6 ms·

Your reply boils down to "It's hard, so we shouldn't try". Which is exactly the reason nothing is getting better, FYI. If it's worth doing, it worth fighting

by grecy 7y ago

Your reply boils down to "It's hard, so we shouldn't try". Which is exactly the reason nothing is getting better, FYI. If it's worth doing, it worth fighting tooth and nail for.

rayiner 7y ago
Define "better?" Being able to drive everywhere in a climate-controlled vehicle regardless of weather is pretty great. Not getting rained on, not getting your shoes wet, not having to huff up a hill, having the kids' crap always at hand, etc. You're missing a link in the logical chain. It's hard to build transit/bike lanes in America because that requires central coordination, and Americans don't like central coordination. That's why Americans love cars so much. Driving and road construction is extremely decentralized. Few towns are sophisticated enough to build rail, but pretty much every place can pave a road, and connect it to roads to neighboring jurisdictions without too much planning. So as long as Americans prefer their decentralized system, advocating for things like transit that inherently require a level of central planning is swimming upstream against the culture.
- grecy 7y ago
  I meant that American society in general is not getting better. The healthcare sucks. The education sucks. The debt sucks. The infrastructure sucks. The access to affordable housing sucks. The Public Transport sucks. All of those things are true because people gave up trying when it got hard to fix/improve them.
  - rayiner 7y ago
    You need to understand America on its own terms. Americans don't really believe in redistribution, so measures that look at overall overages tend to make it look worse. The healthcare sucks if you look at the averages. But most Americans have employer-provided health insurance, and are happy with it: https://news.gallup.com/poll/245195/americans-rate-healthcare-quite-positively.aspx https://news.gallup.com/poll/245195/americans-rate-healthcar.... 69% rate their insurance coverage "excellent" or "good" and 80% rate their healthcare "excellent" or "good." If you look at the most well-off subgroup of Americans, Asian Americans, you see some remarkable statistics. Asian Americans live an average of 87.1 years, longer than people in overwhelmingly Asian countries like Japan and Singapore. Asian American kids have higher scores on the PISA test than kids in any European country, or Japan or Korea. (Just below Singapore.) Median household income for Asian Americans is double that of Japan or Singapore. Asians don't have access to a special version of America. They participate in the same health care system, the same public schools, etc. They're just disproportionately represented in the "somewhat above median" category, and America does really well for those people. The infrastructure and public transit sucks. Which is fine. Americans don't want public transit. They want to drive everywhere. That's why we invented the drive through. The pervasiveness of driving is why Americans have some of the shortest commutes in the OECD: https://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/14/world-of-commuters https://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/14/world-of-commu.... Affordable housing may be an issue in some American cities. But most Americans don't live there. Most live in suburbs/exurbs, or satellite cities. American mortgages as a percentage of income are on the lower side for the developed world: https://www.oecd.org/els/family/HC1-2-Housing-costs-over-income.pdf https://www.oecd.org/els/family/HC1-2-Housing-costs-over-inc.... 15% in the United States, versus 23% in say France and 17% in Germany. Rents are about in the middle, but a much smaller percentage of Americans rent than Europeans. Despite paying similar amounts on housing, we have truly massive houses in the United States: http://demographia.com/db-intlhouse.htm http://demographia.com/db-intlhouse.htm. The average new house is 2,200 square feet, versus 1,200-1,300 in France or Germany. We eat 40% more meat per capita than the EU: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/08/these-countries-eat-the-most-meat-03bdf469-f40a-41e3-ade7-fe4ddb2a709a https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/08/these-countries-eat-t.... We have the second-highest per-capita consumption expenditures in the world, a hair under Hong Kong, 33% higher than Switzerland, and 86% more than France: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_household_final_consumption_expenditure_per_capita https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_household....
    - harryh 7y ago
      I am continuously impressed with your ability to cite your sources in comments like this. Do you find them in real time or do you just keep a file somewhere with this stuff indexed?
      - rayiner 7y ago
        LOL. Usually, I remember reading something with a particular statistic, and it's pretty quick to pull things up on Google with a couple of key words.
    - vkou 7y ago
      > The healthcare sucks if you look at the averages. But most Americans have employer-provided health insurance, and are happy with it: https://news.gallup.com/poll/245195/americans-rate-healthcar... https://news.gallup.com/poll/245195/americans-rate-healthcar.... 69% rate their insurance coverage "excellent" or "good" and 80% rate their healthcare "excellent" or "good." Are they happy with it, compared to being uninsured, or are they happy with it compared to what it should be? Are they happy with it because they haven't yet had non-trivial interactions with the healthcare system, and have not yet gone through that layer of billing hell? > The infrastructure and public transit sucks. Which is fine. Americans don't want public transit. They want to drive everywhere. Likewise, do they 'want' to drive everywhere because they've not built working public transit? Or do they actually want to spend $4-8,000 a year on buying, maintaining, fueling, insuring, licensing, and storing a car (Times two for two-car households)? Inferring 'wants' from polls and statistics is incredibly easy to taint with whatever bias the poller brings to the table.
      - rayiner 7y ago
        The specific question is: > Overall, how would you rate -- [the quality of healthcare you receive/your healthcare coverage] -- as excellent, good, only fair or poor? That's quite obviously asking people to rate it on an objective scale, in comparison to some perception of "what it should be." Interestingly, half of privately insured were even "satisfied" with the cost. > Likewise, do the want to drive everywhere because they've not built working public transit? Or do they actually want to spend $4-8,000 a year on buying, maintaining, fueling, insuring, licensing, and storing a car (Times two for two-car households)? People like the idea of transit in the abstract, but tend to reject it when faced with balancing their other wants and needs. There's a handful of cities with decent transit (New York, Chicago, Boston, DC), but ridership peaked in all of them in 2014-2015: https://www.geekwire.com/2017/seattle-area-transit-ridership-growing-faster-big-u-s-cities-options-way https://www.geekwire.com/2017/seattle-area-transit-ridership.... The only major city where ridership is growing is Seattle, which has the benefit of starting from a very low baseline. Moreover, New York, Chicago, and Boston are all losing domestic residents to other cities: https://www.citylab.com/equity/2014/04/2-very-different-migrations-driving-growth-us-cities/8873 https://www.citylab.com/equity/2014/04/2-very-different-migr.... DC is growing, but Metrorail ridership has been declining for a decade, ever since Uber/Lyft became available. Most domestic migration is to cities with poor or non-existent transit, like Dallas, Phoenix, etc.
sailfast 7y ago
I thought my reply boiled down to “we’d need a lot of people’s opinions on policy to change to set things up”. I was mostly providing a counterpoint to “of course bike friendly cities!” opinions which may not consider the limitations imposed on citizens in order to achieve this kind of objective. Having experienced NL bike culture first hand a great deal I think it’s awesome, but it’d also be frustrating to have a bunch of rules imposed on new development at a state or federal level. This stuff has got to start locally. Agreed - you should fight for that and support it, especially in your local community.

by grecy 7y ago

Your reply boils down to "It's hard, so we shouldn't try". Which is exactly the reason nothing is getting better, FYI. If it's worth doing, it worth fighting tooth and nail for.

rayiner 7y ago

Define "better?" Being able to drive everywhere in a climate-controlled vehicle regardless of weather is pretty great. Not getting rained on, not getting your shoes wet, not having to huff up a hill, having the kids' crap always at hand, etc. You're missing a link in the logical chain. It's hard to build transit/bike lanes in America because that requires central coordination, and Americans don't like central coordination. That's why Americans love cars so much. Driving and road construction is extremely decentralized. Few towns are sophisticated enough to build rail, but pretty much every place can pave a road, and connect it to roads to neighboring jurisdictions without too much planning. So as long as Americans prefer their decentralized system, advocating for things like transit that inherently require a level of central planning is swimming upstream against the culture.

grecy 7y ago
I meant that American society in general is not getting better. The healthcare sucks. The education sucks. The debt sucks. The infrastructure sucks. The access to affordable housing sucks. The Public Transport sucks. All of those things are true because people gave up trying when it got hard to fix/improve them.
- rayiner 7y ago
  You need to understand America on its own terms. Americans don't really believe in redistribution, so measures that look at overall overages tend to make it look worse. The healthcare sucks if you look at the averages. But most Americans have employer-provided health insurance, and are happy with it: https://news.gallup.com/poll/245195/americans-rate-healthcare-quite-positively.aspx https://news.gallup.com/poll/245195/americans-rate-healthcar.... 69% rate their insurance coverage "excellent" or "good" and 80% rate their healthcare "excellent" or "good." If you look at the most well-off subgroup of Americans, Asian Americans, you see some remarkable statistics. Asian Americans live an average of 87.1 years, longer than people in overwhelmingly Asian countries like Japan and Singapore. Asian American kids have higher scores on the PISA test than kids in any European country, or Japan or Korea. (Just below Singapore.) Median household income for Asian Americans is double that of Japan or Singapore. Asians don't have access to a special version of America. They participate in the same health care system, the same public schools, etc. They're just disproportionately represented in the "somewhat above median" category, and America does really well for those people. The infrastructure and public transit sucks. Which is fine. Americans don't want public transit. They want to drive everywhere. That's why we invented the drive through. The pervasiveness of driving is why Americans have some of the shortest commutes in the OECD: https://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/14/world-of-commuters https://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/14/world-of-commu.... Affordable housing may be an issue in some American cities. But most Americans don't live there. Most live in suburbs/exurbs, or satellite cities. American mortgages as a percentage of income are on the lower side for the developed world: https://www.oecd.org/els/family/HC1-2-Housing-costs-over-income.pdf https://www.oecd.org/els/family/HC1-2-Housing-costs-over-inc.... 15% in the United States, versus 23% in say France and 17% in Germany. Rents are about in the middle, but a much smaller percentage of Americans rent than Europeans. Despite paying similar amounts on housing, we have truly massive houses in the United States: http://demographia.com/db-intlhouse.htm http://demographia.com/db-intlhouse.htm. The average new house is 2,200 square feet, versus 1,200-1,300 in France or Germany. We eat 40% more meat per capita than the EU: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/08/these-countries-eat-the-most-meat-03bdf469-f40a-41e3-ade7-fe4ddb2a709a https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/08/these-countries-eat-t.... We have the second-highest per-capita consumption expenditures in the world, a hair under Hong Kong, 33% higher than Switzerland, and 86% more than France: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_household_final_consumption_expenditure_per_capita https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_household....
  - harryh 7y ago
    I am continuously impressed with your ability to cite your sources in comments like this. Do you find them in real time or do you just keep a file somewhere with this stuff indexed?
    - rayiner 7y ago
      LOL. Usually, I remember reading something with a particular statistic, and it's pretty quick to pull things up on Google with a couple of key words.
  - vkou 7y ago
    > The healthcare sucks if you look at the averages. But most Americans have employer-provided health insurance, and are happy with it: https://news.gallup.com/poll/245195/americans-rate-healthcar... https://news.gallup.com/poll/245195/americans-rate-healthcar.... 69% rate their insurance coverage "excellent" or "good" and 80% rate their healthcare "excellent" or "good." Are they happy with it, compared to being uninsured, or are they happy with it compared to what it should be? Are they happy with it because they haven't yet had non-trivial interactions with the healthcare system, and have not yet gone through that layer of billing hell? > The infrastructure and public transit sucks. Which is fine. Americans don't want public transit. They want to drive everywhere. Likewise, do they 'want' to drive everywhere because they've not built working public transit? Or do they actually want to spend $4-8,000 a year on buying, maintaining, fueling, insuring, licensing, and storing a car (Times two for two-car households)? Inferring 'wants' from polls and statistics is incredibly easy to taint with whatever bias the poller brings to the table.
    - rayiner 7y ago
      The specific question is: > Overall, how would you rate -- [the quality of healthcare you receive/your healthcare coverage] -- as excellent, good, only fair or poor? That's quite obviously asking people to rate it on an objective scale, in comparison to some perception of "what it should be." Interestingly, half of privately insured were even "satisfied" with the cost. > Likewise, do the want to drive everywhere because they've not built working public transit? Or do they actually want to spend $4-8,000 a year on buying, maintaining, fueling, insuring, licensing, and storing a car (Times two for two-car households)? People like the idea of transit in the abstract, but tend to reject it when faced with balancing their other wants and needs. There's a handful of cities with decent transit (New York, Chicago, Boston, DC), but ridership peaked in all of them in 2014-2015: https://www.geekwire.com/2017/seattle-area-transit-ridership-growing-faster-big-u-s-cities-options-way https://www.geekwire.com/2017/seattle-area-transit-ridership.... The only major city where ridership is growing is Seattle, which has the benefit of starting from a very low baseline. Moreover, New York, Chicago, and Boston are all losing domestic residents to other cities: https://www.citylab.com/equity/2014/04/2-very-different-migrations-driving-growth-us-cities/8873 https://www.citylab.com/equity/2014/04/2-very-different-migr.... DC is growing, but Metrorail ridership has been declining for a decade, ever since Uber/Lyft became available. Most domestic migration is to cities with poor or non-existent transit, like Dallas, Phoenix, etc.

sailfast 7y ago

I thought my reply boiled down to “we’d need a lot of people’s opinions on policy to change to set things up”. I was mostly providing a counterpoint to “of course bike friendly cities!” opinions which may not consider the limitations imposed on citizens in order to achieve this kind of objective. Having experienced NL bike culture first hand a great deal I think it’s awesome, but it’d also be frustrating to have a bunch of rules imposed on new development at a state or federal level. This stuff has got to start locally. Agreed - you should fight for that and support it, especially in your local community.