Why is it always framed this way? This is NOT the solution.
The solution is to build better public transportation options. That will necessarily include removing a decent amount of the car infrastructure, but you can't just remove car infrastructure and hope people adapt.
The way you frame it, it sounds like (and it often is the case with people framing it this way) that you think that if we remove car infrastructure, people will be forced to use other means of transportation to get around. And while technically true, all it will actually do is piss people off and make it so much harder to get around.
It's framed this way because car infrastructure is so massive and sprawling that it by necessity crowds out public transit in cities.
It's also a vicious cycle: making public transit marginally worse increases the number of people who drive to get places, which makes the government build more roads, which makes cities sprawl more, and eventually you end up with a city like Atlanta that spans 50 miles and is barely navigable without a car.
Yes, it will piss people off - it will make cities MUCH less convenient for suburban drivers. That's not a bad thing unless you happen to be a suburban driver.
It will make homes, 25 miles from the city center, nearly worthless. People will want to live into the denser, walkable neighborhoods. They limit the amount of mixed use, medium density housing because it would crash the market for new car dependent suburbs which provide the funding for road maintenance and construction.
> They limit the amount of mixed use, medium density housing because it would crash the market for new car dependent suburbs which provide the funding for road maintenance and construction.
It is my understanding that many car dependent suburbs got subsidies from higher levels of government to build new roads [0], which allowed them to expand their tax base, but that the density of their taxpayers, per mile of infrastructure, is not enough for longer term expensive maintenance after several decades. This applies not just to roads, but also water and sewer infrastructure. Cities with ten times the density of suburbs have an easier time paying the fixed per-mile portion of infrastructure costs.
The infrastructure in suburbs has already been subsidized, and may need more subsidies. Or services will degrade.
I don't know that anything you said above conflicts with what you said about mixed use, I wasn't sure about the funding part though.
Yeah, the new houses are what pay the bills. Once the music stops playing though the game is over. Medium density, mixed use housing would stop the music by making demand for crappy new R1 housing plummet. No one wants to rip the bandaid off though so it just gets worse and worse until they turn into Detroit.
Part of the problem is that the suburbs already externalize their maintenance costs. Nearly none of them generate enough tax revenue to maintain their sprawling infrastructure, so repairs get subsidized by the tax base in denser areas, or the maintenance is just not done at all.
If suburban drivers and homeowners weren't benefitting from urban success and externalizing all their costs then those properties would already be close to worthless.
I live in Manhattan and I find a bicycle to be a better choice for the majority of my trips than public transit (it's faster, too). I only use public transit for long trips or when I'm traveling with suitcases.
Bikes are simply better at point-to-point transportation (the same advantage that cars have), except that they don't take up a lot of space so it's actually a scalable solution to have everyone using them to get around even in a dense city; see Amsterdam as an example.
Excuse my language but I think it's worth it here: Dear fucking lord, if biking in Manhatten is your idea of bikes shining, then you are way out in left field.
In my week in Manhatten last month I saw several crashes (including a near miss with a sit-down scooter riding in the bike lane who had to bail and slide before nearly crashing into a crowd of pedestrians), pedestrians jumping out of the way of bikes who don't stop at red lights, and bikes swerving around car traffic barely getting by without taking out car mirrors or getting run over.
Biking in Manhatten is not for the faint of heart and not for anyone who isn't decently athletic.
You could have lauded the subway system, but you chose bikes?
Echoing the above, I had a bike commute in midtown Manhattan as well and found it more convenient than the subway and safer than biking in the suburbs.
Compared to the NYC subway it was faster, more consistent, and less prone to delays.
Compared to biking in the suburbs the car traffic typically moved more slowly, I didn't have as many close passes, and drivers seemed more aware of their surroundings. In the suburbs the majority of the people I see biking are middle-aged men in lycra, whereas in the city it seemed more like a demographic cross section.
I also saw other cyclists cross on red lights, knock into pedestrians, and swerve erratically in traffic, though I also saw drivers, moped riders, and pedestrians do the same at roughly the same rate so I always assumed it was a crazy New Yorker thing and not a crazy biker thing.
Sounds like you had an exceptional experience, having seen more crashes in one week than I see in years of living here. And I promise you, I spend a lot more time on foot and on bike in the city than you do.
I think, if you take their argument with a bit of generosity, that they are arguing for more balance in our approach to cities. Right now the balance is so far in favor of cars, that it makes walking and cycling into an extreme sport. The result is loud, dangerous, expensive, and dirty cities that are built almost exclusively for cars.
The humungous parking lots, the 50-foot wide roads, the high speeds, the increasingly larger vehicles, the demolished housing for more freeways, parking minimums, extensive R1 zoning... They all contribute to a city exclusively for cars. Even if we don't get rid of ALL of it, we can certainly cut it back significantly.
Maybe ban cars in places where we don't need them anyways like Valencia street in San Francisco or the Spanish super blocks. Decrease speed limits and design streets to enforce them properly. Add walking and cycling paths to the grocery stores. Add raised crosswalks. When you don't have people using their cars to travel 5 miles everyday it leaves them open to the people who REALLY need to use them. Allow walkable neighborhoods in city planning initiatives.
People WANT to live in places like these, but we refuse to build them for some reason. It's why walkable neighborhoods, built when they were still legal, cost an arm and a leg now. Heck, we even build theme parks to give people a vague feeling of being someplace like that. People go on vacation to countries with places like that.
To me, this discussion is very similar to the discussion around "defund the police": should we lead with the unpopular thing that people will have to accept or should we lead with the goal?
My sense of why this framing is popular is that we've had ~30+ years of passing "public transit" initiatives that are doomed to fail because we would not disrupt car infrastructure. This becomes a double-whammy because we spend money to get very mediocre results, and people reasonably blame the transit system.
Instead, if you're clear from the start that you are going to remove an entire lane in the city for your BRT system - you face more opposition, but you have a much better chance of implementing an actual BRT system!
I think reasonable people can disagree on this, but it's not a mystery how we got here.
It is also not like car infrastructure would turn into non-existance. It most cases all that happens is reuse. Playing fields. Pedestrian areas. Bike lanes. Bus lanes. Bike areas.
The only common thing is they all cist car infrastructure space. This is the common ground. The reallocation of that infrastructure and space is a different story.
I have yet to see a case where it didn't pass people off no matter what the future use was. So even if technically the other framing should be different I have not seen a case where it makes a difference. All while seeing that even pure car infrastructure blockage makes a difference.
No, I said technically people will adapt and take the shitty and overrun public transportation because there's no other option. It's not a solution because it often drastically increases travel time, put people in danger because public transportation without proper security is much more dangerous, and overall it will rightfully piss people off.
The solution is improving public transportation. This isn't something that people are advocating for. They just want the cars out.
Then they should say that and frame their arguments around that. That's my entire point. Do you see any mention of public transportation improvements in the comment I originally replied to? No, you don't.
The movement has no hope if the movement is simply trying to get rid of cars. "Fuck cars" as they say.
As the original poster I'd mention that I'd love to see a much better public transit system but that I've also seen it repeatedly stymied by car-centric interests. I've seen stupidly large bus exchanges placed in the middle of fields because all the land closer to what people actually want to get to is covered with acres of parking and I've seen bus lanes shot down because of the expected impact on traffic. We need to accept that car infrastructure will be degraded to actually get meaningful transit changes and city densification efforts through and those box stores in lakes of parking need to die as a default footprint to build retail. If it takes seven minutes to walk from one storefront to the next then you're never going to get people out of their cars no matter how many buses you throw at the problem.
At the end of the day it comes down to: car infrastructure, walkability - choose one.
Often the car infrastructure itself is what makes getting around without a car infeasible even for short trips - and short trips are a very large portion of trips taken. There are many, many destinations near me that are within easy biking distance, but doing so involves crossing highway ramps and mixing with fast-moving cars.
We do not need to allow cars to take every possible route. Alternative modes of transport are more useful if they're prioritized on the most direct routes. Cars are fast, a diversion won't impact them as much as it does someone on a bike or scooter.
If you remove car infrastructure in SF, for example, there are massive amounts of the city that will die because they lack adequate public transit options.
You remove mobility, and you remove any hope for underserved communities to survive, let alone improve.
Instead, you could advocate for MORE mobility via better public transportation. But you don't for some reason that I may never understand.
No they wouldn't. They would take to the polls and vote in a city council that would reverse whatever sort of plans you think would be implemented. A lot of people seem to think that they will just be able to force a majority of people to join them in bike heaven on the other side of sweeping infrastructure changes but there are far too many people who aren't interested in it and won't let it happen. Car driving and the things it enables are valued much higher by a much bigger proportion of the population that many people seem to want to believe.
Ah yes the progressive strategy: make lives miserable for people to force them to adopt your worldview. The only thing it seems to do successfully is lose them elections.
I mean this is basically all politics - who should suffer and how much to keep society running. I don't think you'll find a progressive monopoly on that
Exactly this reminds me of the Market Street closure in San Francisco, that has the intention and result of inconveniencing citywide traffic while making zero improvements to the tardiness, reach and infrequency of public transit
If you want the real answer it's pretty easy to figure out. There's a group of people that want a particular form of society and that necessitates the absolute removal of the personal car, usually without actually fixing the problems that the car is supposedly causing.
People will adapt to many things, but that doesn't mean it is good - you could stop food deliveries to major cities and they'd empty in days; cars included; but that wouldn't be good.
I'm absolutely sure that people who actually search the internet are so few that google does not think serving them is profitable. That's what I'm saying. Most people are like you and only click the first couple results.
And this is a terrible situation. There's an entire generation of people that can never learn how to search, even if they wanted to, since it is no longer available.
I think the main thing here is to get a watch that matches what you want to get out of it.
I have a mid-range watch, an Omega, that I got new. It's automatic (meaning it's mechanical but it automatically winds as I swing my arm from walking). I wear it nearly every day and almost always just works. I don't mess with it "every other day" like OP, I mess with it every other month when I have to reset the 31 day date window on my watch because the month only has 30 days.
This matches my use better than even a smart watch, which requires more charging and maintenance than my automatic watch. Of course, I could buy like 10-20 apple watches for what I paid for it :)
The watch is 5 years old and it only loses around a second a day on average (it's rated for +-2 seconds). Incredible that it's completely mechanical, and it's part of why I think it's such a cool device to have.
I don't see many 5-star skill ratings, dual colored backgrounds (?), or unreadable fonts. Where do you see those? I would turn people away from that format if they asked my advice.
My resume, and the resumes I've seen aren't too far away from this format. More bullet points and a bit more detail than this, I guess. But otherwise pretty similar
I see them a lot for interns and new grads. I think there's a bunch of templates that have these 'features' and when people are first starting out they don't know better. No interviewer I've ever met thought 5-star ratings were a good idea.
I graduated last year and one of our final classes required a resume be submitted using the professors format which was colorful, differing fonts, and used "confidence percentages". I wouldn't dare use it in the real world but I'm wondering how many of those new grad resumes are similar.
And new grads are probably often looking for something anything to stand out if they haven’t done any projects that really stand out and have a middling GPA from a middling school.
Yep 100%, and I did the same to be honest - I have a memory of painstakingly deciding which languages or technologies I was "experienced" in and which I was merely "intermediate" in, without realising it was wasted effort :) I think people tend to be quite forgiving of graduates or those new to the industry, it's hard to know what's expected of you.
As someone who has been through several government vocational programs in Canada, I will say that when your Case Manager or Instructor says to write your resumes and letters a certain way, you do it.
My girlfriend is a biologist with the National Parks Service and all of their resumes are expected to be three to five pages long. It hurt my soul when she told me that.
Government resumes are different as they rely on documented experience as a substitute for a civil service exam. They want completeness more like a dossier than a marketing document. Your catalog of skills and experience is critical, as "X years of Y" rules the day.
It's actually easier - you just tag on whatever you do every one in awhile. "Normal" resumes are like ads for you, and the positive/negative usefulness of your resume is more about your ability to produce compelling bullshit for an audience, miss the mark, or land in the middle of the bell curve.
Cars are often one of the most, if not the most, expensive purchases people will make in their lives. It's not unreasonable to me to have extra protections for those purchases.
Not only that, a car is basically a requirement for life in the US.
With a complete lack of decent public transportation in the majority of the US, couples with a lack of walkable communities, a car is virtually required.
Anybody who disagrees, try living in the Phoenix metro with a family without a car. Good luck buying groceries, getting to the doctor, etc...
Individually, no, but as part of the overall trend of in-car subscriptions for these kind of features, yes.
Cars, like houses, are in a special class of purchases that we as a society have decided need extra consumer protections because of the high cost involved.
They’d be injecting hard drugs, especially fentanyl, constantly in this toilet, so signs and disclosures won’t mean much. SF is a rather “special” place, you can’t easily compare to other international cities.
More likely than other large companies to not have dark patterns, is probably the more correct sentence. It's especially correct with some of their similarly "non-core" products.
I remember moving off of Google Fi a couple years ago and it being incredibly easy to cancel and move my number. I didn't even have to call anyone. A few clicks and it was done. If you've ever tried to do anything with another phone service, you'll know that's unheard of.
Can someone shed some light on this? I'm in the office for at least 40 hours a week. Then each day I get home, cook dinner, clean, bathe, workout sometimes. I don't even have kids or a long commute.
If I'm not socializing at work, when am I doing it? Two days a week? That is bleeeeaak.
8 hours at work, 8 sleeping, that's still 8 more left. I would be surprised if you took all of them to cook and clean.
Even with 4 hours of chores a day, that's still 4 hours to do whatever you want. Doesn't mean you spend them all that day, or all of them socializing. Maybe you use mondays to study, tuesdays you spend more time cleaning so wednesdays you can go out do something.
Also consider that if you strictly socialise in a work context, most of those relationships will grow distant relatively quickly when you or they leave for another company, which means it's harder to build long lasting friendships. Those can be really handy at times of transition in your life, which is where work friends usually fail first.
Why do so many people try to do the hard math when it comes to this? The reality is by the time I am able to go out on a weekday it's like 8pm. Very few of my peers, friends or not, want to go out late on a weekday after already having a long day.
If you're able to do better than that, then you are in an uncommon bracket.
Well, not sure how else to approach you with the fact that there is more time than you give credit to. Also, 8pm? How much time do you spend on commute? Do you live in a mansion and don't hire a cleaning person?
To be fair, I personally am on an uncommon bracket where I usually socialise over the internet, people who make games tend to like playing them too, and there is no commute.
That said, you're still framing it as a work thing. Your peers can do whatever they want, but the rest of the world still exists. Unless you're saying everyone within 20min of your commute path also follow this routine pattern, but then I would expect you to be on an uncommon bracket.
There are countless activities you can partake that involve interacting with other people and give you opportunity to create friends.
> Also, 8pm? How much time do you spend on commute
Leave work at 5 (hopefully!). Gym/exercise for an hour, commute for 30min, dinner for an hour. That's already 7:30pm. Add in chores or errands or distractions or whatever and 8pm comes quick.
Like yeah, I could start doing microwave dinners or not exercising or replace all my food with Huel like someone actually suggested in the comments here. Or move right next to the office or leave work early. But my god I'm not going to hyper optimize my life in order to maybe see people late on a weekday.
My whole point in this entire thread is that I socialize during work. At lunch, during breaks, between meetings, etc. Time I would have not been working anyway (because I'm not a robot). This is what people have been doing forever just fine.
By the time I work out, get home, cook dinner, eat dinner, clean, shower, it's like 8pm usually. No one around me is staying out past like 10pm on a weekday. Now I have the job of finding anyone who wants to hang out from 8pm to 10pm on a weekday when both/all of us are exhausted from a long day.
Doing the hard math and saying I have 6 hours is just theoretical. _Many_ people may socialize in the evenings, but I'd be surprised _most_ do.
I had a similar realization at a certain point. I was wasting too much time on chores, so I optimized them out of my life.
Replace all food at home with Huel. No more cooking, no more cleaning, no more shopping (no more driving to stores), no more wondering if you can go out for dinner or if food will spoil.
Make sure all your clothes can be washed together (either all tones of grey, or all colours). Make sure all your socks are the same. Do washing once a week on a weekend.
Move closer to your office to eliminate commute. You don't cook anymore, so can get a place without a good kitchen for cheap.
Suddenly you have infinite time. For what it's worth, I would socialize with people from work (and ex-coworkers) after work. 5pm, off to the pub or a restaurant. Then walk home since I'd live near the office which would be near the pub/restaurant (since we are going after work).
That's assuming that you don't have to pop all of your spell slots to get through the 8 hour work day. The 8 hour work day was chosen pretty precisely to be exactly exhausting enough in a menial labor factory assembly job that you return home with very little energy for anything else. If you presume your job is more (creatively, socially) taxing than "repeatedly doing the same task in an assembly" line, it's very easy to assume most jobs today are more exhausting in 8 hour shifts than what that work week was first established for.
You may have 6 hours of time left, but that doesn't mean you have 6 hours of energy reserves left to socialize or otherwise. (Clearly many people spend their evenings in low effort activities like watching TV on weeknights, too.)
