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> With my car, I don't have to wait at all and I can go straight home. Manhattan, famous for its congestion-free streets :-) Calling cars "decentralized" is
by woodruffw 3y ago
> With my car, I don't have to wait at all and I can go straight home.
Manhattan, famous for its congestion-free streets :-)
Calling cars "decentralized" is funny, and more than a little ridiculous: American car culture is a result of centralized planning, both of highways and cities. It'd be more accurate to call them "individualized," with the misaligned incentives and commons failures that that implies.
- mwbajor 3y agoIts not funny. Its accurate. Roads are more decentralized than trains. Your argument is anti-scientific in a way. We see in nature that decentralized systems are more robust yet you are arguing the opposite.
- woodruffw 3y agoMy point was that they're "decentralized" in the least interesting way: they exist as a "decentralized" structure only by overwhelming centralized effort. Calling them decentralized is like calling suburbia decentralized: it's not even wrong. Decentralization is not a virtue (or end) in itself when it comes to public infrastructure. Robustness is also not intrinsically tied to it, and there are a variety of senses in which the American road network is not particularly robust: congestion and unsustainable funding schemes are just the first two that come to mind.
- mwbajor 3y ago" in the least interesting way" Who cares about being interesting, I can go around outages in the network with a car where trains can't. You should be arguing for smaller cars not less of them.
- woodruffw 3y ago> Who cares about being interesting, I can go around outages in the network with a car where trains can't. You, ostensibly[1]! > You should be arguing for smaller cars not less of them. I'd be more than happy to take both :-) [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html