in evil communist china, you can usually just walk to the subway because a stop is within a 10 minutes walk of basically any condo
its almost like they... planned things
Americans don't know what's good for them. You gotta force them to do good things and then they'll change their mind. Yeah, it's authoritarian.
Im not walking anywhere with how hot and humid it is outside
Much rather sit for an hour being traffic and screaming inside their boxes at all the other fuckers being traffic with them
honestly, maybe im old as fuck, but a very short walk outside even in extreme heat feels great on my bones and is refreshing.
Honestly I'm a large guy, I totally get it. That's what skybridges and underground cities are for!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underground_City,_Montreal
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minneapolis_Skyway_System
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plus_15
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dallas_Pedestrian_Network
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houston_tunnel_system
And many many more! Sure they can be a little sterile and many are public-private partnerships
but they can be a great tool in fighting some of the effects of climate change I think.
walking is boring af and takes far too long to get anywhere. fuck 15 minute cities give me a 1 minute city.
So just like a city in one building? I love mixed use zoning let’s do it
yeah obviously they should build the cities shitty and then later maybe consider rebuilding them good but actually do nothing because nimbys would complain
Meanwhile, I can't even walk to the exit of my hellhole suburbs in 10 minutes
In evil capitalist amerikkka you can find the same in dozens of cities, because civil engineers and planning commisions are things that exist.
Woah, dozens of cities in one of the largest countries on the planet? Incredible! How does LA fair in that respect?
What was the cherry picked stat? Apparently I missed something.
Making up a guy to get mad at is out, making up a cherrypicked stat to get mad at is in
Totally agree. Isn't this one of the oldest instances? It doesn't really matter when it federated - that just means it had more time to get distilled into its own special version. But this is an OG strain - whatever else this is, this is Lemmy.
Edit - and I say this as a pretty new user to the instance. I wasn't here from the beginning, this is my take as an instance-hopping reddit refugee.
Why do Americans hate paying tax for things that benefit the community so much?
ok but public transit in a town is gonna be funded by some grants probably and then operated on rider fees and local taxes. Gary Indiana isn't sovereign and Mississippi can't afford shit.
that failure of the federal government has nothing to do with what i was talking about.
on a local level the local taxes we all pay are directly in the budget for that spending. we literally vote on 0.025% property tax increases to pay for specific local projects.
"taxes do not fund government spending" is literally false for entities that don't control the currency or those resources.
Modern Monetary Theory. From an purely economic perspective, SimulatedLiberalism is right.
Think of taxes as an olympic sized swimming pool, a politician may say they are raising taxes to dump a new bucket of water into the pool, but some guy comes around once a month to drain or fill the pool so it always stays level.
Even if what you say is true, telling people tax funds the government/public infrastructure incentives people to pay tax. If you go around telling people "I'm taxing you because I can, and the tax will be used to fund my vacation to Dubai" you're gonna get shit on
to the grasping petit bourgeois, any need fulfilled by the state is a lost profit opportunity
At one point you could say taxation was balanced. People at the top paid more and people at the bottom got services. Almost immediately after WWII, the bourgeois started rolling back on the services. They really hit their stride in the 70s and just started gutting everything. It got worse in the 80s and the in the 90s, Democrats became just as bad as Republicans. In the 80s you also saw taxes being cut for the top despite increased spending on things that benefited the bourgeois. So the tax burden fell upon the lower class. They saw increases in taxes while seeing fewer services than ever. Plus the libertarian propaganda pumped into education didn't help. Privatization is always framed as more efficient and cheaper for the public. So the question becomes why tax me for something I'll never use and if it gets built it'll be shitty and cost too much over time?
I guess, to be more succinct, they don't view it as a benefit to the community. Just a cost to them.
How is it that train tracks are an ominous tax expense but roads are just a naturally occurring feature?????¿??
I think libs are under the (false) impression that roads are both completely mandatory in society AND somehow cheaper to build and maintain than public transit. Per person moved public transit is significantly more efficient per dollar but libs just don't want to know stats when they don't agree with their worldview
I think libs are under the (false) impression that roads are both completely mandatory in society
They kinda are in local transport to be fair. You can't transport truck loads of stuff by bike to grocery stores. This necessitates some level of automobile road to get there. What's unnecessary is regional/national roads for commerce. Most cities would still require road maintenance just for EMS and local commerce even if they had a robust public infrastructure. The good news is that buses can use these roads as well so a post-personal-car future is still viable. Roadless cities are not.
It takes 160,000 bicycles to incur the road maintenance cost of a single personal car.
Yep, and that's why most people should ride bikes and then use public infrastructure as needed. But automobiles are still necessary, unless you mean to bike in all the equipment you'd find in an ambulance.
so a post-personal-car future is still viable
It takes 160,000 bicycles to incur the road maintenance cost of a single personal car.
Are we disagreeing here or are you just mentioning a statistic?
I think ambulances and firetrucks should be basically the only automobiles. Even most delivery vehicles should be replaced by either cargo bikes or by spur lines off the railroad.
Also, it's important to this discussion to draw a clear distinction between streets, roads, and stroads. Streets are destinations and can be made primarily for bikes and pedestrians, roads are routes for cars to go fast from place to place. Stroads are the cursed middle ground common to USAmerican suburbia which combine the width and car friendliness of a road with the density of destinations of a street. I don't think it's possible, or even desirable, to get rid of streets, but I think we can and should get rid of most roads and absolutely all stroads. The remaining impermeable surfaces will be drastically cheaper to maintain.
Even most delivery vehicles should be replaced by either cargo bikes or by spur lines off the railroad.
I just don't think it'd be practical to fill entire grocery stores worth of stuff on bikes. You're not dealing with a few packages of office supplies. You're dealing with entire warehouse districts worth of stuff having to move across cities. Even with reduced consumption, the amount of people needed to transport that on bikes would probably be more than the local population.
Do you plan to run a train through every grocery store, stop to unload at each stop, and still expect to get everything there at the same time?
We don't live in a wildwest train town. Our cities are not built around trains and unless you plan to literally tear down the entirety of New York it will not work.
Our cities are not built around trains
They used to be, and you can still see it in the way a lot of cities roads and former industrial cores are laid out.
tear down the entirety of New York
That picture was from NYC during the 20s.
But surface level freight trains are not a great solution in cities, hence why they built the highline, which stayed in use until the 80s.
expect to get everything there at the same time?
Scheduled freight trains running on their own grade and just stopping to switch out some containers can potentially be more reliable than semis. I have to say potentially because holy shit american freight has been hollowed out by capitalism.
edit: I don't actually think it's feasible for every place that needs more freight than cargo bikes can handle would have a train depot, but every truck that swaps containers at depots inside the city reduces the number of miles they're driving in the city and the need for giant highways cutting the city in half.
I would add special door to door transport automobiles for the special needs populations too but otherwise agree whole heartedly.
don't you know? roads build themselves with the labour of poor illegal immigrants
FWIW road has similar cost to standard rolling stock, which ends up being substantially cheaper than urban subway tracks... so... it's not entirely wrong? building a road in the city is cheaper than building a subway because of... tbh I'm not too sure, but it is in practice
Well, it's a subway, you have to excavate an entire tunnel system for that. But in return you get an entire traffic infrastrucutre that takes up next to no space on the surface, which means a lot in densely built areas. I guess if you'd compare subways to underground roads like that stuff Musk had built in Las Vegas, or if you'd compare roads to cable car tracks, costs would be fairly similar again.
If we are talking about building new roads in cities that is also usually a tunnel these days. The days of Moses tearing down entire city blocks for a highway is largely a thing of the past.
Tens of millions of people live in cities with passable subway systems in the US and have for like a hundred years. And small towns were connected with rail all over. This fantastical scenario was completely normal.
Liberals love describing basic public service concepts as if they're fantastical utopian fever dreams.
Things like free public transportation, or public zero-interest banks, or public grocers.
It's usually a "well that could never work" and refusal to elaborate on why. If it doesn't presently exist in America, it must be impossible and ridiculous, especially if there's no price barrier.
At least in Europe, the norm isn't free public transport, but very cheap subsidized public transport. In Prague, for example, 1 month of unlimited bus & metro use is currently 50 USD.
I think Prague has an amazing public transport system, it's really intelligently designed.
My monthly pass is $250 and only covers the commuter rail that is (sometimes) on time 🙃
Kind of crazy how these people just accepted public transport as a normal thing until like...3-4 years ago? Now suddenly trains and buses are driven by Lucifer himself apparently.
the people calling you unrealistic is infuriating. “how dare you suggest we improve society a little?!?!”
They literally cannot conceive of any solution which is not individualistic
Reminds me of the person in the row housing thread complaining about a lack of parking, like yeah we can actually improve society in multiple ways believe it or not
Yeah not banned for homophobia, comment removed for not being excellent
Then build me a railroad track fucker.
Do libs really? Can't these libs just realize that we live in a car centric society AND that public transport is objectively better?
"Hey we should start sanitising our wounds and setting broken bones instead of just letting them poke through the skin and smell funny."
"Then build me a hospital fucker"Don't you see, if you propose any kind of societal change you must personally and individually build the entire thing?
Learn how to do it yourself (whatever the problem is there's definitely a million youtube vids on how to fix it), it's fun making broken things work and you could potentially help other people out in the future
Battery-electric trains suck outside of very specific circumstances. Any functioning rail operator should be able to build and maintain tracks with electric catenary.
They weren't even talking about battery electric trains, they were talking about battery electric personal automobiles
Had to do this just earlier this week. Got back by train at like midnight and I had to bike back to my appartment. I was really tired especially in my legs, so you'd think that would maybe be a bit annoying, but it was actually really refreshing. It was nice and quiet, and the air was cool. Definitely wouldn't have taken a car even if I had the option.
A railroad track fucker...
Like dragons fucking cars, but this time railroad tracks?
Yes you are
me, who was never convinced to join normal lemmy in the first place
