10 ms·

> Will be interested to see how it works out Easy to predict: more over-crowding, more pollution, more traffic, lower quality of living for everyone

ericmay 4y ago
Yep. In California, there are two answers: density (no cars, remove highways, etc.) or people need to stop moving there. It’s physics. There is no other way around this.
- thesuitonym 4y ago
  It doesn't even need to be no cars, just design spaces where people don't need cars.
  - lotsofpulp 4y ago
    It is an either or situation. If you give people the option to use cars, they will use them to drive 20min to a Costco and big grocery store for all their needs. They will also politically support measures that make their lives easier, such as minimum parking and bigger roads which then lead to needing cars. Severely restricting cars is the only way to have viable local businesses tailored to non-car shoppers and political support for advancing non-car infrastructure (i.e. sufficient density for sufficient people to live without cars and support businesses in walking/bicycling distance). The second a road more than 4 small car lanes across gets constructed (or 40ft), you make walking too cumbersome and risky.
    - dredmorbius 4y ago
      Gresham's law of urban planning? Auto-viable design drives out pedestrian-centric usage?
      - lotsofpulp 4y ago
        I guess? I think of it as a simple physics problem. Walking and cycling requires distances between destinations to be small. And individual cars, especially the American variety, require tremendous amounts of space. The two situations require complete opposite parameters.
        dredmorbius 4y ago
        So, yes, that. But also, once you have and permit cars, there's more that can be done with a car, and other characteristics tend to support them: - Large car parks and less walkable space. - Businesses distributed more broadly across the city or town. - Lack of services for pedestrians (e.g., deliveries for purchases, bus service or transit, etc.) - Greater risk for pedestrians and cyclists (more and faster traffic). Et cetera. So the initial imbalance grows with time.
    - chii 4y ago
      > have viable local businesses tailored to non-car shoppers i would imagine these local small shops cannot have the economy of scale that would allow a big retailer like costco to have cheap items. Which means the cost of living is going to be higher - it may or may not offset the savings of not having to pay for a car.
      - lotsofpulp 4y ago
        Huge externalities of “paying” for a car are not paid by car users. Costs of fossil fuel pollution, tire pollution, brake dust pollution, danger to pedestrians/cyclists, health costs due to sedentary lifestyles, increased fuel consumption due to distances between destinations being further which means mass has to travel further which means more energy consumed. I could even add kids not being able to play outside freely. Could maybe even more stratified societies and less communal atmospheres due to cars allowing people to be spread out.
- heartbeats 4y ago
  So why not impose an internal visa system? Instead of having people buy up the property and jack the prices to shit, just have some notion of "Californian citizenship". * If you were born there, you're grandfathered in by birthright. * If you move out, we'll pay you some money or whatever. * If you want to move in, either pay a big sum of money or convince the government you're helpful. Then they could use the money from these sales to invest in the community, rather than it going to property speculators.
  - aw1621107 4y ago
    Wouldn't such a scheme violate the Privileges and Immunities Clause of the US Constitution? See e.g., Crandall v. Nevada, where the Supreme Court explicitly held that an egress tax was unconstitutional. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crandall_v._Nevada https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crandall_v._Nevada
    - heartbeats 4y ago
      Certainly you couldn't do it like a straight-up visa policy, but you could probably achieve something very similar by giving them strongly unfavorable property taxes and so on.
      - aw1621107 4y ago
        Such a taxation scheme sounds like it can potentially run into similar issues as well. For example, from Cornell's Legal Information Institute [0]: > In the exercise of its taxing power, a state may not discriminate substantially between residents and nonresidents. In Ward v. Maryland the Court set aside a state law that imposed specific taxes upon nonresidents for the privilege of selling within the state goods that were produced in other states. Also found to be incompatible with the comity clause was a Tennessee license tax, the amount of which was dependent upon whether the person taxed had his chief office within or without the state. In Travis v. Yale & Towne Mfg. Co., the Court, although sustaining the right of a state to tax income accruing within its borders to nonresidents, held the particular tax void because it denied to nonresidents exemptions which were allowed to residents. The "terms 'resident' and 'citizen' are not synonymous," wrote Justice Pitney, "... but a general taxing scheme ... if it discriminates against all non-residents, has the necessary effect of including in the discrimination those who are citizens of other States ...." Where there were no discriminations between citizens and noncitizens, a state statute taxing the business of hiring persons within the state for labor outside the state was sustained. [0]: https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution-conan/article-4/section-2/clause-1/privileges-and-immunity-clause-doctrine-and-practice https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution-conan/article-4/sec...
- rayiner 4y ago
  California is growing slower than the US as a whole and lost a House seat this decade as a result. California has had net domestic outmigration (people leaving) since 1990.
  - majormajor 4y ago
    As of 2019 California had domestic out-migration for under-100k earners and in-migration for >100k earners. Plus overall immigration. That might look different post-Covid, but that was a recipe for an affordability disaster even without growing faster than the US as a whole. (I think the high-asset crowd is overall at least as responsible as just the high-income crowd, though. Billionaires gentrify the millionaire neighborhoods, the millionaires displace some of the 500kinaires, etc, etc.)
- TedShiller 4y ago
  Yep. Sometimes reality sucks. I also have a lot of wishes that will never come true.
_vertigo 4y ago
Santa Barbara is kind of an interesting informal case study. It's hemmed in by steep hills and the Pacific ocean and a lot of the available area has already been developed. https://www.google.com/maps/@34.4127513,-119.7096148,12z/data=!5m1!1e4 https://www.google.com/maps/@34.4127513,-119.7096148,12z/dat... On the other hand, despite great zoning in the core parts of Santa Barbara that outlaws the typical strip mall construction pattern, leaving a relatively dense-feeling downtown, it's extremely car centric. There's noticeable traffic both on the 101 and downtown, especially on weekends. Spending time in Santa Barbara, you can't help but feel that a) there isn't a lot more room to spread out for more development, but b) there is definitely a lot more "room" for Santa Barbara to improve in terms of sustainably improving density. Santa Barbara makes a lot of concessions to cars, which is not going to scale at all if the population grows. If you take car dependence as a given, Santa Barbara probably cannot afford to grow much more. On the other hand, Santa Barbara is famed for its nearly perfect weather year-round. Good weather and and its small size means that almost all trips within Santa Barbara proper can be made easily via E-bike, if only there were more bike lanes, but there are too many 2 lane roads with cars that move too quickly driven by drivers who are not used to sharing the road. But I suspect that Santa Barbara may be too dependent on famously car-centric Los Angeles to ever consider de-prioritizing cars.. It's all moot point, though, because I think most people who actually own homes in Santa Barbara are older and quite wealthy and do not really care too much about abstract things like "sustainable growth" and would quite prefer if Santa Barbara could just stay "the same" for the next 20 years until they die.
- stevesearer 4y ago
  State Street was closed to cars during pandemic and it appears that is going to be permanent. The city also has an e-bike program that I can informally say is used quite heavily. In addition many youths ride e-bikes and I will be interested to see if that reduces car dependence for that generation. Water availability is an important factor limiting growth (though we do have a desal plant). Wildfires are another problem to pay attention to.
  - _vertigo 4y ago
    After a couple of years away, I returned last week. Yes, the e-bike program looks quite promising. Closed State Street is a no-brainer, although I've heard a lot of NIMBY-types are opposing it for some reason. But, after living in San Francisco for a couple of years and becoming used to riding my bike everywhere, I had a realization that while on paper Santa Barbara should be much more inviting than SF for bikes, in practice it's weirdly almost less inviting because drivers do not seem interested in sharing the road at all and there are very, very few bike lanes. Most of the main one-way "through streets" that run north-south in Santa Barbara like De La Vina, Santa Barbara, Anacapa, etc. are decidedly bike hostile because people drive very fast on them and there is no bike lane. One way to solve this is to make State St, Bath St, and Garden St dedicated north-south bike thoroughfares, and give all of the east-west streets that cross State St. bike lanes. Biking through Santa Barbara would then be a matter of biking north or south on a dedicated, safe thoroughfare before turning off east or west until you arrive where you need. As it stands, not really very inviting to bike in, _especially_ if you don't know the city by heart..

ericmay 4y ago

Yep. In California, there are two answers: density (no cars, remove highways, etc.) or people need to stop moving there. It’s physics. There is no other way around this.

thesuitonym 4y ago
It doesn't even need to be no cars, just design spaces where people don't need cars.
- lotsofpulp 4y ago
  It is an either or situation. If you give people the option to use cars, they will use them to drive 20min to a Costco and big grocery store for all their needs. They will also politically support measures that make their lives easier, such as minimum parking and bigger roads which then lead to needing cars. Severely restricting cars is the only way to have viable local businesses tailored to non-car shoppers and political support for advancing non-car infrastructure (i.e. sufficient density for sufficient people to live without cars and support businesses in walking/bicycling distance). The second a road more than 4 small car lanes across gets constructed (or 40ft), you make walking too cumbersome and risky.
  - dredmorbius 4y ago
    Gresham's law of urban planning? Auto-viable design drives out pedestrian-centric usage?
    - lotsofpulp 4y ago
      I guess? I think of it as a simple physics problem. Walking and cycling requires distances between destinations to be small. And individual cars, especially the American variety, require tremendous amounts of space. The two situations require complete opposite parameters.
      - dredmorbius 4y ago
        So, yes, that. But also, once you have and permit cars, there's more that can be done with a car, and other characteristics tend to support them: - Large car parks and less walkable space. - Businesses distributed more broadly across the city or town. - Lack of services for pedestrians (e.g., deliveries for purchases, bus service or transit, etc.) - Greater risk for pedestrians and cyclists (more and faster traffic). Et cetera. So the initial imbalance grows with time.
  - chii 4y ago
    > have viable local businesses tailored to non-car shoppers i would imagine these local small shops cannot have the economy of scale that would allow a big retailer like costco to have cheap items. Which means the cost of living is going to be higher - it may or may not offset the savings of not having to pay for a car.
    - lotsofpulp 4y ago
      Huge externalities of “paying” for a car are not paid by car users. Costs of fossil fuel pollution, tire pollution, brake dust pollution, danger to pedestrians/cyclists, health costs due to sedentary lifestyles, increased fuel consumption due to distances between destinations being further which means mass has to travel further which means more energy consumed. I could even add kids not being able to play outside freely. Could maybe even more stratified societies and less communal atmospheres due to cars allowing people to be spread out.
heartbeats 4y ago
So why not impose an internal visa system? Instead of having people buy up the property and jack the prices to shit, just have some notion of "Californian citizenship". * If you were born there, you're grandfathered in by birthright. * If you move out, we'll pay you some money or whatever. * If you want to move in, either pay a big sum of money or convince the government you're helpful. Then they could use the money from these sales to invest in the community, rather than it going to property speculators.
- aw1621107 4y ago
  Wouldn't such a scheme violate the Privileges and Immunities Clause of the US Constitution? See e.g., Crandall v. Nevada, where the Supreme Court explicitly held that an egress tax was unconstitutional. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crandall_v._Nevada https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crandall_v._Nevada
  - heartbeats 4y ago
    Certainly you couldn't do it like a straight-up visa policy, but you could probably achieve something very similar by giving them strongly unfavorable property taxes and so on.
    - aw1621107 4y ago
      Such a taxation scheme sounds like it can potentially run into similar issues as well. For example, from Cornell's Legal Information Institute [0]: > In the exercise of its taxing power, a state may not discriminate substantially between residents and nonresidents. In Ward v. Maryland the Court set aside a state law that imposed specific taxes upon nonresidents for the privilege of selling within the state goods that were produced in other states. Also found to be incompatible with the comity clause was a Tennessee license tax, the amount of which was dependent upon whether the person taxed had his chief office within or without the state. In Travis v. Yale & Towne Mfg. Co., the Court, although sustaining the right of a state to tax income accruing within its borders to nonresidents, held the particular tax void because it denied to nonresidents exemptions which were allowed to residents. The "terms 'resident' and 'citizen' are not synonymous," wrote Justice Pitney, "... but a general taxing scheme ... if it discriminates against all non-residents, has the necessary effect of including in the discrimination those who are citizens of other States ...." Where there were no discriminations between citizens and noncitizens, a state statute taxing the business of hiring persons within the state for labor outside the state was sustained. [0]: https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution-conan/article-4/section-2/clause-1/privileges-and-immunity-clause-doctrine-and-practice https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution-conan/article-4/sec...
rayiner 4y ago
California is growing slower than the US as a whole and lost a House seat this decade as a result. California has had net domestic outmigration (people leaving) since 1990.
- majormajor 4y ago
  As of 2019 California had domestic out-migration for under-100k earners and in-migration for >100k earners. Plus overall immigration. That might look different post-Covid, but that was a recipe for an affordability disaster even without growing faster than the US as a whole. (I think the high-asset crowd is overall at least as responsible as just the high-income crowd, though. Billionaires gentrify the millionaire neighborhoods, the millionaires displace some of the 500kinaires, etc, etc.)
TedShiller 4y ago
Yep. Sometimes reality sucks. I also have a lot of wishes that will never come true.

_vertigo 4y ago

Santa Barbara is kind of an interesting informal case study. It's hemmed in by steep hills and the Pacific ocean and a lot of the available area has already been developed. https://www.google.com/maps/@34.4127513,-119.7096148,12z/data=!5m1!1e4 https://www.google.com/maps/@34.4127513,-119.7096148,12z/dat... On the other hand, despite great zoning in the core parts of Santa Barbara that outlaws the typical strip mall construction pattern, leaving a relatively dense-feeling downtown, it's extremely car centric. There's noticeable traffic both on the 101 and downtown, especially on weekends. Spending time in Santa Barbara, you can't help but feel that a) there isn't a lot more room to spread out for more development, but b) there is definitely a lot more "room" for Santa Barbara to improve in terms of sustainably improving density. Santa Barbara makes a lot of concessions to cars, which is not going to scale at all if the population grows. If you take car dependence as a given, Santa Barbara probably cannot afford to grow much more. On the other hand, Santa Barbara is famed for its nearly perfect weather year-round. Good weather and and its small size means that almost all trips within Santa Barbara proper can be made easily via E-bike, if only there were more bike lanes, but there are too many 2 lane roads with cars that move too quickly driven by drivers who are not used to sharing the road. But I suspect that Santa Barbara may be too dependent on famously car-centric Los Angeles to ever consider de-prioritizing cars.. It's all moot point, though, because I think most people who actually own homes in Santa Barbara are older and quite wealthy and do not really care too much about abstract things like "sustainable growth" and would quite prefer if Santa Barbara could just stay "the same" for the next 20 years until they die.

stevesearer 4y ago
State Street was closed to cars during pandemic and it appears that is going to be permanent. The city also has an e-bike program that I can informally say is used quite heavily. In addition many youths ride e-bikes and I will be interested to see if that reduces car dependence for that generation. Water availability is an important factor limiting growth (though we do have a desal plant). Wildfires are another problem to pay attention to.
- _vertigo 4y ago
  After a couple of years away, I returned last week. Yes, the e-bike program looks quite promising. Closed State Street is a no-brainer, although I've heard a lot of NIMBY-types are opposing it for some reason. But, after living in San Francisco for a couple of years and becoming used to riding my bike everywhere, I had a realization that while on paper Santa Barbara should be much more inviting than SF for bikes, in practice it's weirdly almost less inviting because drivers do not seem interested in sharing the road at all and there are very, very few bike lanes. Most of the main one-way "through streets" that run north-south in Santa Barbara like De La Vina, Santa Barbara, Anacapa, etc. are decidedly bike hostile because people drive very fast on them and there is no bike lane. One way to solve this is to make State St, Bath St, and Garden St dedicated north-south bike thoroughfares, and give all of the east-west streets that cross State St. bike lanes. Biking through Santa Barbara would then be a matter of biking north or south on a dedicated, safe thoroughfare before turning off east or west until you arrive where you need. As it stands, not really very inviting to bike in, _especially_ if you don't know the city by heart..