Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

711–720 of 783 posts

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

#711

Post by adamomada »

nerb wrote: post #672
adamomada wrote: post #670

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

personally lose someone, no, but i've gotten the chance of being a citizen first responder to a lost of life one. i feel like your's and OP's response are because you've never seen or been impacted first hand what dying by car is like. it is usually horrific and violent that to be able to say those outweigh the time saved traversing the sprawled built environment created for the sake of those very same cars shows a l…

I think that in North America the deal is done, there is no way of going back this far down the path and private vehicles on the road are never going away until the fall of said civilization (or plan B: making the country dirt poor, but this may lead to plan A anyway)

And props for being a responder and seeing it with your own eyes. I actually think it should be more widely spread, showing it on the nightly news, etc. it’s an effective strategy to make more careful drivers.

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

#712

Post by matchbok »

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.

[dead]

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

#713

Post by throwaway2037 »

joe_the_user wrote: post #703
throwaway2037 wrote: post #484

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you consider the DC Metro garbage and its recent Silver Line extension? People in seem quite pleased with their system.

The DC Metro service, according to wikipedia, was effective transit service that has been trashed over the years by neglected - like BART. And like BART, it's hard single extension but is basically in terrible shape now. My point is that growing demand for mass transit hasn't translated into anything.

Is BART measurably worse than 10 or 20 years ago? I didn't see anything in the news.

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

#714

Post by pkulak »

rayiner wrote: post #705
pkulak wrote: post #688

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay, if you can't handle being around other people, then don't live in NY. But, what's your point here? Cus I know you hate it, but supply and demand says that waaaay more people like NYs than there actually _are_ NYs. People who can only exist in giant metal boxes, sealed off from the world at all times, can choose to live in nearly any city in America and live their bliss. But not everyone is you. You shouldn't ha…

NYC has a net negative out-migration rate. If it wasn't for foreigners moving in the city would be shrinking. And foreigners (like many of my family in Queens) don't move to NYC because they like a city that's just one step up from Bangladesh. They do it because of the access to jobs, people who speak their native language, etc. They tend to move to Long Island (or, these, days, Texas) as soon as they get their feet…

Well, somehow housing in NYC is up 3% this year. I’m the biggest urbanist shill you’ll meet and even I don’t live there, cus it’s too damn expensive. We build only suburbs, only suburbs are affordable, and that’s where people live. Shocking.

I would love to see an experiment where we make a 1200 sq-ft apartment in a dense, walkable neighborhood, the same price as a 3000 sq-ft McMansion outside Dallas, by actually building the former. I predict… unexpected migration, but who knows. That’s a hard experiment to run.

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

#715

Post by [deleted] »

cscurmudgeon wrote: post #520
TheCleric wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I lived in Denver this GenXer gladly transitioned to light rail as it freed up an hour a day that I would have spent concentrating on driving on more relaxing things like reading. I miss it.

Respectfully, you should be arguing for more density so you don't even have to travel by rail that much. But any density is opposed strangely by the anti-car crowd due to (e.g., see SF local politics). 1. "It will ruin the character of our precious million year old city" 2. "Building more housing will magically cause existing people to move out the city" 3. "Developers will get rich. Can't ever let that happen. They…

[deleted]

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

#716

Post by ambyra »

resolutebat wrote: post #210
ambyra wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that’s limited to the US. In Thailand, kids ride motorcycles from a very young age, and don’t exhibit the crazy driving on that they do here. I think if more families drove motorcycles, it would no longer be considered cool or extreme, and that behavior would disappear. It reminds me of the high drinking age situation in the United States. When people here start drinking, they end up in emergency room, which…

Traffic fatalities in Thailand are the highest in SE Asia and 73% of them are on motorcycles. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_motor_vehicle_deaths_i...

This is not necessarily from extreme behavior, most Thai are on relatively slow scooters.

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

#717

Post by adolph »

nullindividual wrote: post #641
adolph wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Goalpost movement noted. Is being "driven by the cattle prod" a valid excuse to hold views described as "distrusts or dislikes the government?"

No goal posts were moved, but nice try. You also seem to be under the false assumption that the cattle prod is a real device in this scenario.

Moving from a maximally coercive metaphorical “cattle prod” to a minimal “sin tax” is classic. Go on

https://medium.com/bigger-picture/what-is-a-motte-bailey-aad...

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

#718

Post by [deleted] »

Jensson wrote: post #583
rangestransform wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A crackhead grabbed my girlfriend’s hair on the subway recently Tell me, anti car fundamentalists, what are the odds that happens in a waymo?

That happens because the transit isn't used by enough normal people. The need for security personnel doesn't go up with more normal people, when you have the levels Europe has the crackheads etc gets removed from the trains. You basically ensures your transit system will remain shitty forever, but that is easily fixable. The more good actors that use it the cheaper fixing it gets per person, you can have people who c…

[deleted]

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

#719

Post by rayiner »

nerb wrote: post #674
rayiner wrote: post #584

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

i think you forget 2 things: 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…

Rethink your misanthropy. We live in a free and rich country, and you hate people so much that you assume they’re being duped by “automobile manufacturers” instead of making their own choices about how they prefer to live. The fact is that Americans live like we do because we can afford to be comfortable. My mom, an immigrant to the US who grew up in Bangladesh, went to Australia recently and came back complaining about how cramped everything was over there and how small everyone’s houses are. She didn’t come to America until nearly age 40–she didn’t grow up being brainwashed into car culture. She just has eyes and can see what’s a more comfortable life.

There’s no country that can afford to be car dependent where most people don’t drive. Even in Sweden and Japan, which have amazing public transit systems, 80% of households own a car.

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

#720

Post by secstate »

kjkjadksj wrote: post #296
secstate wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Careful how you swing that axe of relaxed zoning. Got me nearly kicked off my local town council. "Why can't that town two towns over build more apartments for our day laborers?" they all ask in unison.

It seems weird but you have to look at the market effects evangelist perspective to understand their position. A person believing in these forces might say that by having a large day laboring population and not building housing for them, there is now strong incentive for other areas to approve new housing and take advantage of guaranteed demand. And then they might go on to cite a location like (EDIT: not daly city b…

And the problem is, zoning is almost never the answer to healthy growth. Is it useful for segregation? Yes. Is it useful for temporarily sustaining property value. Yes.

I know there are some counter examples, but I always think about the beautifully organic growth from some of America's greatest cities in the early 20th century. And how that growth would be categorically impossible today because everyone's afraid someone's gonna build a lard rendering plant next to a single-family house. Or that poor people will move in across the street. Goddamn I'm sick of selfish assholes.

Post reply on HN