better infrastructure.

It is crazy to honestly believe that those living in car dependent areas lack empathy. I'm sorry as someone who loves transit and will wax poetic on my lovely light rail, I am not okay with literally dehumanizing people I disagree with and saying they lack the ability to feel compassion.

Come on.. you're better than that. Compassion, empathy, etc are found almost anywhere.

Do people need to be shown it could work? Yes. They don't need to thought of as deficient people.

Re: In Colorado, an ambitious new highway policy is not building them

#475

Post by CalRobert »

mrangle wrote: post #378

Hardly anyone commenting, let alone policymakers with lifelong privilege and who are career incentivized to stay within a certain perspective, has significant if any experience taking the bus. I took the urban bus to and from school for years: at least 1.5 hours each way. Often two, with at least one transfer. Outside of the city center, reliance on buses is a massive poverty tax in terms of reduced quality of life.…

Your proposed solution makes the world a dangerous, more hostile, more lonely choice for people who do not drive (and those who do, for that matter). Among other things, car-focused landscapes are terrible for raising independent children. You are removing the ability for them to travel on their own safely and replacing it with sprawling auto-focused landscapes.

Re: In Colorado, an ambitious new highway policy is not building them

#476

Post by throwaway2037 »

jskrablin wrote: post #434
nox101 wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should consider experiencing living in places with good non-automobile transportation. a few off the top of my head. Amsterdam, Berlin, Paris, Barcelona, Tokyo, Kyoto, Osaka, Seoul, Singapore, Taipei, London Poor people in these cities don’t feel disadvantaged for not having a car. I fact most people in these cities don’t have a car regardless of income level lived with a car in California for 20yrs, Lived withou…

I don't want to live in a city. It's noisy, polluted, crowded and I really like my small countryside house with plenty of land around it. Lived in a city for 20 years, got fed up with it, despite all of the alleged 'advantages' it offers. I guess I don't deserve decent infrastructure in your world view?

    > I guess I don't deserve decent infrastructure in your world view?
Do you pay enough taxes to demand it? Probably not.

Re: In Colorado, an ambitious new highway policy is not building them

#477

Post by anon291 »

mdorazio wrote: post #25
duxup wrote: post #17

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…

How do you propose doing that, though? Mass transit almost everywhere runs at a significant loss already and if we're talking buses then there's a significant driver shortage. In the US the distances and routes required outside of dense urban centers also pretty much necessitate a huge increase in transit time compared to driving, making the whole thing a bad value for people who can afford a car.

> Mass transit almost everywhere runs at a significant loss already

All infrastructure runs at a loss? Do roads generate revenue

Re: In Colorado, an ambitious new highway policy is not building them

#478

Post by CalRobert »

ohmyiv wrote: post #381
Maarten88 wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the bus is a strictly worse version of the car in these kinds of cities You can change that by giving them their own lane so they don't get stuck in traffic with the cars, let them go where cars may not go, give priority at traffic lights etc. That is what they do where I live.

A city next to me (L.A. area) has some dedicated bus lanes and bike lanes. Unfortunately, they dont have one of the other benefits that you mention, like banning cars in some areas. There are also connections to the train to go farther, but the buses are still mostly empty except for students and laborers who live outside the city. The buses themselves are typically faster and decent, as I ride them a lot. Meanwhile,…

You are not wrong - this is where personal, private, transportation excels. And why Culver city desperately needs a quality network of safe, protected, bike infrastructure. Cars don't scale, but bikes do.

Re: In Colorado, an ambitious new highway policy is not building them

#480

Post by CalRobert »

detourdog wrote: post #298
languagehacker wrote: post #51

I just read Paved Paradise as well as The High Cost of Free Parking. This seems like the current gradual trend towards reversing the hidden subsidy for drivers, first by giving them less affordances at remarkably low prices or for free. A few folks in the comments have mentioned a couple of times that it doesn't make sense to make a policy like this without supporting transit. I believe the argument would be that not…

The problem I have with reducing minimum parking is that in rural areas it doesn’t make sense. That doesn’t stop people in my rural town of 2,500 houses advocating for reducing parking requirements.

Why doesn't it make sense? I don't see why you should be forced to build parking if you don't want to.
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