671–680 of 783 posts
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When I lived in Santa Monica it was supposedly building a great network of bike lanes. That was twelve years ago…
Santa monica has the best bike network in socal honestly
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> a few tens of thousands of deaths in car crashes a year, is vastly outweighed by the time saved by everyone else compared to even an excellent public transit system. what in the absolute f** are you talking about? have you ever experienced the sudden death of a loved one? what about the network impact of someone dying? even if you want to look at it through a capitalistic lens, think of the reduction in capability…
He’s right, though. There are as many if not more lifetimes saved in aggregate. You make a decision to get into the car with eyes open and most people are okay with the deal & the odds. I have a feeling your response is because you’ve lost someone, so sorry about that. Life ends up more or less as a shit lottery and sometimes you get lucky (unlucky)
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This has nothing to do with capitalism. Quite the opposite, it’s about the needs of the many outweighing the lives of the few. There’s 200 million+ adults in the U.S., who save 5-10% of their waking lives by the US being car dependent compared to transit dependent places. Road deaths amount to 0.015% of that population. For every person who does, 7,000 live a more comfortable and convenient life.
> For every person who d[i]es, 7,000 live a more comfortable and convenient life. That you see this tragedy as a benefit reveals the grotesquerie of your world view. You also do not address the downstream effects of that lost life in terms of grief, material loss, and reduced capacity. (You’re not even a good capitalist.) May you never experience the losing end of a “more comfortable and convenient life”.
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> a few tens of thousands of deaths in car crashes a year, is vastly outweighed by the time saved by everyone else compared to even an excellent public transit system. what in the absolute f** are you talking about? have you ever experienced the sudden death of a loved one? what about the network impact of someone dying? even if you want to look at it through a capitalistic lens, think of the reduction in capability…
This has nothing to do with capitalism. Quite the opposite, it’s about the needs of the many outweighing the lives of the few. There’s 200 million+ adults in the U.S., who save 5-10% of their waking lives by the US being car dependent compared to transit dependent places. Road deaths amount to 0.015% of that population. For every person who does, 7,000 live a more comfortable and convenient life.
1. deaths directly by car are not the only deaths to account for. look at the history of lead poisoning from gasoline and the ramifications we're still reckoning with today from that. think of the rubber, heavy metal pollution we are just finding out today is driving critical ecosystems rapidly to extinction (in my neck of the woods: salmon). the death from the resource gathering required only for cars. there are so, so many externalized costs you don't consider even tho i'd argue that due to no experience with it yourself that the violence associated with a death by car is no easily written off as a statistic.
2. the environment built for cars is the only environment that can be. you've been duped by automobile manufactures, oil barons, and the affluent class that needs their chose mode of transportation adopted and subsidized by the masses. i see many more countries with better public transit and less folks living with cars all with better measures of comfort and convenience. you have exact measures to compare number of deaths, population, and road miles, but there's no way to measure whether those miles were worth it for anyone because of the baked in assumptions of no other choice. but what is always measurable is that deaths are directly caused by the existence of cars, and that death impacts people greatly.
rethink your assumptions and misanthropy.
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It’s hard to talk about the topic at very high level but for many American cities like Columbus where I live the answer lies at least partially converting surface parking lots in downtown areas into economically productive assets like housing or businesses which are also not extractive to the local economy. This density makes it easier to walk and bike as well. Many cities, including Columbus, are expanding bus rapid…
Columbus is one of those cities where the car experience is too nice, highway system built out and roads hardly congest (save for osu football games) . Say you live in worthington and work near downtown perhaps. You will probably be taking 315 or 71 there in like 15 minutes. Even if there was a train line 15 mins walk from your house that took you to downtown, it would probably double your commute at least. Not to me…
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i think the point of "induced demand" is that you sometimes can't really fix -- specifically -- traffic or parking congestion problems by building more. if you widen the roads, in many cases it won't make your commute any quicker. if you add more parking spots downtown, more people will drive downtown. it's not that there's no benefit to the wider road or parking spots, just that the benefit people really care about…
>> if you add more parking spots downtown, more people will drive downtown But that's good if you wan't more people to drive downtown, isn't it? What am I missing here?
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> Why do you think someone who walks and bike everywhere should pay increased taxes to subsidise empty buses running around the place? Because the cost of living in a society is helping to drive that society forward, even though you personally aren't benefiting from every dollar spent. Would that same person balk at paying emergency services, even if they aren't the ones riding an ambulance or getting help from a cop…
Who benefits from running empty buses? What population density do you need to sustain a 15 minute service from point A to point B on a Sunday at 6am? Or 9pm?
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Waymo's working in Phoenix, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, with Austin coming soon. Maybe it'll take 10 years, but the technology's already here, just needs to get scaled up.
The proof of concept is already here, but the technology still needs too much human supervision to be cost-effective. If you want to make self-driving taxis cheap enough for most people to use daily, the prices have to be something like $2/trip.
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It's not that public transit is bad, it's that if you try to make car travel worse without providing people with a viable alternative to it, you will lose at politics. And just sticking a bus lane in there doesn't provide an alternative unless the bus comes at short intervals to the places where people actually travel, which isn't compatible with the geography of most American cities, because at least one of the endp…
Unfortunately we built those suburbs without factoring in the real cost of transporting people to and from them. Now those homeowners are real used to that transportation subsidy and are not happy when it is threatened to be taken away. Something is going to give, cities can’t afford it any more.
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The induced demand argument is sort of crazy. It is saying you shouldn't build something because if you do, it will be extremely popular and widely used. We shouldn't build libraries - if we do, people will want to check out books. Instead, let's penalize people who read books. That will destroy the demand for books. Problem solved.
You are comparing the externalities of car driving to that of libraries