5 ms·

Exactly. The streets are public. They are paid for by the taxes collected by the town. And now Google is using them to increase the utility of their app, which

by rp1 5y ago

Exactly. The streets are public. They are paid for by the taxes collected by the town. And now Google is using them to increase the utility of their app, which benefits Google and their shareholders. The increased traffic causes wear and tear on the roads to increase, and quality of life to drop dramatically. A five minute drive to the store takes 40 minutes now. What does Google give back to the public in return? They don’t even pay their taxes.

raldi 5y ago
Do you have this level of indignance against car manufacturers, who also use the existence of public streets to benefit their shareholders? > What does Google give back to the public in return? Free, searchable maps and outstanding directions that allow all taxpayers to benefit from all the roads they pay for, instead of reserving certain roads for the use of an exclusionary group of locals.
- eesmith 5y ago
  I don't follow your argument. If the answer is "yes", would you accept that things need to be changed? While I can't speak for rp1, yes, there are many who are indignant that the road system is biased in favor of car manufacturers over other forms of transit. You might recall that "jaywalker" was a marketing term created by car manufacturers to shift blame to pedestrians rather than car drivers, when a driver hits a walker - https://www.vox.com/2015/1/15/7551873/jaywalking-history https://www.vox.com/2015/1/15/7551873/jaywalking-history - and those anti-jaywalking laws still exist.
  - raldi 5y ago
    Indeed, and I'd also recommend reading The High Price of Free Parking for all the ways we stupidly subsidize car culture. As a transportation activist, I'm used to drivers attempting to claim the progressive mantle by saying that a tech shuttle bus or proposed bikeshare station represents the privitization of public space, and then completely dismiss how free (that is to say, fully-subsidized) parking and cheap tolls do that to car manufacturers and owners and oil companies to a far greater extent. If OP answered yes, we could have an actual discussion. If they answered no, I'd know that further discussion was hopeless.
smabie 5y ago
The amount of time saved by other drivers taking this route could very well outweigh the time it costs you. So all in all, could be a utilitarian win wrt maximizing total utility. You're just upset that you're the loser in this situation.
- eesmith 5y ago
  rp1 also pointed to 'The increased traffic causes wear and tear on the roads to increase, and quality of life to drop dramatically', so don't focus just on the increase time part. Your full analysis would also need to consider how higher use by car drivers affects other uses of the road. Some people cycle, for example, but increasing car traffic will likely increase injuries and deaths due to collisions. This can be mitigated by separate bike lanes, which has its own cost. As a kid, we played "baseball" and "tennis" on the street, because it was an open area, the traffic was low, and no parks were nearby. If the traffic rate increases, then those opportunities disappear. Pushing kids inside, because there's no safe place outside, may affect childhood obesity. There's also a shift in pollution closer to living areas, and the stop&go local traffic may increase brake dust pollution ("Brake dust air pollution may have same harmful effects on immune cells as diesel exhaust" - https://phys.org/news/2020-01-air-pollution-effects-immune-cells.html https://phys.org/news/2020-01-air-pollution-effects-immune-c... ). So all in all, it could be a net-negative, even if it's a positive for some people with cars, and for those who manufacture cars. It's certainly not as simple as adding up time saved with extra time waiting. As for utilitarianism, would you walk away from Omelas?
  - KptMarchewa 5y ago
    >The increased traffic causes wear and tear on the roads to increase Unless they route large trucks through local roads, the impact is negligible. https://www.insidescience.org/news/how-much-damage-do-heavy-trucks-do-our-roads https://www.insidescience.org/news/how-much-damage-do-heavy-...
    - eesmith 5y ago
      Thank you. Though looking at it, that's a different scenario than I was thinking of. My local parking garage has groove marks on the entrance and exit, where all cars are channeled through the same route, and where they are most likely to brake and start. Large trucks aren't allowed, so in that specific case the impact isn't "negligible". I was using that observation to guide my intuition. The experiment you pointed to was for vehicles driven "around a loop until the road was damaged to a certain point", which I believe doesn't include starting and stopping. A search found https://ascelibrary.org/doi/10.1061/9780784478462.006 https://ascelibrary.org/doi/10.1061/9780784478462.006 with "In hot-mix asphalt (HMA) pavements, rutting failure due to shear deformation is often more prevalent at intersections with turning and/or stop-go traffic, particularly when subjected to slow-speed heavy traffic loading and high temperatures.", so that's the engineering way to describe what I was thinking of. I would be surprised that a road designed for 30 cars per hour can handle 150 cars per hour with no shortening of its lifespan. I realize that weather and other factors play a role in deterioration, but in my 10 minutes of looking I found nothing which gave something more concrete (or more asphalt ;).

by rp1 5y ago

raldi 5y ago

Do you have this level of indignance against car manufacturers, who also use the existence of public streets to benefit their shareholders? > What does Google give back to the public in return? Free, searchable maps and outstanding directions that allow all taxpayers to benefit from all the roads they pay for, instead of reserving certain roads for the use of an exclusionary group of locals.

eesmith 5y ago
I don't follow your argument. If the answer is "yes", would you accept that things need to be changed? While I can't speak for rp1, yes, there are many who are indignant that the road system is biased in favor of car manufacturers over other forms of transit. You might recall that "jaywalker" was a marketing term created by car manufacturers to shift blame to pedestrians rather than car drivers, when a driver hits a walker - https://www.vox.com/2015/1/15/7551873/jaywalking-history https://www.vox.com/2015/1/15/7551873/jaywalking-history - and those anti-jaywalking laws still exist.
- raldi 5y ago
  Indeed, and I'd also recommend reading The High Price of Free Parking for all the ways we stupidly subsidize car culture. As a transportation activist, I'm used to drivers attempting to claim the progressive mantle by saying that a tech shuttle bus or proposed bikeshare station represents the privitization of public space, and then completely dismiss how free (that is to say, fully-subsidized) parking and cheap tolls do that to car manufacturers and owners and oil companies to a far greater extent. If OP answered yes, we could have an actual discussion. If they answered no, I'd know that further discussion was hopeless.

smabie 5y ago

The amount of time saved by other drivers taking this route could very well outweigh the time it costs you. So all in all, could be a utilitarian win wrt maximizing total utility. You're just upset that you're the loser in this situation.

eesmith 5y ago
rp1 also pointed to 'The increased traffic causes wear and tear on the roads to increase, and quality of life to drop dramatically', so don't focus just on the increase time part. Your full analysis would also need to consider how higher use by car drivers affects other uses of the road. Some people cycle, for example, but increasing car traffic will likely increase injuries and deaths due to collisions. This can be mitigated by separate bike lanes, which has its own cost. As a kid, we played "baseball" and "tennis" on the street, because it was an open area, the traffic was low, and no parks were nearby. If the traffic rate increases, then those opportunities disappear. Pushing kids inside, because there's no safe place outside, may affect childhood obesity. There's also a shift in pollution closer to living areas, and the stop&go local traffic may increase brake dust pollution ("Brake dust air pollution may have same harmful effects on immune cells as diesel exhaust" - https://phys.org/news/2020-01-air-pollution-effects-immune-cells.html https://phys.org/news/2020-01-air-pollution-effects-immune-c... ). So all in all, it could be a net-negative, even if it's a positive for some people with cars, and for those who manufacture cars. It's certainly not as simple as adding up time saved with extra time waiting. As for utilitarianism, would you walk away from Omelas?
- KptMarchewa 5y ago
  >The increased traffic causes wear and tear on the roads to increase Unless they route large trucks through local roads, the impact is negligible. https://www.insidescience.org/news/how-much-damage-do-heavy-trucks-do-our-roads https://www.insidescience.org/news/how-much-damage-do-heavy-...
  - eesmith 5y ago
    Thank you. Though looking at it, that's a different scenario than I was thinking of. My local parking garage has groove marks on the entrance and exit, where all cars are channeled through the same route, and where they are most likely to brake and start. Large trucks aren't allowed, so in that specific case the impact isn't "negligible". I was using that observation to guide my intuition. The experiment you pointed to was for vehicles driven "around a loop until the road was damaged to a certain point", which I believe doesn't include starting and stopping. A search found https://ascelibrary.org/doi/10.1061/9780784478462.006 https://ascelibrary.org/doi/10.1061/9780784478462.006 with "In hot-mix asphalt (HMA) pavements, rutting failure due to shear deformation is often more prevalent at intersections with turning and/or stop-go traffic, particularly when subjected to slow-speed heavy traffic loading and high temperatures.", so that's the engineering way to describe what I was thinking of. I would be surprised that a road designed for 30 cars per hour can handle 150 cars per hour with no shortening of its lifespan. I realize that weather and other factors play a role in deterioration, but in my 10 minutes of looking I found nothing which gave something more concrete (or more asphalt ;).