5 ms·

If you go to any community board meeting, you'll hear old people rant for hours about how their cars are essential and bike are destroying the city. And for som

• zip1234 5y ago
  Community board meetings in general are a problem that nobody has found a great solution to. Oddly enough, the pandemic has caused most of these to go virtual, which has nerfed a lot of the power of the highly motivated old people with too much time on their hands.
  • rtlfe 5y ago
    Honestly the easy solution is to ignore the CBs. Surveys show that the majority of people want more bus and bike lanes, so just build them and skip all of the "community input" aka "giving veto power to a small minority". https://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/ny-bike-lane-survey-data-siena-20210126-sszpyz77lzfpdaems4rhdbgaai-story.html https://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/ny-bike-lane-survey-dat...
    • irrational 5y ago
      A small minority who overwhelmingly votes and has lots of money. Of course the politicians listen to them.
    • hello_newman 5y ago
      Wow, the blatant hypocrisy of this comment. Imagine some cause or topic in your local government that you're passionate about and someone saying, "hey, let's just do what we want because f*ck what the other side thinks". If you don't like that a group of people have more perceived power than you in your local government then find a way to fix it ethically. Don't bypass local democracy just because you think it's easier to take a shortcut.
      • zucker42 5y ago
        Hmm, I think the problem the person you replied to sees is that sentiment community board meetings are not as good at measuring what the "average citizen" wants as opinion polls. Why do CB meetings have the moral high ground?
        • disgruntledphd2 5y ago
          Because they are part of a local democratic infrastructure that is actually pretty good by global standards in the US.
          • dijit 5y ago
            > that is actually pretty good by global standards in the US Citation needed. From a European perspective, it is not my impression that the local democratic system is good in any US city. But that could be my filter bubble, we only heard bad things because people shout the loudest about bad things.
            • thehappypm 5y ago
              What are the main problems you think of local government? I'm curious what the perception is in Europe. American cities aren't the pretty, walkable, public-transit oriented cities you have in Europe but that doesn't mean they're failures either.
              • disgruntledphd2 5y ago
                So, the US actually has real local government, with elections at very low levels, relative to what is more centralised and formalised system in the UK & Ireland. I'm not a big fan of the practices of a lot of these low-level elected groups (seriously, fuck you Palo Alto representatives), but the principle behind the existence of all the local town and county governance systems (and particularly the heavy reliance on elected people) are things that seem like really good ideas to me, and that I think should exist in more places (maybe they do, I'm sure the commenters here will alert me to such places ;) ).
• colinmhayes 5y ago
  Those are the people who vote.