Imagine being AFAB and having your car snitch on you cause their AI detected the car left Florida and parked near an abortion clinic in ankghed state. Keep in mind States are researching systems they will help them get this data automatically as it happens or tech companies might start automaticlly reporting if to avoid increased liability in these states.
Don’t you know the famous communist cities of Amsterdam, Tokyo, Barcelona, Berlin, Copenhagen, Stockholm, Singapore, London, Madrid, New York (where Wall Street has been recently renamed into Stalin Street), Beijing, Chicago, Milan…
I’ve been to Amsterdam before. Can confirm filthy communists. Biking is also commie behavior and it’s getting more popular in EU. Especially in Germany… Very concerning
Because planned economies are a terrible idea. We would be doing this efficiently and organically if the demand for bikes and public transportation was higher and the demand for cars was lower.
Why don’t we uproot all our vegetable crops and grow cherry trees? Cherries are delicious so this is obviously a great idea!
The only reason you have food on your plate is because economies adjust incrementally from the ground up, not all at once from the top down.
If you uproot an old failing oak without plans to plant something in its absence, you’ll be left with a big hole and no shade.
Edit: Maybe I’m agreeing with some of what was said and I’m misunderstood. Either way, I agree with understanding demand as it relates to a planned economy.
This is a problem with some poorly executed pedestrianisation/walkable area conversions IMO.
I like it since it means more car free spaces for me and my 🚲, but those without a bike aren’t going to wait around a hour for a bus, they’ll hop in their car and drive to an alternative location. They might not even be familiar with bike paths and routes to get there, especially if they’re not comfortable riding on the road.
When car-first infrastructure is ripped out, people need to be introduced to alternatives and the alternatives need to be attractive, otherwise the status-quo will shift elsewhere
Here comes the guy with the degree in economics and a lot of free time lmfao. It must be really difficult to misunderstand such a simple meme but here, I will help you out: MAYBE the spendings our governements “plan” (uuuh scary buzz word) on: car infrastructure (go check how much your country spends on it), gas tax cuts, road maintenance, healthcare costs related to car accidents (you don’t obviously “plan” those but they are nonetheless a cost for a society), just MAYBE, they could be decresed in favor of public transportation? Cycling infrastructure?
“BuT tHe dEmAnD fOr CarS iS sO hIgh!!1!1 LeT tHe fReE mArKet ChOoSe wHaT pEoPlE wAnT.”
Nice free market you got there when outside its all roads and parking lots (tax-paid), with no sidewalks/cycleways, and the only bus/train going to where you need to has a ride every 6 hours. Im sure people will buy a car to get around because they love it so much.
Why don’t we uproot all our vegetable cropsmodes of transportation and grow car trees? Cars are delicious so this is obviously a great idea!
I also have a degree in economics (and computer science, fwiw). We agree that the incentive structures in the United States are fucked up. I was just answering the question in the meme with regards to manufacturing decisions and how/why they’re made. Discontinuing our perverse car-centric subsidy schemes would be a great way to steer demand and supply away from cars.
Under-founds public transportation until all that’s left is a old dirty bus going in along a useless route every 6 hours. Builds massive highways, parking lots and roads that make it “easy” to drive and impossible to walk or cycle, cuts gas taxes. WOAH GUYS, people are buying cars because they love them! We should give them more funding and keep de-funding transit projects
What we have is a transportation economy that’s been planned by car companies. From demonizing “Jay Walkers”, to buying trolley companies to shut them down.
Even today, where small trucks stop being produced in order to avoid emission restrictions. Along with marketing, that falsely claims improved safety of the larger, more expensive, more profitable large trucks.
Whenever a market is dominated by a small enough group of companies, they start planning how it will work.
We live in an economy that is heavily distorted by things like car centered infrastructure, price fixing, cartels, industry lobbying, corruption and advertising among other things. Considering this makes your statement naive at best.
The only thing i can see on the right bad is that many people dont like beeing cramped in with many other people. + want to have a garden Balcony can be a “garden” but not as good. I have nothing against the right, but keep in mind not everyone is the same.
Buildings like the one on the right near me have something like community gardens, but exclusive to the residents.
I don’t know exactly how it works, but it seems residents who want a garden have one, and those who don’t aren’t forced to maintain exactly X cm high grass.
Right - unless you’re getting a custom home, builders do jack shit about noise control - at best, you’ll have some fiberglass batting inside an interior wall, but even that is usually not done. Take the same kind of standard cost-cutting and apply it to an apartment complex, and congratulations, you just created the projects. My point being is that if residential density is a desired social policy, then there need to be standards put in place that focus on quality of life, not just safety/environmental standards. But builders and developers have regulatory capture (in the US), and things like “quality of life” are marketing premiums rather than something everyone should enjoy.
I wonder how well Tesla’s tech would handle train engine development. The cars run on Li-ion batteries while electric trains are continuously fed with energy. Either way, Tesla engineers’ time would be better spent designing next-gen affordable rail.
Not really what you were saying, but I just want to take this opportunity to jump on the box you left out and scream that battery trains are stupid and anyone who suggests installing them needs to be slapped. The lifecycle cost of rolling stock batteries easily dwarfs the cost of electrification in pretty much any application.
All the class 1 RR companies on the US are absolutely allergic to any kind of capital expense. They will literally turn down very profitable business expansions to avoid increasing their costs because they view maintaining a good cost/revenue ratio as more important than increasing profits.
It's pretty mind-blowing how poorly-run these companies are.
Well, they’re basically in the early stages of vulture capitalization. This is where businesses just sort of coast, they stop trying to grow, and just don’t replace things as they break. I think the long term plan is to milk it for whatever they can before getting bought/bailed out by the federal government. We’ll get CONRAIL again for a few years and maybe some pretty sick Amtrak expansions as the government goes around fixing about half of the most critical rail lines, but then the cycle will start over and we’ll sell CONRAIL and our freshly repaired alignments off to some genius investor for pennies on the dollar just so they can vulture capitalize anew and talk about what a business genius they are.
Like way way more expensive. I know that in France electrification is around 1M€/km, so when you’re working on a long line with a few train, it might be cheaper to use batteries, diesel train or even hydrogen (even though it’s mostly prototypes for now).
And I’m only talking about economic cost, think of the ecological one, if you have to deploy +100kms of wires, sub electrical stations and maintain them, all for a handful of trains a day then there’s simply no interest
I mean, ecological cost of electrification vs burning diesel seems like a pretty clear choice. In terms of economic cost, though, the US would probably balloon that price out to $20M/km, because how else would contractors get to take the taxpayer over the coals?
US rail infrastructure is also more expensive just as a simply supply and demand problem -- we have very, very little supply compared to in Europe. We've fallen so far behind in the technology that most major projects involve bringing in contractors from Italy, Germany, and France to do the work. We even import most of our new rolling stock (and the Class 1s nearly never buy new rolling stock anyway, if they can help it). We're buying and building so little rail that we've lost the capacity to do it well ourselves and so have to import it at a premium.
Plus the US federal system -- and its general philosophy with e.g., city departments competing with each other for budget -- just makes infrastructure projects super expensive in general.
We need to start investing in it again to see the cost drop but people refuse to invest in it because the cost is so high. That might just be starting to change with Cali HSR, Brightline, the mid-Texas HSR project, Amtrak ConnectUS, etc., but we'll see.
There’s a confluence of factors that make infrastructure projects such a nightmare in the US, but the big ones seem to be:
-Not institutional knowledge. State DOTs don’t retain people who can plan and manage this stuff, it all gets farmed out to contractors or their people get scalped by contractors willing to pay 2-3x the wage the state will pay. So, they’re completely at the mercy of contractors.
-Overreliance on contractors and subcontractors. Nuff said. There’s a lot of shitty contractors out there whose whole game is to take the taxpayers for as big of a ride as possible, regardless of whether the work actually gets done. Because of Reagan era “reforms” (those are sarcasm quotes, to be clear), we use contractors for all kinds of stuff, and it’s easy for shitty contractors to game the system.
-Stations: the US has a hard-on for building large stations, when they’re very reliably the most expensive part of building any kind of rail infrastructure. We could substantially reduce rail project costs be re-examining our station designs and opting for more utilitarian choices. I’m not against making stations look nice, mind you, I’m not advocating for a brutalist, khaki concrete cube approach here; just saying that we can make more pragmatic choices than CAHSR’s fantasy-future ribcages.
Again, the ecological cost of electrical infrastructure is bigger than the one for diesel train, so when you got 2 trains a day it might make sense to keep Diesel
Just fine? Whether it’s in a car, train, freight train, it’s just an electric motor. You can have a AC or DC motor, if AC you need a converter. The issue has always been battery capacity. *But I agree with the other guy, running an overhead power line is the way to go.
In this image I can’t help but notice how much infrastructure cost there is here. Consider need for water treatment pipes run to and from each house for water and sewage as well as sewage treatment infrastructure. Keep in mind that failure rate increases with each house and by length of these runs that you are adding and fire hydrants being added every so many feet, shut off valves. Don’t forget that we now have significantly bigger demand for water as we now have a lot more vegetation to manage and a higher reliance on emergency services as we are spread out over a larger area so we now have to increase ems, fire, and police spending. Then you add the costs for electrical infrastructure with your sub stations and transformers and all the costs set to maintain that especially since these are underground lines apparently and ofcourse we have increased risk of failure again per service and foot run and higher demand on those services which will require more workers which turns into money being spent outside of the community. You then add the cost of data lines and phone lines including the costs associated with maintaining and upgrading those which are also apparently underground which means your upgrades may be significantly more expensive and will take much longer to deploy. Now that we have all these houses separated we will now have a population that will be more dependent on vehicles so now we have to factor in all of our road maintenance costs and our public services will not require far more vehicles as well which means we will also need mechanics to repair and maintain these vehicles. Now with roads alone when we consider the costs involved things get rather expensive quickly. Cost to maintain roads, even roads that are seldom used, is surprisingly expensive and require a lot of workers to build and maintain as well as vehicles, machinery, and land to store, recycle, and create materials needed to repair and build the roads. On top of that there is also an often missed statistic of vehicles which is public safety as they are a leading cause for injury which is another stressor on our little community.
This is far from all the possibly missed costs of our suburban/rural neighborhood but I feel these are some of the important ones people live to overlook.
You’re absolutely correct. Suburbia is subsidized. sprawling, car-dependent suburbs are almost universally financially insolvent on their own, as they literally don’t produce enough tax revenue to cover the colossal cost of infrastructure needed to serve it. They require the financial backing of denser communities to prop themselves up.
The scale of money needed for car-centric development is astounding. Consider Massachusetts:
Using publicly available data, the authors put the annual public tab at $35.7 billion, which amounts to about $14,000 for every household in the state. Those that do own vehicles pony up an additional $12,000 on average in direct costs.
Using the numbers from the article, Massachusetts literally spends over 10% of their GDP on cars, more than half of that being public subsidy. Absolute insanity.
Consider need for water treatment pipes run to and from each house for water and sewage as well as sewage treatment infrastructure.
Someone has never heard of “well and septic”.
Out in the country, you have enough biological diversity around you that sewage is just fertilizer for your lawn. You don’t need the extensive network of sewers to concentrate it, the chemicals to treat it, and the sufficiently large body of water necessary to dilute it back down to something that nature can tolerate.
Much the same with potable water: there’s no need for an extensive system of water treatment plants, chlorination, the network of underground piping when you are just pulling water up out of the aquifer. It has been filtered through hundreds of feet of sand and gravel, in the absence of oxygen. All the biological material has been filtered out, leaving just water and some trace minerals.
Electrical infrastructure is moving away from centralized fossil fuel plants to distributed solar and wind power. Spreading the load out allows generation to be moved closer to the point of consumption, which reduces the total load at any point on the grid, and increases redundancy and resiliency.
Spreading homes apart introduces a natural firebreak between them, reducing the demand on fire services. A single kitchen fire in an apartment complex can put hundreds of people out of their homes. High-rise fires are especially dangerous. It’s much easier to attack a house fire than an apartment fire.
Roads are not reduced: food and raw materials used by humanity come from the countryside. Transportation infrastructure must stretch out to the farms and mines. Housing farmers and miners in the cities just increases their commutes on top of their long work days.
Wireless data can be much more feasible in the country than the city. Less building interference; less RF interference.
No, I’m afraid you’ve overblown the cost difference considerably.
I started to respond to this but it’s so full of obvious bullshit it’s not worth the time. Dump raw sewage into the ground in suburbia? What the fuck kind of capitalism hellscape do you live in?
Well and septic are viable options down to as little as half-acre lots, yes. Raw sewage is dumped into the first of 2-3 tanks, where it is biologically processed with virtually no intervention, before the nutrient-rich effluent eventually flows into a leach field and soaks into the topsoil.
Municipal sewage processing does it much the same way. The problem is that the cities don’t have sufficient biomass, so they have to discharge their effluent over a very large area. A city typically converts a nearby river into a massive leachfield.
You have a problem with individuals processing their own sewage and discharge it to vegetation on their own lands, but you support massively upscaling that process and dumping the effluent directly into waterways.
“Capitalism hellscape” accurately describes one of these scenarios, but not the one you’re thinking of.
When I left home this afternoon, I briefly disturbed two doe and four fawns eating ground ivy in my front yard. When I get home, I’m going to hear crickets in the woods behind my house, and bullfrogs in the pond. I’ll probably hear the big owl in my neighbor’s tree, talking to his girlfriend down the road.
While I was last in the city, I saw a homeless guy pissing on the sidewalk, dozens of boarded buildings, and hundreds of broken windows. I heard four sets of gunshots. The local “park” has nothing growing in it; it has an asphalt basketball court and a gravel playground with busted equipment. An industrial site has a methane flare burning overhead 24/7.
The reason you are having a rough time explaining what’s wrong with my argument is that you are accustomed to the dystopian nightmare of urban living, and expect everyone to accept and tolerate that nightmare.
Sorry dawg I grew up in a rural area. I have to return to rural areas frequently to visit family and I currently live in a suburban area so… sorry? But your anecdote is pretty awful
That is exactly the point of this meme. The resource allocation for building car infrastructure has been massive since the '60s while transit has been left behind as it is way less of a oppurtunity for car manufacturers and oil companies to profit from it and yeah, they do have a saying bigger than yours when it comes to deciding your country’s politics. (See corruptionlobbying)
But it means rebuilding cities. We should absolutely do it, but entirely reworking how everyone gets around is gonna take a while even best case scenario. But that’s why we should get started now!
We already bulldozed and rebuilt our cities for the car, so there’s certainly no reason we can’t do it again. It should be easier this time, though, as the main things we have to demolish are parking lots and stroads, not entire city blocks of dense housing. See Cincinnati below:
From my interpretation, this meme suggests we should just stop building cars. The fact we are buying so many cars is just a testament on how bad public transportation is. Even with traffic I still manage to get 1 hour and half faster than public transportation by train + subway.
I wish the solution was as simples as a resource redirection, but unfortunately it would require some city planning and possibly rebuilding around public transportation. Not gonna happen, I guess.
In an alternate world you’d complain cars can never work because there isn’t enough space for them on roads, and there’s never any parking when you arrive. (Oh, and accidents)
Holy shit can you imagine? If we’d take all the investments that are done on a yearly basis for cars and we stuff that in trains, busses and bikes and their infrastructure?
We’d get walkable cities, cities would get more tax income, we’d all get healthier, we’d have tonnes of money left for parks… and we’d actually for once really do something to stoo climate change to boot
Ahhh to dream…it’s so nice. The world could be so pretty if people just weren’t such dumb egocentric assholes.
Replace “love” with “don’t mind” and you’ve described a portion of us c/fuckcars subs in a nutshell.
I personally dislike car-dependent design, which forces the majority of people to purchase, insure, and operate an understatedly dangerous, but very convenient mode of transportation. Us as a society being numb to deaths caused by dangerous driving, but not to deaths related to motorbikes, pedestrians etc, kind of sums up how big of an exemption we’ve given these vehicles - both mentally and in infrastructure.
There’s no question that cars serve an essential mobility function in areas where public transport is an unrealistic possibility at present, but the same benefits don’t translate well to dense urban areas like cities, where entire blocks in some instances are dedicated just for accomodating vehicles, and road space is taken up by individuals in their own personal 5 seater bus (exc. Carpooling)
Urban sprawl prevents actual buses from being a viable alternative for out of city commuters, so it’s a tricky problem to solve. Trains are a nice alternative too, but most of those tracks were ripped out and the remaining ones are mostly owned by freight companies ☹️.
…although you didn’t ask for my opinion and I deviated a bit off topic here sorry 🤪
You literally didn't. You answered with a logical fallacy. I'm not even saying the conclusion is wrong or right. Just that your way to get there is brain dead. You literally argued "the most popular choice is the best choice." I weep at whatever schooling system you're a part of as you clearly are still in school based on your maturity level.
Lmao there is a certain category of people that always starts using emojis the moment they are copeing.
Trying to put up points with you looks particularly useless, like speaking to a wall, but I will say for whoever reads this that people using something doesn’t necessarily means they like it. Unless you are suggesting people like to go to the hospital or to their workplace.
Pretending they didn't respond again expanding on it is funny. Plus it was an argument against the given one. It wasn't explaining why it's not that way. It was explaining why it shouldn't. Since that's the structure of the given argument above.
When someone says we should do X and then you just respond with "no, people love y" you're explicitly arguing it's a reason against. We obviously know people have cars. There is no value add to the discussion if it's truly what you claim, that they are just pointing out the current state of affairs. That's ludicrous. You're basically saying "no, they're just stupid."
he isnt arguing that they’re not wrong for liking cars. he’s saying not enough people want this to happen to make it feasible, because people want cars. do you have a chip on your shoulder?
That's not what they said. At all. That's an entirely different argument. If you want to make that one, be my guest. Also take some lessons on reading comprehension.
What a bs take. Many people used lead but that doesnt mean lead is good. Many buildings were built with asbestos but that doesnt mean asbestos is good either.
You may be shocked to hear this, but the world is a far bigger place than inside your head.
People don’t like cars, people like freedom and convenience. The US is designed around cars, and it’s not impossible to live without a car, but very close. Your argument is like saying people like health insurance, that’s why they keep buying it. The issue is that there isn’t a different choice.
To be faaaaaair, there are certain politicians who claim that “people like health insurance”, but those ‘people’ might be politicians who get big donations from the private healthcare firms.
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