4 ms·

Yeah nimbyisn isnt just blocking homes. Its rampant for every project. High speed rail in california has spent billions and years fighting nimbys. Every factory

Yeah nimbyisn isnt just blocking homes. Its rampant for every project. High speed rail in california has spent billions and years fighting nimbys. Every factory, every buisness, every job often faces nimbyism to try and keep out economic growth because the area will be slightly buiser lmao.

ToucanLoucan 2y ago
Not endorsing here but it's not like that's not over entirely nothing. Our car-centric infrastructure means anywhere that is busy is basically impossible to navigate, which... I mean nearly every other G20 nation has a much more diverse transportation system than us, and car focused infrastructure is by far the most inefficient way to move people. It's why I'm still a remote worker despite loving my job, coworkers, and the office: I don't want to deal with commuting in a major metro. Numerous others who work where I do regularly clock commutes in the 30 minute range to travel 10 miles. It's absurd. And it's not JUST inconvenient, it's costly. Living in a place with more people and more traffic means you pay higher insurance premiums and spend more on fuel, unless you have an EV of course. Again I don't mean to fully cosign NIMBYism I'm just saying, especially with the shit way the United States goes about building, it isn't a position completely without merit.
- lazyasciiart 2y ago
  It is completely without merit when used to block non-car transport like trains and light rail and buses and bikes.
- ameliaquining 2y ago
  At the risk of being That Guy, traffic on high-demand corridors is not caused by building too much or too little or the wrong things; it is caused by lack of congestion pricing. If you don't have that, then you'll have congestion anywhere people want to be, regardless of whether you build lots of roads or build lots of trains or don't build at all. Building roads or trains might (or might not) still be a good thing to do, in the sense of creating more economic value by increasing throughput and so making more marginal trips viable, but that induced demand means the roads will still be congested. Whereas if you have congestion pricing you can just decide how much congestion you want to tolerate and set it at whatever level achieves that.
  - nickff 2y ago
    The problem with the 'induced demand' paradigm is that it leads to cities not investing in infrastructure, and often designing the city to be hard to enter or exit, and impossible to bypass. This is one instance where there are many examples of the 'slippery slope' coming to pass. If we want people to take mass transit, we should make it better, instead of making everything else terrible.
    - ameliaquining 2y ago
      I'm not sure I understand what you're getting at. "Induced demand" isn't a policy paradigm; it's just the observation that if you make it easier for more people to get somewhere, then more people will go there. Without congestion pricing, the only equilibrium (until you exhaust all demand, which isn't going to happen in hot metro areas) is the one where the roads are congested enough to deter the next marginal person from using them. With congestion pricing, you can choose a different equilibrium without the deadweight loss of people stuck in traffic. The question of how much to invest in infrastructure, and what kinds, can then be addressed separately in whatever way makes sense given local conditions.
      - nickff 2y ago
        Everyone that I’ve ever heard mention ‘induced demand’ with respect to roads does so while advocating against the construction of additional infrastructure capacity for passenger vehicles (cars). This correlation is consistent enough that it does indicate some sort of ‘induced demand paradigm’. I agree that ‘congestion pricing’ does impact traffic, but it does so by changing the cost function, and granting the city government additional revenue from (usually poorer) people who it is not accountable to.
        ameliaquining 2y ago
        Yes, it's definitely the case that a lot of mass transit advocates are confused about this and talk about induced demand in an unproductive way. New York City's congestion pricing scheme was approved at the state level, so it's not true that people living outside the city didn't get a say—though people from New Jersey didn't, and can reasonably complain. It's theoretically possible that congestion pricing could be welfare-reducing if peak demand is inelastic enough. If this were happening, then (1) traffic wouldn't fall much unless the price were raised to extremely high levels, and (2) frequent commuters would be ones most harmed by the policy and would be its most fervent opponents. In New York, we see the opposite: traffic has fallen sharply and frequent commuters are the policy's biggest fans (https://pfnyc.org/news/new-poll-ny-voters-say-congestion-pricing-has-led-to-faster-commutes-and-less-traffic/ https://pfnyc.org/news/new-poll-ny-voters-say-congestion-pri...). Similar things have been seen internationally in other cities; people often initially resist having to pay for something they're used to getting for free, but once it's in place, it's durable and popular because people don't want to go back to traffic jams.
- janalsncm 2y ago
  NIMBYism ensures that cars will be the only way to access any areas, because any public transit projects which would reduce traffic get blocked. Roads are the lowest common denominator so they happen. There’s no reason 280 and 101 can’t also have corresponding high speed rail lines to cut commute times from San Jose to SF down from 2 hours to a fraction of that.
- dkarl 2y ago
  > Again I don't mean to fully cosign NIMBYism I'm just saying In my city, the same people who are against housing also oppose transit. They don't want the city to grow, whether successfully or unsuccessfully. If you tell them we can build transit and create walkable neighborhoods, and growth can be a positive rather than a negative, they hate that idea just as much as if we grow and it's a gridlocked disaster. Maybe even more so.
dkarl 2y ago
As I understand it, the problem building high speed rail in California isn't that people are trying to stop it, but rather that everybody who has the power to throw up roadblocks realizes that they can use it to extract something from the state.

ToucanLoucan 2y ago

Not endorsing here but it's not like that's not over entirely nothing. Our car-centric infrastructure means anywhere that is busy is basically impossible to navigate, which... I mean nearly every other G20 nation has a much more diverse transportation system than us, and car focused infrastructure is by far the most inefficient way to move people. It's why I'm still a remote worker despite loving my job, coworkers, and the office: I don't want to deal with commuting in a major metro. Numerous others who work where I do regularly clock commutes in the 30 minute range to travel 10 miles. It's absurd. And it's not JUST inconvenient, it's costly. Living in a place with more people and more traffic means you pay higher insurance premiums and spend more on fuel, unless you have an EV of course. Again I don't mean to fully cosign NIMBYism I'm just saying, especially with the shit way the United States goes about building, it isn't a position completely without merit.

lazyasciiart 2y ago
It is completely without merit when used to block non-car transport like trains and light rail and buses and bikes.
ameliaquining 2y ago
At the risk of being That Guy, traffic on high-demand corridors is not caused by building too much or too little or the wrong things; it is caused by lack of congestion pricing. If you don't have that, then you'll have congestion anywhere people want to be, regardless of whether you build lots of roads or build lots of trains or don't build at all. Building roads or trains might (or might not) still be a good thing to do, in the sense of creating more economic value by increasing throughput and so making more marginal trips viable, but that induced demand means the roads will still be congested. Whereas if you have congestion pricing you can just decide how much congestion you want to tolerate and set it at whatever level achieves that.
- nickff 2y ago
  The problem with the 'induced demand' paradigm is that it leads to cities not investing in infrastructure, and often designing the city to be hard to enter or exit, and impossible to bypass. This is one instance where there are many examples of the 'slippery slope' coming to pass. If we want people to take mass transit, we should make it better, instead of making everything else terrible.
  - ameliaquining 2y ago
    I'm not sure I understand what you're getting at. "Induced demand" isn't a policy paradigm; it's just the observation that if you make it easier for more people to get somewhere, then more people will go there. Without congestion pricing, the only equilibrium (until you exhaust all demand, which isn't going to happen in hot metro areas) is the one where the roads are congested enough to deter the next marginal person from using them. With congestion pricing, you can choose a different equilibrium without the deadweight loss of people stuck in traffic. The question of how much to invest in infrastructure, and what kinds, can then be addressed separately in whatever way makes sense given local conditions.
    - nickff 2y ago
      Everyone that I’ve ever heard mention ‘induced demand’ with respect to roads does so while advocating against the construction of additional infrastructure capacity for passenger vehicles (cars). This correlation is consistent enough that it does indicate some sort of ‘induced demand paradigm’. I agree that ‘congestion pricing’ does impact traffic, but it does so by changing the cost function, and granting the city government additional revenue from (usually poorer) people who it is not accountable to.
      - ameliaquining 2y ago
        Yes, it's definitely the case that a lot of mass transit advocates are confused about this and talk about induced demand in an unproductive way. New York City's congestion pricing scheme was approved at the state level, so it's not true that people living outside the city didn't get a say—though people from New Jersey didn't, and can reasonably complain. It's theoretically possible that congestion pricing could be welfare-reducing if peak demand is inelastic enough. If this were happening, then (1) traffic wouldn't fall much unless the price were raised to extremely high levels, and (2) frequent commuters would be ones most harmed by the policy and would be its most fervent opponents. In New York, we see the opposite: traffic has fallen sharply and frequent commuters are the policy's biggest fans (https://pfnyc.org/news/new-poll-ny-voters-say-congestion-pricing-has-led-to-faster-commutes-and-less-traffic/ https://pfnyc.org/news/new-poll-ny-voters-say-congestion-pri...). Similar things have been seen internationally in other cities; people often initially resist having to pay for something they're used to getting for free, but once it's in place, it's durable and popular because people don't want to go back to traffic jams.
janalsncm 2y ago
NIMBYism ensures that cars will be the only way to access any areas, because any public transit projects which would reduce traffic get blocked. Roads are the lowest common denominator so they happen. There’s no reason 280 and 101 can’t also have corresponding high speed rail lines to cut commute times from San Jose to SF down from 2 hours to a fraction of that.
dkarl 2y ago
> Again I don't mean to fully cosign NIMBYism I'm just saying In my city, the same people who are against housing also oppose transit. They don't want the city to grow, whether successfully or unsuccessfully. If you tell them we can build transit and create walkable neighborhoods, and growth can be a positive rather than a negative, they hate that idea just as much as if we grow and it's a gridlocked disaster. Maybe even more so.

dkarl 2y ago

As I understand it, the problem building high speed rail in California isn't that people are trying to stop it, but rather that everybody who has the power to throw up roadblocks realizes that they can use it to extract something from the state.