It’s worth noting that Americans also must spend that income in a similarly-inflated market, so it doesn’t much matter what their salary would be worth in, say, Uganda. I think any such comparison of global wealth runs into these sorts of issues.

Someone earning in the global top 10% may not be able to afford a house locally. Someone earning in the top 30% may not be able to afford rent and food at the same time in their locale. It makes the percentile meaningless.

What’s far less dense with better public transit than NYC? The most popular example of no-car city design I see is Amsterdam, which is 1/2 the density of NYC, but still 15x the density of where I’m from (not even close to a rural area). I think robust public transit at 1/15th the density of Amsterdam and 1/30th the density of NYC is a pipe dream.

In these lower density places, maybe you luck out and you’re walking or biking distance to work. If you change jobs do you have to move instead of hopping in the car and commuting a bit further? In circumstances like these, transit can’t possibly serve every origin and destination efficiently, and personal vehicles can offer efficient point to point.

Fuckcars is made up of people with little life experience who think they have all the answers, and people who fetishize city living and think it’s normal or healthy for humans to live at a density like NYC (and fuck you if you disagree). They’re oversimplifying to the point of meaninglessness, and handwaving away the problems.

I feel like this point is missing the big picture: people create the demand, and companies supply what the market demands. Like or hate “the free market”, this is essentially what it is. If there were magically 1/10th the number of humans on the planet, we would expect those companies to have 90% less emissions. It’s not that some of these companies aren’t bad actors, and have actions that are at times immoral, it’s that they are amoral actors in a market economy that is only responsive to consumer demand.

The example I like to give is that companies’ race to the bottom on quality. They’re responding to human behavior, where if an item on Amazon is $6, and another very similar item is 10 cents cheaper, the cheaper item will sell 100x more. This is a brutal, cutthroat example of human behavior and market forces. It leads to shitty products because consumers are more responsive to price and find it hard to distinguish quality, so the market supplies superficially-passable junk at the lowest possible price and (with robust competition) the lowest possible profit margin.

Totally agree. We should have <1B people living like kings, not 10B people living like peasants. A lot of environmentally unsustainable things become perfectly sustainable if there are fewer people on the planet. Like, we shouldn’t have to be worried about the impact of beef production or overfishing - the planet should be able to sustain the number of humans that want to eat those things. At 8-10B it obviously can’t.

Capitalism and retirement is set up as a pyramid scheme. We shouldn’t be looking at situations that were recklessly arranged assuming endless growth and saying “how do we prevent population contraction” - that’s insanity. We need to figure out how to retool society for a post-growth world.

If the only way to prevent the music from stopping is a pyramid scheme, we’re all fucked.

https://newfastuff.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/fxy2rtr1ec651.png

And now be honest: Would you NIMBY a couple of multiplexes three-story apartment complex flanked by some commercial space and a tram stop in your suburb? A plaza, cafes, restaurants, bars, doctors, no car parking, it’s serving your suburb, you can bike there, there’s ample of bike parking. Would you support repealing laws that make such developments illegal.

I should really give up on collecting downvotes by arguing with people who are incapable of considering my arguments, but it’s worth making this point: “NIMBY” as a term has been overused and misused to the point of meaninglessness. Let me give an example:

There are people in cities and suburbs across the US right now trying to shut down small airports. Ostensibly they want the airport converted into “low cost housing” or a park, but the real underlying reason always seems to be that they hate airplane noise and the value of their house would increase if the airport were to disappear. The wrinkle is these airports existence predates ownership of their house, predates the construction of their house, predates their housing development, and in the majority of cases the airports are older than 99% of people in the area. Nevertheless, they are succeeding in shutting down these airports, which arguably have more right to be there than they do. They knew there was an airport there when they moved in. The developer knew there was an airport there when they built the house. In many cases, the airport was actually busier in the past than it is in the present.

These people could accurately be called NIMBYs, but it’s becoming increasingly clear that the term NIMBY is most often wielded as a pejorative for anyone who opposes anything you don’t like. It has lost its descriptive power because people who want to conserve the status quo are NIMBYs, and people who want to change the status quo are equally NIMBYs.

Do you oppose development? NIMBY!

Do you support development? NIMBY!

Do you have any opinion about anything in your community? Believe it or not, also a NIMBY.

I think it’s bullshit. I think opposing change to preserve the status quo happens to be more valid in most cases. I’m sick of democracy being used as a weapon where an influx of outsiders can move into an area, become a majority, and vote to change its character. There are rural areas across the US that are being invaded by people from wealthier, populous states - namely CA and TX - as a result of remote work. The effect this has is that people who have lived there for generations are priced out, and then the local character is forced to change by these newcomers who now outnumber the original locals. If being opposed to that change is being a “NIMBY”, I think the NIMBYs are morally in the right - and I think the term being used as an insult is nonsense.

I do have developer mode on, but don’t keep activities is off

This is a great idea, I’m going to try it

Edit: messages is a system app, battery is set to unrestricted, still reloads with blank screen and big messages icon at the center while it does so.

I read the link I posted, which is the same one you linked. I think some of the way you presented your argument suggests to me that you’re making a distinction between well-executed and poorly-executed transit, and saying that because I find transit/buses to be inefficient and an unbearable mode of travel, I must be using a poorly-executed system. That sounds a lot to me like no-true-scotsman, because you seem to be judging whether I’m experiencing the “real thing” based on whether I thought it was efficient or not. Clearly I must be experiencing a bad version of it if it was inefficient or otherwise not to my liking - or at least that’s what you seem to have implied.

I agree that we probably don’t have a common definition of good or bad transit.

I also think you should read up on what a phallus is.

Maybe you happen to be on a route that runs well from home to work without lots of stops and no need to change lines. Can you find a destination in your city that would require a change of bus or train and incur a larger time penalty? What if your job was located there instead?

I think most people buy sensible vehicles but there are certainly people who have a truck fetish that is not justified. Unfortunately it creates an arms race where all cars get larger because there are very real risks of a collision with a larger vehicle.

phallacy

Nice.

Your argument parallels the no true Scotsman fallacy much closer than you realize.

You: no Scotsman would commit such a crime

Me: but it says here that a Scotsman committed the crime

You: No true Scotsman would commit such a crime…

Compare:

You: buses are great!

Me: I take buses and they suck!

You: good buses are great, you just aren’t taking the good ones…

It’s exactly the same. You get to decide who is a true Scotsman for the purpose of argument, and what constitutes a good bus service. You can simply declare that the bus service isn’t a good one and therefore doesn’t reflect badly on bus services, just as you can decide the criminal wasn’t a true Scotsman, and therefore you’re always right.

you now admit that you yourself have used buses that run frequently, which undermines your original argument, even if they had other flaws in your view

I have used buses which run frequently for buses, but which are still too infrequent and thus add lots of unnecessary time.

I think NYC is an excellent representative of transit done well. It may not be world-best, but there aren’t many places that are as dense or more dense and that creates a best case scenario for running at all hours and with maximum frequency. Also, most people don’t own cars and don’t drive there. There are few places with so many built-in advantages for transit as NYC.

It sounds like you just don’t like cities or being around too many other people.

No argument there.

It’s hard to tell the intent of any poster, and there is a vehement anti-car movement here (and on Reddit) that allows for no exceptions to the idea that living should be done at high density, and without personal vehicles. It’s hard to read your intent and beliefs because the things you said before are very similar to what I’ve heard from the zealots.

I’m trying to make the point that public transit easily misses on serving every origin, destination, and timing efficiently. Usually it misses badly, and my average experience with specific commutes is a 3x time penalty for transit vs driving. The penalty gets worse if done at especially early or late hours. Maybe this is exacerbated by car infrastructure and lower density, but the anti car crowd would have you believe it’s intrinsic and not a function of history and preference. At any rate I usually disagree with them on almost every premise.

You’re off by a factor of 4 on the grocery distance for the last 3 places I’ve lived, and those stores were CLOSE. It’s like 100cc of petrol to go that far, 200cc round trip, in lieu of 40+ minutes of fast walking (in which you can only carry limited groceries). I know all about it because I’ve done the walk many times when I didn’t have a car, and it fucking sucks.

I’d say freaking out about 200ccs of petrol to get groceries is an insane degree of austerity, and the fact that people like you are proposing that is evidence of either an irrational need to control impact, or (if justified) evidence that the world is grotesquely overpopulated.

Nobody owns 3 ton cars around here. Mine isn’t even 2 tons. In fact it’s pretty close in weight to a Fiat 500, while being generally more useful in every way. Everything you’re presenting is a strawman/caricature of what you imagine typical suburban car owners to live like. And yes, we should all be driving electric cars, but it’s not going to happen overnight.

Edit: damn near nobody on earth would drive to get groceries if the store was 300m/1000ft away. Most people will never be able to live that close to the grocery store, work, or any other place that they routinely need to visit. That’s why your example is insane.

I swear this is a no-true-Scotsman argument: “you don’t hate buses/apartments/transit, you just have never lived anywhere that has the good stuff”.

I’ve lived many places and traveled plenty, and I’m convinced there’s no good stuff. To have transit that works, you need density that’s oppressive. I did it in NYC, which is a best-case scenario for transit facilitated by high density. NYC has transit that runs frequently, and 24/7/365. Buses, subway, trains, and even ferries. It’s so dense most people don’t own a car (I certainly didn’t). Everyone lives in apartments. Walking and biking is the norm. Even pizza delivery is done by bike instead of car. Catching an Uber was still much faster for many point-to-point trips, because transit necessarily can’t go direct from everywhere, to everywhere.

Now that I’m back in suburbia, a trip to the grocery store takes 1/4 as long by car (same distance). I don’t have to spend a ton of time waiting to catch a connecting train or bus that I missed by 30 seconds. I don’t have to ride though stop after stop, packed in with other people. I can just go direct from origin to destination in quiet comfort, without the headaches

Are you going to be first in line to give up your computer? Your phone? Antibiotics? Vaccines? Electricity?

Innovation is real, even if you don’t personally like it. Motor vehicles are a legitimately good invention, arguably only becoming problematic due to increasing population and urbanization.

Not allowing the overcrowded parts of the world to invade the less crowded parts of the world is a policy choice.

I’m not opposed to it, but there’s something nice about having your own workshop. Depends on what you’re doing. I also have fewer and worse makerspaces where I am now than places I’ve lived in the past - it’s a crapshoot.

They pretty much do have to suck. They arrive infrequently, stop frequently, accelerate like an overloaded lorry, and are only remotely feasible if your start and end points are on the same route. Switching buses is a huge time penalty. They only approach usability in urban hellscapes that are so densely populated, it makes my skin crawl.

Yet they keep putting them in small cities and towns where they take 3x as long to get anywhere as driving because of indirect routing, while causing traffic congestion because of frequent stops and low performance. Seriously, fuck buses.