41 ms·

It takes a LONG time to build out serious transit infrastructure. Like 30 years (see Seattle's recent ballot initiative). You're asking basically an entire gene

It takes a LONG time to build out serious transit infrastructure. Like 30 years (see Seattle's recent ballot initiative). You're asking basically an entire generation to have shitty mobility for most of their working lives, so that they will vote to build trains for their children. More likely they will just leave the cities. Cities do adapt to poor mobility: local businesses get to charge huge markup because they don't have to compete with the rest of the city. I don't think that's particularly good for consumers.

ethanbond 10y ago
You're asking basically every generation after us to have shitty environmental health and shitty cities for the entirety of their lives. Also, if you need a car to be mobile enough to live your life, you already have shitty mobility. You should have the ability to live your life without having to pay the tens of thousands of dollars that owning a car demands [0]. You could get rid of cars and with all that newly available street space add a bunch of electric buses for the interim. You could even up taxi availability and efficacy, seeing as there would be minimal traffic from non-public sources, further reducing the costs of using them. This would also make the city significantly more bike friendly, even before the cultural reorganization into self-sufficient neighborhoods. There would also be a significantly reduced strain on pretty much every social institution there is. In NYC on August 2nd 2016 alone, the NYPD tended to at least 357 accidents [1]. Reducing this would free up valuable police and medical resources. Oh, and it will also help to save our species from impending environmental doom. 0. https://www.nerdwallet.com/blog/loans/total-cost-owning-car/ https://www.nerdwallet.com/blog/loans/total-cost-owning-car/ 1. https://data.cityofnewyork.us/Public-Safety/NYPD-Motor-Vehicle-Collisions/h9gi-nx95/data https://data.cityofnewyork.us/Public-Safety/NYPD-Motor-Vehic...
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- superuser2 10y ago
  >shitty environmental health People would lose essentially nothing by stepping down from SUVs/crossovers to compact sedans/hatchbacks. We could start there. There's also the issue of average age: driving an older car is a classic case of negative externality. Driver saves money, everyone else suffers for their worse emissions and fuel efficiency. These are both excellent targets for tighter regulation. My argument here is that policy should be at least net-neutral on quality of life. If you "simply wip[e] out parking" and don't do anything else, I claim that's bad policy because it reduces quality of life. If you wipe out parking AND deploy electric buses or whatever such that people's lives at least don't get worse, then I'm with you. >There would also be a significantly reduced strain on pretty much every social institution there is. Except, of course, the transit agency, which has to actually have the funding and the competence to step up its game to not only stay neutral under increased demand, but also improve enough that drivers' quality-of-life is flat. Local services are also funded by local economic activity, which generally requires that people have viable transportation. > before the cultural reorganization into self-sufficient neighborhoods. Which do you think is better for consumers: a whole bunch of hyper-local monopolies, or citywide competition and economies of scale? Economics provides very little support for the former.
  - ethanbond 10y ago
    Sure. Now go ahead and try to regulate those, like many have been trying for literally decades. We've gotten better, but it's still not enough and our cities/suburbs still suffer from the non-environmental side effects of designing cities around cars. Such as, you know, having to purchase a car to be mobile. I would really like a large scale holistic solution, but again, we've been having this debate for decades and we haven't moved fast enough. If we continue to build our cities for cars, then we will continue to need cars. Reducing parking in cities is one decision that could have large scale effects and that doesn't require a dictatorship or nationwide collective epiphany to institute. And yes, higher prices hurt consumers, as in they damage the one facet of an entire human being that's responsible for purchasing things. But there are many other facets of a human being that would be much better off with fewer cars around them, and I dare say that many of those facets are more important to preserve than ease of consumption. The human race survived for many thousands of years with nothing even resembling an automobile, and now after 100 years you're positing that we simply cannot go on without them?
    - superuser2 10y ago
      >Reducing parking in cities is one decision that could have large scale effects and that doesn't require a dictatorship or nationwide collective epiphany to institute. Making cities worse is likely to have the effect of driving people out of them. You do in fact need a collective epiphany (or a Constitutional amendment to shut down freedom of movement) to get people to accept that they simply need to live worse lives in the short and medium terms so that their children can live better ones. If you make that happen, then maybe we can pay off the national debt too.
      - ethanbond 10y ago
        What are you talking about? Removing, say, 10% of parking spots per year for 8 years wouldn't require any of that. It would result in the same frustration that people already have and already cope with: "it sucks to park in the city." It's clear this isn't going anywhere, have a good weekend!
philwelch 10y ago
How are people going to leave cities if that's where the jobs are and you can't drive there from outside because there's nowhere to park? We've already had shitty mobility for multiple generations. We can and should build transit much more quickly than we are today, and we could if we were actually willing to commit to redesigning our cities. People want to live in walkable towns and cities. People have done so, happily, for much, much longer than cars have existed. Set aside the environmental and economic concerns: studies of show that walkable communities are much more conducive to human happiness. The world of freeways and suburbs that we live in isn't a natural human pattern of development; it's a futuristic dream from the 1950's that turned into a nightmarish reality. Half a century of irrational exuberance over the invention of the automobile is a mistake that can and should be rectified.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- superuser2 10y ago
  Indeed it can and should. Leaving people stranded in places where things are far apart with neither parking nor adequate transit is not a viable way to do it, though. In Chicago it is actually faster to commute by public transit from the suburbs ~20 miles away then from the neighborhoods ~8 miles away because the commuter rail service (Metra) is so much better than the urban transit service (CTA).

ethanbond 10y ago

You're asking basically every generation after us to have shitty environmental health and shitty cities for the entirety of their lives. Also, if you need a car to be mobile enough to live your life, you already have shitty mobility. You should have the ability to live your life without having to pay the tens of thousands of dollars that owning a car demands [0]. You could get rid of cars and with all that newly available street space add a bunch of electric buses for the interim. You could even up taxi availability and efficacy, seeing as there would be minimal traffic from non-public sources, further reducing the costs of using them. This would also make the city significantly more bike friendly, even before the cultural reorganization into self-sufficient neighborhoods. There would also be a significantly reduced strain on pretty much every social institution there is. In NYC on August 2nd 2016 alone, the NYPD tended to at least 357 accidents [1]. Reducing this would free up valuable police and medical resources. Oh, and it will also help to save our species from impending environmental doom. 0. https://www.nerdwallet.com/blog/loans/total-cost-owning-car/ https://www.nerdwallet.com/blog/loans/total-cost-owning-car/ 1. https://data.cityofnewyork.us/Public-Safety/NYPD-Motor-Vehicle-Collisions/h9gi-nx95/data https://data.cityofnewyork.us/Public-Safety/NYPD-Motor-Vehic...

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
superuser2 10y ago
>shitty environmental health People would lose essentially nothing by stepping down from SUVs/crossovers to compact sedans/hatchbacks. We could start there. There's also the issue of average age: driving an older car is a classic case of negative externality. Driver saves money, everyone else suffers for their worse emissions and fuel efficiency. These are both excellent targets for tighter regulation. My argument here is that policy should be at least net-neutral on quality of life. If you "simply wip[e] out parking" and don't do anything else, I claim that's bad policy because it reduces quality of life. If you wipe out parking AND deploy electric buses or whatever such that people's lives at least don't get worse, then I'm with you. >There would also be a significantly reduced strain on pretty much every social institution there is. Except, of course, the transit agency, which has to actually have the funding and the competence to step up its game to not only stay neutral under increased demand, but also improve enough that drivers' quality-of-life is flat. Local services are also funded by local economic activity, which generally requires that people have viable transportation. > before the cultural reorganization into self-sufficient neighborhoods. Which do you think is better for consumers: a whole bunch of hyper-local monopolies, or citywide competition and economies of scale? Economics provides very little support for the former.
- ethanbond 10y ago
  Sure. Now go ahead and try to regulate those, like many have been trying for literally decades. We've gotten better, but it's still not enough and our cities/suburbs still suffer from the non-environmental side effects of designing cities around cars. Such as, you know, having to purchase a car to be mobile. I would really like a large scale holistic solution, but again, we've been having this debate for decades and we haven't moved fast enough. If we continue to build our cities for cars, then we will continue to need cars. Reducing parking in cities is one decision that could have large scale effects and that doesn't require a dictatorship or nationwide collective epiphany to institute. And yes, higher prices hurt consumers, as in they damage the one facet of an entire human being that's responsible for purchasing things. But there are many other facets of a human being that would be much better off with fewer cars around them, and I dare say that many of those facets are more important to preserve than ease of consumption. The human race survived for many thousands of years with nothing even resembling an automobile, and now after 100 years you're positing that we simply cannot go on without them?
  - superuser2 10y ago
    >Reducing parking in cities is one decision that could have large scale effects and that doesn't require a dictatorship or nationwide collective epiphany to institute. Making cities worse is likely to have the effect of driving people out of them. You do in fact need a collective epiphany (or a Constitutional amendment to shut down freedom of movement) to get people to accept that they simply need to live worse lives in the short and medium terms so that their children can live better ones. If you make that happen, then maybe we can pay off the national debt too.
    - ethanbond 10y ago
      What are you talking about? Removing, say, 10% of parking spots per year for 8 years wouldn't require any of that. It would result in the same frustration that people already have and already cope with: "it sucks to park in the city." It's clear this isn't going anywhere, have a good weekend!

philwelch 10y ago

How are people going to leave cities if that's where the jobs are and you can't drive there from outside because there's nowhere to park? We've already had shitty mobility for multiple generations. We can and should build transit much more quickly than we are today, and we could if we were actually willing to commit to redesigning our cities. People want to live in walkable towns and cities. People have done so, happily, for much, much longer than cars have existed. Set aside the environmental and economic concerns: studies of show that walkable communities are much more conducive to human happiness. The world of freeways and suburbs that we live in isn't a natural human pattern of development; it's a futuristic dream from the 1950's that turned into a nightmarish reality. Half a century of irrational exuberance over the invention of the automobile is a mistake that can and should be rectified.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
superuser2 10y ago
Indeed it can and should. Leaving people stranded in places where things are far apart with neither parking nor adequate transit is not a viable way to do it, though. In Chicago it is actually faster to commute by public transit from the suburbs ~20 miles away then from the neighborhoods ~8 miles away because the commuter rail service (Metra) is so much better than the urban transit service (CTA).