Just fucking urban hell. People don’t realize they don’t have to live that way.
Well, I say don’t have to only in that there are different ways to design transportation and this is the worst way, but they don’t know it because this hell is all they’ve known.
They most certainly have to live that way because their transportation and city planners are idiots.
Induced demand. Apparently Texas hasn’t heard of that yet, but that’s the reason 3 or even fewer lanes work fine everywhere else where there’s also good alternative transportation.
Keep adding lanes, traffic quietens down, people see the roads are quiet and decide to drive, road gets busy, rinse and repeat.
We have long reached the point where everyday is "joke about the Ministry of Transport and Digitalisation"-day, as the idiot in charge has still not understood his job description and is just running a Ministry of Cars instead (including persistent and completely moronic narratives of how efuels will solve everything) while single-handedly failing CO2 reduction goals for the whole country.
For those wondering it’s like 3 feeder lanes, 6 regular freeway lanes, and 1 hov/toll lane on each side. When it was completed back in (est 2005) it was already outdated and fully congested duri my rush hour.
And don’t forget the 3 lanes of frontage road in each direction which are common on most highways in Texas! They also get contested during rush hour of course, but have traffic signals between the entrances/exits so aren’t part of the actual highway even though they run parallel to it.
[Image] Hinterher develops innovative bicycle trailer based on the traffic light government’s transport policy
“We fed ChatGPT with the transport policy concepts of the governing parties and this is what we came up with,” says Peter Hornung, founder and CEO of the Munich-based trailer manufacturer Hinterher. What may seem strange at first glance is the result of artificial intelligence and intensive analysis of previous transport policies.
The company normally manufactures rectangular trailers with two wheels, “but we are open to new technologies,” says Hornung. Although the new trailer cannot drive straight ahead, it can turn in circles at high speeds. The company is convinced that the new model will be a success: the existential consequences of the climate crisis are well known to the governing parties FDP [liberals], SPD [social democrats] and Greens. It must therefore be assumed that this urgency is also reflected in their policies. So our latest model can only be a direct hit".
Company spokesperson and media expert Johannes Schubert therefore has no technical objections to the functionality of the bike trailer. “The evidence-based and scientific foundations on which transport policy has been based for decades are forcing us as a manufacturer to innovate.” Hinterher is therefore setting itself apart from tried-and-tested straight-ahead technologies with a view to the future.
The comprehensive analysis also included the transport policies of the last transport ministers from the CSU [conservatives], Wissmann, Ramsauer, Dobrindt and Scheuer. From this, the AI calculated a trailer travelling in reverse. “I’d rather drive in circles,” says CEO Peter Hornung, who, together with his company, is hopefully looking forward to the decisive steps taken by those in power to save the climate.
Also available in other colours!
[Images]
As a company from the transport industry, we are concerned that the current German government is continuing to prevent and delay urgent measures to limit global warming in the transport sector. This article is our satirical attempt to channel our frustration about this into creative channels. By chance, shortly after publishing our Hinterher H-Ampel [“H-traffic light”, referring to the colors of the government coalition] trailer, we found the picture with Minister Wissing in the social media, which was published by the BMDV and, as we think, fits like a glove. We would like to expressly mention here that the credits for this picture lie with the BMDV, not with us - and we would like to thank the ministry for this contribution.
[“Feedback” by various people]
Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version) Contents in [square brackets] added by me.
I have seen some truly terrible takes elsewhere online from New Yorkers who think this is another poor people tax. This is the opposite of a poor people tax. I don’t know where that idea is coming from, but it sounds like a Fox News and New York Post talking point.
I don’t disagree however for people who work in NYC, but don’t live in NYC, there’s some real shit mass transit options and none of the money from congestion pricing is going towards anything but MTA, which is just NYC, not New Jersey or Connecticut.
Honest question: Who are the people who work in Manhattan, live elsewhere in areas with poor transit, drive into the city every day, pay the high parking costs, yet get paid poorly enough that the cost of the congestion toll is prohibitive, such that wasting their free time in standstill traffic is preferable? With unemployment down, why can’t they get jobs closer to home, which may pay less, but don’t have the costs in time and money, so that they come out ahead?
Fair question, I think it harms two groups of people 1) people who live far enough outside NYC for cheaper housing, or people who work hours that aren’t normal commuting hours, where there is no mass transit service at all even in somewhat closer outside NYC areas. With that said, although I’m sympathetic to these somewhat edge cases, I fully support congestion pricing, but think there can be some tweaks, such as funding external to NYC mass transit, and potentially providing some accommodations to these edge cases.
Yeah, exactly. The problem is the poor are kept poor because they have to keep shouldering the costs of other (usually richer) people’s negative externalities. Properly pricing those externalities and using the funds either for a citizen’s dividend or for other beneficial public spending is like one of the most obvious ways to make a more prosperous and equal society.
Just because you don’t tax the externalities doesn’t mean those costs disappear; instead they just get paid by society’s most vulnerable.
Street space is a public good. It is literally land, surface area to be used for something. You can’t create more of it short of demolishing all the existing buildings. Right now like 80% of the width of a Manhattan avenue is dedicated to moving and parking cars. Pedestrians and bicyclists are squeezed into tiny slithers on the sides. It’s a total shame. If you count and compare the number of people passing a given point on a 5ft busy Manhattan sidewalk to the number of passengers in private cars in the 55ft roadway next to it, it’s like a 10-fold difference in 1/10th the space.
Right now, everyone poor and rich at least has an equal access to drive on the roadway (assuming you can afford to maintain a car at all). However, midtown roads are already at full capacity all the time. There exist way more people in New York who would drive if they could, but they literally can’t fit. It takes 1-2 hours to drive into Manhattan. This is considered “typical traffic conditions”. Morning rush hour stretches into the afternoon and merges into evening rush hour.
Effectively, you are trading patience/time for the opportunity to drive in. For every one person who has the patience to wait 1 hour in gridlock, there are 2 more who do not and find alternative ways in. Even billionaire mayor Mike Bloomberg took the subway to work. It was described as “populist signaling” but it was literally faster for him than taking a limo.
Rich people have a lot of money and not a lot of patience. Lots of them would have loved to be able to pay to skip the gridlock, but they couldn’t, until now. They have succeeded in taking this 80% of public space, that everyone with sufficient patience could access, and turning it into a private toll road. That’s why this is a land grab! Doesn’t matter if the fees go into a public fund - if revenue was needed it should have been raised by a progressive tax. A flat fee is the opposite of that!
The congestion charge will not even decrease the number of cars on the road. Remember how for every 1 driver there are 2 more who wish-they-were-drivers but who had more money than time? Every 1 poor driver taken off the road will be immediately replaced by 1 more private car service Suburban SUV. The rich crave travel away from us poors, in their padded armored tanks, and now they can do exactly that, as they have succeeded in having the legislature kick us off our public land.
The only thing that will reduce car traffic is shrinking the roadways. Take those 5-lane Manhattan avenues, take away one lane and convert it to protected micromobility lane. Take away another and widen the fucking sidewalks! Take away the street parking and convert it to green space with trees that survive longer than 1 year. Add loading zones for delivery drivers. Use the public street space for the benefit of the actual public!
Interesting points here. I hope things don’t work out this way, but I think there is a very strong chance that this is exactly what will happen: the streets of Manhattan below 60th will stay mostly-as-busy, but with more ride shares and private car services, since clear streets means rich people can finally transmute money into quick, private transportation.
I’m curious about this statement:
There exist way more people in New York who would drive if they could, but they literally can’t fit.
I believe there are a lot of rich folks in NYC who would rideshare even more if they didn’t get stuck in gridlock. But I’m not sure we have sufficient evidence to say that “way more people” would drive if there was less traffic. When I lived in NYC (just before covid hit), none of my friends owned cars even though they all had the means. It was just too much trouble to park them and maintain them for the few days a year you need a car if you mostly hang out in the city. And driving is a pain if you’re mostly in a city – the NYC lifestyle is very alcohol heavy and for a lot of folks only spans a couple of miles on an average day. Not exactly a huge benefit from cars there.
100% agreed that we should reclaim parking space and lanes from cars, though. Perhaps congestion pricing will temporarily empty the streets and give the city ammunition to reclaim that space? A smart city would enact congestion pricing, downsize the largest avenues before rideshares figure out a way to exploit the opportunity, and then use that reduced main throughput to justify downsizing and pedestrianizing streets across the city over the next few years. But I suppose they could have done that during the covid traffic downturn, too, like how Paris and London seized the empty streets to expand bicycle infrastructure and pedestrianize streets around schools.
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