591–600 of 735 posts
Awesome. But congestion pricing still doesn't charge rideshare vehicles for loitering on the streets; it only charges per ride. Now ban AirBnb, Lyft and Uber. Basically anything funded by YC.
Is well outside the Overton window of YC's private discussion forum.
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In my region of the world they enable having any sort of housing at all . Plenty of people don't have the credit score to buy anything livable within city limits, so they resort to buying apartments in the suburbs and small, adjacent cities. Public transport hasn't caught up because these places developed too fast and even though their inhabitants live and pay taxes there, the businesses they work for don't, so the t…
Your point is valid, but the lack of affordable housing in your city is most likely due to the lifestyles that cars allow us to live. Single family homes and parking lots as far as the eye can see.
I moved out BTW, because I figured that being able to afford at most a 1-bedroom, 55m2 apartment as a software engineer is a deal I'm not willing to take.
Real estate has been going up in price all over the world in the past decade and it doesn't matter if it's apartment blocks or detached homes.
My new place is a city 40% the size and far from there, but my friends by and large drove until they qualified. Typically less than 30km, but that's already a 1h commute by car.
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Because my experience is that I don't find the food tempting, and so it feels pointless to spend time considering it.
> I don't find the food tempting One thing I realized a number of years ago is that my childhood instilled biases in me. A Few Examples: Sushi/Raw Fish/ethnic/spicy food == Bad Apple Products == For Suckers Ford == Found On Road Dead (bowtie life) AMD >>> Evil Netburst Intel empire. When I realized just how irrational I was on soo many subjects (I had never seen sushi or really any ethnic food until I was at my first…
Heck, my breakfeast at the moment is vegan, because I'm on a diet and cutting real milk out of it let me drop a few more calories, not because I find it more enjoyable, because I very much detest the milk substitute. But cutting a few more calories makes it easier to add plenty of meat to my other meals.
It's not even that it's always bad. It's again that cost isn't going to get me to consider the vegan options unless the cost difference is absolutely brutal. Other factors might on occasion, such as diet.
Car speed in the zone.. that graph is really telling, showing that in NYC cars never really travel faster than even the slowest bicyclist, and slower than a modest runner. That alone tells you this is the right path. All that infrastructure and work for cars to not actually allow anyone to travel fast. 9mph is very very slow even for the weakest/most timid cyclist.
It's nice that all those numbers are up, but it would be great also to see some metrics that attempted to measure the overall utility of the change. Something like avg time spent commuting, or really commute_time * dollars_spent_commuting^B where B is some parameter for the relative utility of time and money. Of course B is different for everyone but something like this could be attempted. Stated another way, if they…
I would add another metric: how are businesses doing since the change? I was walking around the city on a Wednesday evening and it was utterly eerie how empty it felt. This past weekend seemed to be the exact opposite thanks to the nice weather, but I haven't seen that level of emptiness. I notice empty storefronts and anecdotally, I feel like there is an increasing number. I have a friend who opened a store downtown…
https://www.governor.ny.gov/news/traffic-down-business-gover...
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It's not the only reason, but in general in American history, "why is this weird thing this weird way?" is usually answered in part by "racism". Avoiding public transit has historically been one way affluent white people avoided contact with poor people in general and black people specifically; underfunding or shutting down public transit in turn disproportionately hurts those populations. Again, not the only explana…
In northern cities, the black population is quite recent, and urban renewal programs predate much of the Great Migration. The Great Migration was itself weaponized by WASP elites against the European and very often Catholic ethnic neighborhoods in northern cities (who were out-procreating the WASPs given their stance on contraception, for example, which differed from the Protestants who had began to accept its use in…
LOL. sure it was.
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They're just quoting a danish government report Googling it, I found a second one in London with the same methods (surveying CCTV footage of multiple intersections) and they get the same findings In both: - Motorists break way more traffic laws - Motorists mainly break the law for speed or convenience - The infractions by motorists are generally more serious and pose a threat to others (the main one is speeding) - Th…
> the main one is speeding Speeding mildly is usually a consequence of stupidly low speed limits. Unless the speeding is bucketed, this alone is enough to skew the results to say motorists are worse than bicyclists. Remember, speeding tickets are a revenue source and the incentive is to set limits that produce revenue. > The main one cyclists break is riding on the sidewalk - which is because of cars, and it doesn't…
This is still illegal. Blaming it on what you feel the speed limits "should" be is lame - these are grown adults willfully ignoring the law because they find it inconvenient.
...okay, okay, that's a bit too forum-argument, but hopefully it demonstrates the contradiction here.
Further, I'd argue that, while speeding is universally a response to perceived inconvenience, sidewalk cycling can sometimes be a response to perceived safety problems, not just inconvenience.
Obviously it's still illegal and unsafe for pedestrians, but I think handwaving car-based lawbreakers and assuming their violations are justified, while also assuming the least generous intentions for cyclists... just hammers home the initial claim: people perceive car lawbreakering as forgivable when it's common and rare when it's worse, and cyclist lawbreaking as both egregious and universal, because they emphasize more with drivers than cyclists.
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Less cars + overflowing bike lanes = hey what if we mark more of the street as being for bikes. (Possibly with an interim step of "the cyclists have already claimed pretty much the entire street for bikes".)
They've already started doing this in NYC - the new 10th ave bike lane is double the width of normal bike lanes.
Car speed in the zone.. that graph is really telling, showing that in NYC cars never really travel faster than even the slowest bicyclist, and slower than a modest runner. That alone tells you this is the right path. All that infrastructure and work for cars to not actually allow anyone to travel fast. 9mph is very very slow even for the weakest/most timid cyclist.
* Some people have mobility issues and can't bike or walk but can drive.
* Cars give you environment isolation when it's freezing, sweltering, or pouring rain.
* Cars isolate you from other people, which can be important especially for groups that are more likely to be on the receiving end of unwanted interactions.
* Cars make it much easier to haul stuff around.
* You are much safer being in a car when hit by another car than when not being in a car. This is something a lot of bike commute advocates sweep under the rug. They talk about how biking is overall safe, but then you ask them if they've ever had an accident and so many have been hit by cars and broken bones.
I fully support more people biking and walking. But I think the optimal solution is multi-modal. Cars aren't bad, they're just one piece of the puzzle.
(The reason I'm not a bike commuter right now is because I slipped in a puddle biking to work and destroyed my ankle. Non-fatal accident statistics for cycle are actually pretty scary when you dig into them. People always point out that overall mortality statistics are better for cyclists, but you can still have a really fucking bad time without dying.)
This article reminds me of the 1990s because it was a time when you believed that America was getting better all the time and that we had reason to feel hopeful.