frostbiker
You know, you are right. Since pressing beg buttons is not such an inconvenience, why don't we make car drivers press them instead and let pedestrians continue unimpeded like cars do today?
Maybe there should be two entries: the gender they identify with, and the sex assigned at birth. One would be used to address the patient, the other would be useful for medical diagnosis and treatment.
And while we are at it, a few people are born with undifferentiated sexual organs, so it could make sense even for medical purposes to include a third option beyond male and female, rare as it might be.
Some people can't afford to leave their jobs for extended amounts of time. The sort of people who can't afford formula, for example.
Nobody designed them the way they are, at least not with a grand design in mind. Traffic is shaped by planning for existing demand
That is not how it works, at all. They model future demand and they do make executive decisions to shape traffic in the way they want it to be, not just the way it is today.
as long as you don’t have a credible idea why millions of people should give up their homes to live in overpriced shoe boxes without a bit of green and quiet in the city, this will get you nowhere
That is happening because:
- The rest of us are subsidizing their lifestyle through our taxes. North American suburbs don't pay enough to cover their own infrastructure.
- They do not experience the externalities of their lifestyle. It is us living in denser areas that suffer from the increased motor vehicle traffic that suburbanites produce.
- Ever increasing car traffic has led to widening roads and culling of trees. Eliminate car lanes and plant trees, I say.
- Cities aren't loud, cars are loud. Reduce car traffic and our streets won't be noisy.
People love living in spaceous houses they own.
They don't love it so much when they have to pay for the cost of the infrastructure needed to support them. Stop subsidizing suburbs and suddenly people will be much more accepting of more modest accommodations, like most of us do.
Remember that those urban centers would and could simply not exist without people from the outskirts working and shopping in those urban centers.
Plainly false, as those suburbanites could simply move closer to where they work, if only zoning laws permitted them to do so, which is not the case in most of North America.
Again, and it is a point that no amount of mental yoga can get around: what we want is something that already happens in plenty of towns around Europe and Japan that existed before the advent of the car. It is not unrealistic, it is the historical norm.
Based on the way things are today, I can't make any assumptions that people in charge have any idea of what it takes to make a neighborhood ditch the car.
This is the key worry of governments with cryptocurrencies, and was the main selling point of them initially, before the whole crypto tech bro hype.
Yep. Arguably Bitcoin arose from the 2008 financial crisis and the following bailouts.
What I've never understood about it is that it seems so unlikely that it would ever replace a national currency, for two simple reasons. First, because taxes owed in a country can only be repaid in the national currency. Second, because government contracts will only ever pay in the national currency, from macroprojects, to maintenance contracts, to millions of civil servants. This creates both a ton of demand and a ton of supply for the national currency.
And that doesn't even take into account the role of the central bank and private banks in the money supply. Being highly regulated, there's zero chance that a private currency would ever be legally allowed to take hold there either.
Central bank digital currencies appear to have very little to do with crypto currencies like Bitcoin. Rather, they appear to be a mechanism to surgically induce economic stimulus when and where desired, like a more controlled version of the stimulus checks that we saw in many countries during COVID.
For example, they could directly credit your digital currency account with a certain amount of money that you are only allowed to spend on certain goods and services and for a limited amount of time. This would ensure that the money is spent and stimulates certain economic aress rather than being hoarded or invested.
Density without walkability means non-stop traffic.
Walkable neighborhoods need retail businesses. We need to be able to do everyday errands by foot if we want to keep traffic to reasonable levels.
I spent a couple of decades living in Spain. I'm well familiar with old towns.
Designing our streets for pedestrians first, transit/bikes next and private motor vehicles last is the way it should be. If that means that some streets are inconvenient for car traffic, so be it. Surely that is preferable to downgrading the ability of the most vulnerable to move around, or the quality of that experience.
North-american style car-dependent suburbs are an aberration that should disappear altogether. They didn't exist a hundred years ago and they shouldn't exist now. It is immoral that the people living sustainably in urban centers are subsidizing the people living at large in the suburbs. If they like them so much they can pay their true cost to society.
There are multiple different ways to tax carbon. The current federal carbon tax does not include rebates for planting trees, so that loophole doesn't exist.
I just made it clear that making personal cars somehow “vanish” will not really change the financial side of things.
What you are not taking into account is that the sort of low-density, car-dependent, single family home suburbia we criticise requires many more square meters of road per person than a walkable medium-density mixed-use neighborhood. Strongtowns shows with data, not opinion, how town centers are subsidizing financially unsustainable car-dependent suburbia.
I wish anyone in this “FuckCars” community would actually think of a way to fix the world, and not just complain about the way it is.
Easy. Start by copying the Dutch street design guidelines and zoning laws. Boom! Living car-free or car-lite would be much easier, at least in North America where so many people drive to do the most basic daily errands.
We don't need to reinvent the wheel, just study and copy what already works elsewhere. That's how bad things are around here.
That's because their zoning laws are different.
They allow building walkable neighborhoods with mixed-use buildings that have retail businesses on the ground floor and residential units on the 3-5 floors above. Their daily errands can easily be done by foot, so there is less traffic.
You can't achieve that in a car-dependent suburb where you need to drive to get to the nearest grocery store, school or cafe.