19 ms·

People and governments need to realize that trying to make city living and non-city living the same is a losing proposition. Cities should not have an obligatio

by causi 4y ago

People and governments need to realize that trying to make city living and non-city living the same is a losing proposition. Cities should not have an obligation to be car-accessible. It's unnatural for a place with thirty thousand people per square mile. It'd probably be better for everyone if personal vehicles were outright banned in all major cities, as long as it's possible to live in a city without ever leaving it and to live outside the city without ever entering it. Half the square footage of a street being taken up by cars parked on it is utterly perverse. I say that as someone who has never ridden a bus or subway and who would rather pull my tooth with a pair of pliers than set foot in a major city.

idiotsecant 4y ago
This has increasingly been on my mind lately with the discussions around firearm laws. I grew up in a relatively rural state where firearm ownership and usage was pretty much assumed and a normal part of life because law enforcement and animal control services simply aren't available at the speed you need them in an emergency. In an urban area there are different considerations that might weigh less heavily in favor of unrestricted access to firearms. It strikes me that rural area firearm ownership might warrant a different treatment than urban area ownership. And if that's the case maybe there's a wide class of these sorts of things that we should address on a similar basis.
- DiggyJohnson 4y ago
  Really well put. The reason I'm making this Reddit-style comment is because I believe this sort of nuanced perspective is exceedingly rare in any venue that actually matters. There is little to not attempt to understand or empathize with the "other side" in these sorts of debates, usually.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    It's also combined with years, decades, of trying to "solve problems at the highest level" which is the federal government, and those often end up being heavy handed or failures entirely.
- lamontcg 4y ago
  Australia's gun laws allow pump/lever/bolt action rifles for hunting along with shotguns for rural home defense (primary producers and farm workers can buy pump shotguns). Pistols and anything semiautomatic are mostly restricted to occupations that require them. There's also exceptions for sport shooters, so rural people can start an organized gun club and actively train in order to own shotguns or pistols (a "well-regulated militia"?). This means, though, that an 18 year old is only going to be able to buy a bolt action rifle without coming under some extra scrutiny of having to join a sport shooting club.
  - germinalphrase 4y ago
    Which makes me wonder if putting state level structure around “militias” (open entry for anyone over 18, govern some aspects of sport shooting and training) would be an effective entry to reducing the number of semiautomatic weapons in circulation (though the numbers there are so staggering that it feels somewhat pointless).
    - idiotsecant 4y ago
      FYI this isn't super different from how it's culturally done in certain circles in the US (although it's not universal). When I was a young teen I took a hunter's education course that covered ethical hunting, firearm safety, first aid, basic wilderness survival, etc. I would support making that sort of requirement for owning firearms universal, but I would anticipate that a lot of people would view this as a registry which is not a very attractive prospect for a lot of people.
      - germinalphrase 4y ago
        This is my experience as well. I grew up in a small midwestern town. I continue to shoot and do a little bit of hunting, but the temperature around firearms and gun ownership really took a turn in the 90’s. Lots of wild conversations happening down at the conservation club. Edit: I guess my initial comment was more about a cultural/legal framework for reasonably reducing the number of semiautomatic weapons in the general populace.
- mrtranscendence 4y ago
  If getting a firearm is as easy as driving forty-five minutes outside of town, then access may as well be unrestricted.
  - failTide 4y ago
    Not if there's a border checkpoint to enter cities - I wouldn't be surprised to see that sort of thing at some point down the line. Like customs.
    - kelnos 4y ago
      Oof, no thanks. I'm pretty anti-gun, but that sort of thing is not worth it.
  - Kbelicius 4y ago
    If only there was a way to check from where a person is...
  - acjacobson 4y ago
    True, but it could still be treated as a crime within the city and punished accordingly. This was the premise of DC vs. Heller which overturned a DC law that banned handguns in the district.
- thaumasiotes 4y ago
  > I grew up in a relatively rural state where firearm ownership and usage was pretty much assumed and a normal part of life because law enforcement and animal control services simply aren't available at the speed you need them in an emergency. > In an urban area there are different considerations that might weigh less heavily in favor of unrestricted access to firearms. Law enforcement isn't available at the speed you need it in an emergency, anywhere. This is often recognized in the statement "when seconds count, the police are only minutes away". Law enforcement's job is to enforce the laws after the fact. Animal control may be available at the required speeds just because animal-related emergencies generally allow for more time. If you have a mountain lion hanging around outside your door, you can just not go outside until it's gone.
  - zdragnar 4y ago
    Unless the mountain lion is attacking your children or farm animals out in the yard. Humans are extremely slow runners compared to most dangerous large animals. Even black bears, who really only attack to protect their cubs, can sprint a hell of a lot faster than humans.
  - idiotsecant 4y ago
    >Law enforcement isn't available at the speed you need it in an emergency, anywhere. This is often recognized in the statement "when seconds count, the police are only minutes away". Law enforcement's job is to enforce the laws after the fact. While this is certainly true, we're talking about the difference between minutes and hours out in the country. I am reasonably comfortable walking around town unarmed because, whether it's accurate or not, I feel like there are enough police and people around that i'm not on my own. I do not have the same level of comfort 10 miles into the mountains. >If you have a mountain lion hanging around outside your door, you can just not go outside until it's gone. This might not be obvious to someone who hasn't dealt with this problem before but the issue is not just seeing one outside your house, it's coming across a moose with cubs or a bear on a hike 10 miles from home. That is a situation where being able to make a lot of noise best case or using deadly force worst case are the different between you living or not.
    - 4y ago
- UIUC_06 4y ago
  Once it becomes a battlefield in the Culture Wars, you may as well stop trying to use logic. Only your own side is going to listen. To people on the anti-gun-control side, NO such law is acceptable, because it's just the thin edge of the wedge. "The pro-gun-control people are just going to pocket these gains, and push for more." Can you honestly say they're wrong?
  - cowtools 4y ago
    I agree completely. In the current political climate, there's no reason for the anti-gun-control crowd to compromise with the pro-gun-control crowd: their opponents do not hold strong principles. There's no middle ground or end goal at which they would be satisfied. It's not like they're gonna throw their hands up and say "Welp, we finally passed the Ban Attachable Whatevers Act, this is enough gun control, let's go home now"
- bobthepanda 4y ago
  This is true but also somewhat incomplete. A big source of guns in areas that do have strict gun control in the US is other states. The recent shooting in the NYC subway, for example, was perpetrated by a man from Milwaukee, WI. With no such thing as internal border checks within the US, it would be quite difficult to maintain a two-tier gun control system.
  - idiotsecant 4y ago
    Are you saying you consider Milwaukee rural? Half a million people live there and it's the most populous place in WI.
    - bobthepanda 4y ago
      More meant to illustrate how porous state borders are with guns despite the varying legal regimes en route. Rural-urban borders are even more porous, if anything. So many roads to cover.
- trgn 4y ago
  The distinction between rural and city life is absolutely fundamental, since the dawn of civilization that's been the case. For a relatively recent acknowledgement of this; the Kentucky flag is a frontiersman shaking hands with a city slicker. This distinction between rural and urban was still very keenly felt, only two centuries ago. That started to fray when the car allowed the city to engulf the country-side; people wanted to have their cake and eat it. The wealth and splendor of the city, with the bucolic serenity of the countryside. Cruel irony that the majority of our living environment is that we now have neither.
throwaway894345 4y ago
I sympathize with this sentiment, but it's not tenable without major investments in public transit. I live in Chicago, the third largest US city, and getting around by car is about twice as fast as taking public transit even when "public transit" means taking the L with no connections during rush hour (worst case scenario for car commuting). Mind you, (contrary to recent remarks by our mayor) Chicago isn't even a "car city"--we have only ~3ish arteries through the city and everything else is slow-moving side streets. Meanwhile, most trains are pretty unpleasant--many cars wreak of piss, smoke, etc, people free-style rapping, trying to start fights (especially people of questionable sanity), etc. Buses can be better, but they're also a lot slower. If you have a family, own a dog, or have a disability, then it quickly becomes more practical to own a car, and even if we clean up public transit, police it properly, and expand it I'm not sure it would change the calculus--you would still likely be better off owning a car than relying solely on public transit and rideshare and so on. Of course, I want Chicago to make those improvements to its public transit system if only to pull more people off the road more often, but I think there will always be a core group of people who need to own cars. I think if this is true for Chicago it will also be true for smaller US cities.
- mrguyorama 4y ago
  >Meanwhile, most trains are pretty unpleasant--many cars wreak of piss, smoke, etc, people free-style rapping, trying to start fights Important note, these kind of "only the bums use public transit" problems will go away if and only if non-bums start using public transit.
  - xyzzyz 4y ago
    Bums will not leave public transit just because non-bums start using it more often. Only practical mechanism here to achieve the effect you predict is that non-bums are angry about terrible conditions in public transit they are dependent on using, and force the government to kick the bums out. If this is viable, why won’t the government, you know, kick out the bums now? That it does not do so, I take as evidence that it won’t do it in future either.
wwweston 4y ago
> It'd probably be better for everyone if personal vehicles were outright banned in all major cities Why go this far when it's pretty clear that a happy medium is possible? Seems to me it's clear that a place like NYC does well enough at accommodating density, foot traffic, public transport, bicycling, and still allows a modicum of (usually inconvenient but still possible) auto traffic.
- nobody9999 4y ago
  >Why go this far when it's pretty clear that a happy medium is possible? Seems to me it's clear that a place like NYC does well enough at accommodating density, foot traffic, public transport, bicycling, and still allows a modicum of (usually inconvenient but still possible) auto traffic. As a native New Yorker, I have to disagree. Your standard bike ride in NYC is a mix of exhilaration, care and outright terror because the motor vehicles just don't pay any attention at all to bicyclists. I've been hit (from behind) by a bus without ever changing lanes. I've had taxi passengers open their doors three feet in front of me (no way to stop or get out of the way) and way more close calls than I care to remember. Cars are a blight on the city.
usrn 4y ago
Likewise dense construction shouldn't be forced on people who are happy with their suburb/exurb.
krater23 4y ago
> It'd probably be better for everyone if personal vehicles were outright banned in all major cities, as long as it's possible to live in a city without ever leaving it and to live outside the city without ever entering it. I'm sure it is a great idea to divide the people of a country in city-livers and non-city-livers. It will bring wealth and happyness in this new world. And maybee the next big civil war...
- xorfish 4y ago
  There is this thing called trains and public transport. I don't live in a city. I don't have or need a car. I can do nearly everything with a 10 minute walk. There are two city centers available to me within a 20 minute train ride and many more with a 1.5h train ride. You don't need cars to have "access" to cities.
bluescrn 4y ago
> It'd probably be better for everyone if personal vehicles were outright banned in all major cities And then cities become prisons, with no escape even at the weekends. The people waging war on the car rarely seem to be car-free themselves. There seems to be an attitude of 'To deal with climate change, pack all the poors into tiny apartments in megacities and take their transport away. Then the wealthy people can have the rest of the planet and its open roads!'
- sofixa 4y ago
  > And then cities become prisons, with no escape even at the weekends Nope. It just means you take the train to your weekend getaway or the airport or the long term car parking or whatever.
  - bluescrn 4y ago
    Trains are effective for moving people between cities, or around cities, but will rarely serve destinations out in the countryside. For that, you need a car.
    - xorfish 4y ago
      Have you been to Switzerland? Going on a hike where you don't need to go back to the place you started is pretty convenient.
    - sofixa 4y ago
      My grandparents live in a village with a few hundred inhabitants, and have a train connection to the "big" city(30k) nearby multiple times per day. In the poorest country in the EU. Of course that's not feasible anywhere, that's why there's the concept of Park and Ride. You take the train to a station which has a big car parking and you can use your car from there. The usual use is for people commuting by car to be able to leave their cars there and take the train into the city, in order to avoid traffic (and this concept gets abused in the US and Canada with train stations and lines only for that single use case and unusable for anyone without a car), but it can go both ways.

by causi 4y ago

idiotsecant 4y ago

This has increasingly been on my mind lately with the discussions around firearm laws. I grew up in a relatively rural state where firearm ownership and usage was pretty much assumed and a normal part of life because law enforcement and animal control services simply aren't available at the speed you need them in an emergency. In an urban area there are different considerations that might weigh less heavily in favor of unrestricted access to firearms. It strikes me that rural area firearm ownership might warrant a different treatment than urban area ownership. And if that's the case maybe there's a wide class of these sorts of things that we should address on a similar basis.

DiggyJohnson 4y ago
Really well put. The reason I'm making this Reddit-style comment is because I believe this sort of nuanced perspective is exceedingly rare in any venue that actually matters. There is little to not attempt to understand or empathize with the "other side" in these sorts of debates, usually.
- bombcar 4y ago
  It's also combined with years, decades, of trying to "solve problems at the highest level" which is the federal government, and those often end up being heavy handed or failures entirely.
lamontcg 4y ago
Australia's gun laws allow pump/lever/bolt action rifles for hunting along with shotguns for rural home defense (primary producers and farm workers can buy pump shotguns). Pistols and anything semiautomatic are mostly restricted to occupations that require them. There's also exceptions for sport shooters, so rural people can start an organized gun club and actively train in order to own shotguns or pistols (a "well-regulated militia"?). This means, though, that an 18 year old is only going to be able to buy a bolt action rifle without coming under some extra scrutiny of having to join a sport shooting club.
- germinalphrase 4y ago
  Which makes me wonder if putting state level structure around “militias” (open entry for anyone over 18, govern some aspects of sport shooting and training) would be an effective entry to reducing the number of semiautomatic weapons in circulation (though the numbers there are so staggering that it feels somewhat pointless).
  - idiotsecant 4y ago
    FYI this isn't super different from how it's culturally done in certain circles in the US (although it's not universal). When I was a young teen I took a hunter's education course that covered ethical hunting, firearm safety, first aid, basic wilderness survival, etc. I would support making that sort of requirement for owning firearms universal, but I would anticipate that a lot of people would view this as a registry which is not a very attractive prospect for a lot of people.
    - germinalphrase 4y ago
      This is my experience as well. I grew up in a small midwestern town. I continue to shoot and do a little bit of hunting, but the temperature around firearms and gun ownership really took a turn in the 90’s. Lots of wild conversations happening down at the conservation club. Edit: I guess my initial comment was more about a cultural/legal framework for reasonably reducing the number of semiautomatic weapons in the general populace.
mrtranscendence 4y ago
If getting a firearm is as easy as driving forty-five minutes outside of town, then access may as well be unrestricted.
- failTide 4y ago
  Not if there's a border checkpoint to enter cities - I wouldn't be surprised to see that sort of thing at some point down the line. Like customs.
  - kelnos 4y ago
    Oof, no thanks. I'm pretty anti-gun, but that sort of thing is not worth it.
- Kbelicius 4y ago
  If only there was a way to check from where a person is...
- acjacobson 4y ago
  True, but it could still be treated as a crime within the city and punished accordingly. This was the premise of DC vs. Heller which overturned a DC law that banned handguns in the district.
thaumasiotes 4y ago
> I grew up in a relatively rural state where firearm ownership and usage was pretty much assumed and a normal part of life because law enforcement and animal control services simply aren't available at the speed you need them in an emergency. > In an urban area there are different considerations that might weigh less heavily in favor of unrestricted access to firearms. Law enforcement isn't available at the speed you need it in an emergency, anywhere. This is often recognized in the statement "when seconds count, the police are only minutes away". Law enforcement's job is to enforce the laws after the fact. Animal control may be available at the required speeds just because animal-related emergencies generally allow for more time. If you have a mountain lion hanging around outside your door, you can just not go outside until it's gone.
- zdragnar 4y ago
  Unless the mountain lion is attacking your children or farm animals out in the yard. Humans are extremely slow runners compared to most dangerous large animals. Even black bears, who really only attack to protect their cubs, can sprint a hell of a lot faster than humans.
- idiotsecant 4y ago
  >Law enforcement isn't available at the speed you need it in an emergency, anywhere. This is often recognized in the statement "when seconds count, the police are only minutes away". Law enforcement's job is to enforce the laws after the fact. While this is certainly true, we're talking about the difference between minutes and hours out in the country. I am reasonably comfortable walking around town unarmed because, whether it's accurate or not, I feel like there are enough police and people around that i'm not on my own. I do not have the same level of comfort 10 miles into the mountains. >If you have a mountain lion hanging around outside your door, you can just not go outside until it's gone. This might not be obvious to someone who hasn't dealt with this problem before but the issue is not just seeing one outside your house, it's coming across a moose with cubs or a bear on a hike 10 miles from home. That is a situation where being able to make a lot of noise best case or using deadly force worst case are the different between you living or not.
  - 4y ago
UIUC_06 4y ago
Once it becomes a battlefield in the Culture Wars, you may as well stop trying to use logic. Only your own side is going to listen. To people on the anti-gun-control side, NO such law is acceptable, because it's just the thin edge of the wedge. "The pro-gun-control people are just going to pocket these gains, and push for more." Can you honestly say they're wrong?
- cowtools 4y ago
  I agree completely. In the current political climate, there's no reason for the anti-gun-control crowd to compromise with the pro-gun-control crowd: their opponents do not hold strong principles. There's no middle ground or end goal at which they would be satisfied. It's not like they're gonna throw their hands up and say "Welp, we finally passed the Ban Attachable Whatevers Act, this is enough gun control, let's go home now"
bobthepanda 4y ago
This is true but also somewhat incomplete. A big source of guns in areas that do have strict gun control in the US is other states. The recent shooting in the NYC subway, for example, was perpetrated by a man from Milwaukee, WI. With no such thing as internal border checks within the US, it would be quite difficult to maintain a two-tier gun control system.
- idiotsecant 4y ago
  Are you saying you consider Milwaukee rural? Half a million people live there and it's the most populous place in WI.
  - bobthepanda 4y ago
    More meant to illustrate how porous state borders are with guns despite the varying legal regimes en route. Rural-urban borders are even more porous, if anything. So many roads to cover.
trgn 4y ago
The distinction between rural and city life is absolutely fundamental, since the dawn of civilization that's been the case. For a relatively recent acknowledgement of this; the Kentucky flag is a frontiersman shaking hands with a city slicker. This distinction between rural and urban was still very keenly felt, only two centuries ago. That started to fray when the car allowed the city to engulf the country-side; people wanted to have their cake and eat it. The wealth and splendor of the city, with the bucolic serenity of the countryside. Cruel irony that the majority of our living environment is that we now have neither.

throwaway894345 4y ago

I sympathize with this sentiment, but it's not tenable without major investments in public transit. I live in Chicago, the third largest US city, and getting around by car is about twice as fast as taking public transit even when "public transit" means taking the L with no connections during rush hour (worst case scenario for car commuting). Mind you, (contrary to recent remarks by our mayor) Chicago isn't even a "car city"--we have only ~3ish arteries through the city and everything else is slow-moving side streets. Meanwhile, most trains are pretty unpleasant--many cars wreak of piss, smoke, etc, people free-style rapping, trying to start fights (especially people of questionable sanity), etc. Buses can be better, but they're also a lot slower. If you have a family, own a dog, or have a disability, then it quickly becomes more practical to own a car, and even if we clean up public transit, police it properly, and expand it I'm not sure it would change the calculus--you would still likely be better off owning a car than relying solely on public transit and rideshare and so on. Of course, I want Chicago to make those improvements to its public transit system if only to pull more people off the road more often, but I think there will always be a core group of people who need to own cars. I think if this is true for Chicago it will also be true for smaller US cities.

mrguyorama 4y ago
>Meanwhile, most trains are pretty unpleasant--many cars wreak of piss, smoke, etc, people free-style rapping, trying to start fights Important note, these kind of "only the bums use public transit" problems will go away if and only if non-bums start using public transit.
- xyzzyz 4y ago
  Bums will not leave public transit just because non-bums start using it more often. Only practical mechanism here to achieve the effect you predict is that non-bums are angry about terrible conditions in public transit they are dependent on using, and force the government to kick the bums out. If this is viable, why won’t the government, you know, kick out the bums now? That it does not do so, I take as evidence that it won’t do it in future either.

wwweston 4y ago

> It'd probably be better for everyone if personal vehicles were outright banned in all major cities Why go this far when it's pretty clear that a happy medium is possible? Seems to me it's clear that a place like NYC does well enough at accommodating density, foot traffic, public transport, bicycling, and still allows a modicum of (usually inconvenient but still possible) auto traffic.

nobody9999 4y ago
>Why go this far when it's pretty clear that a happy medium is possible? Seems to me it's clear that a place like NYC does well enough at accommodating density, foot traffic, public transport, bicycling, and still allows a modicum of (usually inconvenient but still possible) auto traffic. As a native New Yorker, I have to disagree. Your standard bike ride in NYC is a mix of exhilaration, care and outright terror because the motor vehicles just don't pay any attention at all to bicyclists. I've been hit (from behind) by a bus without ever changing lanes. I've had taxi passengers open their doors three feet in front of me (no way to stop or get out of the way) and way more close calls than I care to remember. Cars are a blight on the city.

usrn 4y ago

Likewise dense construction shouldn't be forced on people who are happy with their suburb/exurb.

krater23 4y ago

> It'd probably be better for everyone if personal vehicles were outright banned in all major cities, as long as it's possible to live in a city without ever leaving it and to live outside the city without ever entering it. I'm sure it is a great idea to divide the people of a country in city-livers and non-city-livers. It will bring wealth and happyness in this new world. And maybee the next big civil war...

xorfish 4y ago
There is this thing called trains and public transport. I don't live in a city. I don't have or need a car. I can do nearly everything with a 10 minute walk. There are two city centers available to me within a 20 minute train ride and many more with a 1.5h train ride. You don't need cars to have "access" to cities.

bluescrn 4y ago

> It'd probably be better for everyone if personal vehicles were outright banned in all major cities And then cities become prisons, with no escape even at the weekends. The people waging war on the car rarely seem to be car-free themselves. There seems to be an attitude of 'To deal with climate change, pack all the poors into tiny apartments in megacities and take their transport away. Then the wealthy people can have the rest of the planet and its open roads!'

sofixa 4y ago
> And then cities become prisons, with no escape even at the weekends Nope. It just means you take the train to your weekend getaway or the airport or the long term car parking or whatever.
- bluescrn 4y ago
  Trains are effective for moving people between cities, or around cities, but will rarely serve destinations out in the countryside. For that, you need a car.
  - xorfish 4y ago
    Have you been to Switzerland? Going on a hike where you don't need to go back to the place you started is pretty convenient.
  - sofixa 4y ago
    My grandparents live in a village with a few hundred inhabitants, and have a train connection to the "big" city(30k) nearby multiple times per day. In the poorest country in the EU. Of course that's not feasible anywhere, that's why there's the concept of Park and Ride. You take the train to a station which has a big car parking and you can use your car from there. The usual use is for people commuting by car to be able to leave their cars there and take the train into the city, in order to avoid traffic (and this concept gets abused in the US and Canada with train stations and lines only for that single use case and unusable for anyone without a car), but it can go both ways.