fuckcars

This magazine is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

Nouveau_Burnswick, in [article] Thumbtacks strewn across Montreal bike path as tensions rise between motorists, cyclists

Okay, the loss is 250, but of how many?

I can’t find a fixed value for the number of spaces in the Burrough, however this CBC article suggests that 29.8% of the Burrough is parking (bike lanes are 2%).

The burrough is 16.5km^2. Therefore 4.917 km^2 is parking. Parkingindustry.ca offers 8" x 16" as the average parking space in Canada, which is 0.000011891589 km^2. I’m going to round up to 0.00002 km^2 to make math easier and absorb non-stall area of parking lots.

That gives us at least 245,850 parking spots in the Burrough. So the percentage of parking lost is 0.1%.

Villeray–Saint-Michel–Parc-Extension resident parking permits cost $100 for most cars.

Fried_out_Kombi,
@Fried_out_Kombi@lemmy.world avatar

Is that 29.8% the percent of total land or the percent of total street space? The article’s wording is kind of vague.

As an aside, I also find it very frustrating how one woman quoted in the article said this:

“When you’re doing a project like the bike lane, have a compromise in mind,” Bailakis said in an interview outside. “Why do the old people, kids, families get booted out [of the conversation] just to please one people: the bike people?”

It’s such a gross way to portray the topic. They just automatically assume the car as default and treat bikes like some thing that only the “bike people” use. I might ask her why she believes my sister, who had her driver’s license suspended because of a medical condition, doesn’t deserve the same rights as those physically fit to drive. My sister can ride a bike just fine, but just can’t drive, and yet car-dependent urban design strips her of what ought to be equal rights to mobility.

bionicjoey,

“Why do the old people, kids, families get booted out [of the conversation] just to please one people: the bike people?”

How are old people and children benefitting from cars over bikes???

Fried_out_Kombi,
@Fried_out_Kombi@lemmy.world avatar

Clearly children and the elderly are literally physically incapable of using any mode of transit besides a car, thus our car-dependent hellscape is actually an act of charity out of the pure goodness of our hearts!!

/s

bionicjoey,

I love knowing that children and the elderly make up a large percentage of drivers.

Nouveau_Burnswick,

Is that 29.8% the percent of total land or the percent of total street space? The article’s wording is kind of vague.

Dunno, I assumed total area, and balanced that by giving nearly half the area to “parking area” that didn’t count towards the number of stalls.

I haven’t been up there, so I don’t know that the burrough is like. I’d also be unlikely to see anything not within 1km of a metro station even if I did go, so my view would be biased anyways.

Alternatively, the population of the burrough is 143,85, so they are removing one stall for every 575 residents (all residents, not just driving residents).

Fried_out_Kombi, in [video] Car Enthusiasts Should Hate Car Dependency. Here’s Why.
@Fried_out_Kombi@lemmy.world avatar

Also, in the comments section of this video I saw a really good comment about car dependency and accessibility:

There’s one aspect I want to add to this because I’m ashamed at how ignorant I used to be in this regard: Driving and Disability.

For context, in 2015 I became very ill suddenly and instead of the illness going away it kept getting more and more severe. In 2018 I was medically confirmed disabled due to my worsening heart and as a result I couldn’t drive anymore. Before my disability I assumed, much like quite literally everyone I knew, that disabled people could only realistically get around by car or by being driven somewhere. The idea of getting groceries or heading to a medical appointment seemed impossible for someone non-able-bodied and as a result I made the ignorant assumption that reducing car infrastructure would be horrific to some of the most vulnerable people in our population.

Instead, becoming disabled taught me how HORRIBLE it is to be disabled in a car-infested world. First off, I live alone due to a suppressed immune system so the very act of trying to get a ride is either impossibly expensive through a ridesharing service or I’d have to beg my friends to help me get to the store when they already have enough going on in their lives. Second, despite me living remarkably close to a grocery store for an American suburb, I have to cross a major road, 2 parking lots, and 2 backstreets before getting to the store which is exhausting as someone already weak and without a simple, flat path to walk on. Third, and this is the most important part, despite being less than half a mile away from the store and in slow-speed parking lots, I have been nearly hit SO many times I can’t even count. I already can’t move nearly as fast as my able-bodied counterparts but it’s made even worse carrying heavy groceries back to my home since drivers do not care about your safety at all.

Now the immediate question I get from people all the time is: “Well, how exactly would walkable streets help you at all? You still struggle to walk to the store so wouldn’t it be better to have a personal driver or make public passes for free ridesharing?” The thing people seem to completely miss is the fact that most disabled people can walk fine. We WANT to walk more. We WANT to do low-impact exercise and experience the world around us. We WANT to be able to visit friends or go to bars or just have fun in our lives just like you. The struggles I get from walking to the store aren’t from the walking itself but the hyper-vigilancy I need to practice around drivers and the uneven, altitude-changing roadways that make going up and down a struggle. Had I just had a regular, flat path I could walk along without the worry of rushing across a street then not only would my time walking be cut dramatically but I’d actually be comfortable doing it. It’s also saying nothing about how much it would help people confined to motorized wheelchairs that are rarely able to get around rough terrain. That’s not even including the consideration of a mixed-use development where my store could literally be an elevator ride away and going to the store wouldn’t be a calculation of risking life or death to feed myself.

The only reason I can say this with any amount of confidence is because I met a fellow disabled friend across the ocean in Denmark. While Denmark is certainly far from a car-less utopia of walkability and freedom, Danish cities still blow our cities out of the water with being at least partially viable for the disabled. My friend has similar heart problems made even worse by being forced to walk with crutches. Yet, despite his clear worse health, he does FAR more walking than I ever could because his grocery store is in a mixed-use development and even if he needs to make a longer trip he can do so without ever considering that his life might end. When I told him about how badly I needed a car over here he reacted with complete shock when he heard what I had to go through just to get food to eat. It’s one of those things where I slowly realized that I’ve normalized something that’s a complete injustice to any disabled person when we’re some of the weakest in society yet we work HARDER than the average person just to survive the basic act of walking.

And the worst part about this is that I still love cars. I love the feeling of fixing things and giving a symbolic middle finger to any overpriced shop for friends and family. I love tinkering and modifying cars and watching my dreams slowly come to fruition. I love seeing everyone’s personal ride and listening to the stories of how each dent got there or the friends they’ve made along the way. I want to love all of these things but I now need to take a hard look back at everything I’ve loved and realize how much of it truly stems from horrible lobbying and marketing that made me love cars at the expense of everyone else. Like I said before, I’m ashamed it took me this long to wake up to just how bad it is to be outside of a car and how lucky I was before my illness to even be able to afford it or be around people who could. Falling into poverty and seeing the dark underbelly of something I once loved hurts so bad, but frankly I, and many others, NEED to force ourselves through it not just for my own survival but for everyone I’ve ignored (and even fought against…) throughout the years. My hope is that if I ever meet them again someday I can show my deepest regrets and just say sorry for implying that their survival came after my love for big things that go fast. I hope the first step to that is finding someone who reads this and realizes that things could be better for all of us rather than a lucky few. Walkable cities are better for everyone, including drivers, and now I may literally have to fight to the death to prove it.

theragu40, in How the heck did we get here? Most best selling "cars" are now superzied pickups and SUVs.

Am I reading this wrong? By all means plenty of people who don’t need trucks buy trucks.

But the majority of this list is sedans and compact crossovers? These are barely more than hatchbacks with a different name. Obviously the top few spots are dominated by pickups that have ballooned in size. Legitimate criticisms are easily made.

But after reading the title I was pretty surprised at the list because I expected lots of large SUVs. But most large SUVs are missing from this list.

urist,
@urist@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

Disclaimer: I am not a car person. I do not know the difference between a hatchback and an SUV, except that SUVs are bigger.

This is entirely anecdotal so take this how you will.

Having lived in another nation for a few years, the cars you are calling “compact crossovers” are huge compared to the sort of cars sold in other nations. I don’t want to give too many details about where I used to live, but in that nation, roads that we would consider to be one-way, one lane roads were used as two-way roads. If you meet oncoming traffic, the rule is the smaller vehicle pulls aside for the larger one. This is in urban areas. There is no shoulder to pull onto, there is a building there. If everyone with a car owned a huge American-style car or SUV there, it just wouldn’t work. Many parking places just don’t accommodate for them.

Another anecdote: Despite every house on my street having a two-car garage, there are huge vehicles parked on either side of the road, making our road wide enough for one lane of traffic. These two-car garages were built in the 70s and are too small to fit two vehicles now. Either one car is in the garage and one is on the street, or both cars are now on the street and the garage is full of misc stuff. Why would a road with with two car garages for every house have such congestion problems?

IMO, More people are buying SUVs than they used to. And their “cars” are simply much larger than they used to be.

theragu40,

I appreciate your perspective. I’ve spent enough time in other countries now to vouch for your anecdote generally speaking. Though to be honest sizes are increasing in places outside the US as well. It’s noticeable on repeat trips over years. Still not as big on average, but it feels like the trend is upward. The gap is not what it used to be. Something like a Corolla Cross or CR-V is taller than what you see in Europe but the footprint really isn’t much larger.

Some of it I think is people being actively unreasonable, some of it is larger safety and crumple zones on newer cars, some is the simple fact that the market has shown people like bigger vehicles.

In the end though I guess my point was just that of all the vehicles on the market in the US, it looks to me like the top 25 list is dominated by those in the midrange and smaller categories relative to other vehicles on the market. Whether these are still too large objectively is a topic that can be fairly debated but the fact remains that people are buying things on the smaller end of what is available to them which runs a bit counter to the title of the post.

ricecake,

Only speaking to the garage thing, I think a lot of people like to think of their garages as a unfinished part of the house, rather than car storage. Same for the basement. So it’s sort of luck of the draw which one gets a TV, old refrigerator, and selection of tools and craft projects and which one is used for storage.

ricecake,

They bracketed it funny. I think they meant (large trucks) and SUVs.

Turns out the more efficient engines make a hatchback a little bigger, creating the “compact crossover SUV”.

IHaveTwoCows, in How the heck did we get here? Most best selling "cars" are now superzied pickups and SUVs.

The last good normal truck sold in America was the 2007 Ford Ranger Extended Cab. Everything has been useless shit since.

Angry foot-stomping by tiny-penised neanderthals in three…two …

Harvey656,

TIL some fella with two cows didn’t get attacked by Neanderthals.

IHaveTwoCows,

It’s still early, but when I said this exact same thing on Reddit there was a complete meltdown

Harvey656,

That’s reddit, let them melt.

Mdotaut801,

What about the newer ranger? Love it, it’s perfect for what I need.

IHaveTwoCows,

Bed is too tall and too short, and four full size doors on a mini truck are entirely unnecessary. Four doors on any truck is ridiculous, and it looks like they’re not made for work at all but for weekend Costco runs

Pipoca, in How the heck did we get here? Most best selling "cars" are now superzied pickups and SUVs.

Trucks have been bestselling models for literally decades.

It’s because there’s a 25% tariff on importing trucks. It was put in place nearly 60 years ago by Lyndon B Johnson; it’s called the “chicken tax” because the excuse for passing it was as a retaliatory tariff against France and Germany taxing American factory farmed chicken.

Because of the chicken tax, fairly few foreign car companies in the US sell pickups.

And because being a “best selling” model is good marketing, truck makers generally sell very few models of truck. For example, the best selling vehicle right now is the Ford “F series”. So that’s the F150, F250, and F350, in all of their assorted trims. There’s a couple other models they sell - the Maverick and the Ranger - but most of the trucks Ford sells are F series.

So a truck driver has been much more likely to drive a F-series for decades than a car driver was to be driving a Civic.

Metacortechs,

Don’t forget the insane fuel efficiency calculation that rewards larger, less efficient trucks over the smaller more efficient ones we used to have. It’s the reason even an f150 is gargantuan compared to ones of the past.

HelloHotel,
@HelloHotel@lemmy.world avatar
Fedizen,

I just don’t understand why the tariff applies to foreign cars that don’t compete directly with US cars in terms of form factor

Pipoca,

Because it’s designed to protect Ford etc. from foreign competition.

qyron,

Mind if hijack your comment to clarify a doubt I have?

In the early 2000’s I had an acquantaice move to the US, somewhere in California.

After driving a typical american car for about six months, that person came to Europe, bought a hot hatchback, bolted on it every aftermarket part available for the car, had all the mods approved by the manufacturer and imported it, which awarded them a very high power/low consumption vehicle when compared with the standard american market, and I was told all the money spent was recouped in a few years.

Would this still be valid today?

ItsDedo, in How the heck did we get here? Most best selling "cars" are now superzied pickups and SUVs.

The headlights can be angled downwards but fuck it, it’s not themselves they’re blinding

Naja_Kaouthia,
@Naja_Kaouthia@lemmy.world avatar

I’ve stopped driving my wee little Subaru at night because of these asshats with 900 lights on at roughly supernova levels of brightness.

MyFairJulia,
@MyFairJulia@lemmy.world avatar

(eyes burnt to crisps) What do mean? I drive a 2012 Renault Twingo and i’m not complaining.

quindraco, in [blog] Stay alive and enjoy the ride: Imposing 20mph speed limits to protect lives – time for furious drivers to embrace reality

Given that we know going over the speed limit raises your collision rate, meaning setting the speed limit so low every driver will go over it is genuinely dangerous, do we have any studies supporting the claim that reducing the speed limit reduces the collision rate overall? I couldn’t find one, but it’s a surprisingly challenging search - I easily found studies confirming that collision lethality scales with speed, but that’s not my question.

Purely anecdotally, the vast majority of my collisions have been at very low speeds - in parking lots.

Nouveau_Burnswick,
  1. Why will every driver go over 20mph/30kph? Are they incapable of maintaining that speed? All school and community zones in my country are 30kph; are we wasting our time with those?
  2. I’m a vision zero proponent, so I don’t care about the number of collisions; I care about the number of fatal collisions first, serious injuries second, minor injuries third. So even if 20 mph maintains, or even increases collisions; so long as it reduces casualties, it’s positive. Bumpers are replaceable; people are not. The AAA document you link even says a 10% reduction in mean speed reduces fatal crashes by ~34% in the executive summary.
GBU_28,

Regarding the first point, drivers naturally trend towards the speed they “feel” is right. Also many modern cars practically idle faster than 20 once you get rolling.

Change the actual road to slow people down and reduce accidents.

biddy,

I agree, but you are making excuses for bad driving. It’s still their fault that they drive too fast.

GBU_28,

Not excusing shit, I’m describing human behavior. Humans literally drift to the speed they think is right, by feel.

Don’t assume intent.

biddy,

But similarly, human behavior can be trained. We aren’t NPCs. These bad drivers could be taught to drive at a safe speed regardless of the width of the street, through stricter education and enforcement. Pedestrians/cyclists/homes/businesses around the street -> drive slow, that should be an instinct.

GBU_28,

I said “change the actual road”

Enforcement doesn’t work for what I’m describing, without conscious effort, humans drift to the speed they think they need. Always. So whenever you try to policy it, you are asking folks to go against their nature.

Change the shape / characteristics of the road to change the speed people drive it.

biddy,

As I said, I completely agree that changing the shape of the road is an important component of this solution.

Yes, I am asking the operators of deadly heavy machinery to put in a small amount of conscious effort to keep people safe. Why is that an impossible request?

Cryophilia,

No one in my state complies with the speed limits because they’re ridiculously low for the design of the road. You have a road built to handle 90mph but you tell people to go 30mph? Yeah that ain’t happening

quindraco,
  1. I did not make this claim, and so I do not choose to defend it.
grue,

Purely anecdotally, the vast majority of my collisions have been at very low speeds - in parking lots.

The fact that you talk like you have enough samples to make that inference worries me.

Leviathan,

Sounds like this guy needs to stop driving into parked cars.

Dozzi92,
@Dozzi92@lemmy.world avatar

He only hits people in the lots, not cars. So it’s fine.

wearling0600,

My main concern with this is that what you’re doing is desensitising people from the speed limit.

I’m from a country that has arbitrarily defined speed limits and VERY low compliance rates compared to the UK (if you’ve ever been to Italy for example you know what I’m talking about). The nice thing here is that because the vast majority of roads have a speed limit that ‘feels’ appropriate (ie the road is designed for its speed limit), the amount of speeding I see here is negligible compared to what I was used to.

And generally here when the limit changes people comply to it because you can trust there’s usually a good reason.

There’s roads near me that are arbitrarily set to 30 (no pedestrian walkways, no side roads, but it passes near the back of houses and I assume they successfully petitioned the local authority to change it to 30), and traffic flow there is usually 40-45. I’ve never seen an accident there.

We have a poorly designed intersection not too far away and there’s always accidents there to the point that there’s now a consultation to fix it.

If this rule came to England, both these roads would be turned to 20, and that won’t really be solving anything. In the first example I assume locals will still be driving 40, and it will create unnecessary overtaking because the road is wide and the visibility is good so it’s not necessarily unsafe. But you’ve gone from a safe 40 road to risking head-on collisions pointlessly.

Arthur_Leywin, in this is all

But that’ll take away people’s freedom to pay a subscription for heated seats 😔

Hazdaz, in this is all

That’s great when all those people live in the same block and go to work at the same company and have the same hours.

But Frank lives 10 miles away and works on the other side of town. And Tim lives 3 towns over and works the night shift. Bill lives in the country and works 40 miles away. Eddy lost a leg in the war and while he is only 1/2 mile from the bus station, can’t walk that far with his disability.

When it is convenient, it is convenient, but there’s a reason why when given the choice, most normal people will drive their car instead no matter what the nonsense in this subs likes to pretend is real.

uis,
@uis@lemmy.world avatar

can’t walk that far with his disability.

Neither he can drive. Or in some countries even not allowed to.

while he is only 1/2 mile from the bus station

  1. This is seriously fucked.
  2. Powered wheelchair.
Hazdaz,

Hand-controls are a thing. Eddy is perfectly fine driving his handi-van around. He’s not too keen on when motorcycles part in between the handicapped spots though.

Nouveau_Burnswick,

Jessie got shot in the face in the war, his lack of depth perception from having one eye stops him from driving.

Fred, Stephanie, Phil, Jack, and Masha all have severe hearing loss from the war (Jack’s is actually from training for the war), while they can still drive, it’s safer for them not too.

Nick, Chloe, Phil (different Phil), and Jessie (same Jessie) all got blown up in the war, driving vehicles is extremely stressful for them. Being a passenger to varying less degrees. Trains don’t seem to trigger any reaction, and busses don’t for at least one of them (not sure about the others)

totallynotarobot,

Don’t forget Susan, whose base wages are so low that she has to work overtime to make ends meet. But the bus doesn’t run that late, so 2/3 of her overtime goes to an uber, whose driver also can’t feed her children.

Hazdaz,

Well Susan sounds rather dumb if she is using an Uber as a daily form of transportation where 2/3rd of her money is going to. She should consider getting a car.

totallynotarobot,

Paycheque to paycheque can’t buy you a car, but it can guy you multiple cabs.

It’s expensive to be poor.

Hazdaz,

Being stupid is even worse.

totallynotarobot,

Bit of a dick, aren’t ya?

Hazdaz,

Only sometimes. Imaginary “gotcha” type of hypothetical situations tend to bring that out.

totallynotarobot,

Not imaginary but ok. Didn’t realize you were one of those insufferable “actually” kind of trolls. My bad, I really should have clued in. Carry on.

Gabu,

Susan should’ve been born on a civilized country, as those run buses around the clock

stevedidWHAT,
@stevedidWHAT@lemmy.world avatar

The post is a meme about how buses are a better option than cars because they can transport more people at once using amount of gas less than what would be done on a 1:1 basis.

I feel like you’ve not ridden a bus before though - you didn’t mention schedules or routes once which solve the majority of your claimed points.

The disabled persons perspective is an interesting point, but shuttle services for the disabled would be even easier to run, as they would require vans instead of buses. Also, choosing to live in the country side away from bus routes when you can’t fucking walking is not the fault of the bus haha

Gabu,

Spoken like a true clueless 'murican. What the fuck do you think bus lines are?

Jimbabwe, in ask patrick

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.

Airport_Bar, (edited )

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.

lemann,

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

pjhenry1216,

That's a horrendous comparison. You could have had an arguable point if other countries weren't already doing it.

Nobilmantis,
@Nobilmantis@feddit.it avatar

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!

  • car manufactures in the '60s
Jimbabwe,

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.

diffaldo,

Demand for public transport will not increase because it continues to be underfunded.

Nobilmantis,
@Nobilmantis@feddit.it avatar

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

Steve,
@Steve@communick.news avatar

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.

Nacktmull,
@Nacktmull@lemmy.world avatar

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.

dangblingus,

Source: trust me bro!

gowan,
@gowan@reddthat.com avatar

Their source would be neoclassical economics. The idea that planned economies work well is completely undone by a historic look at planned economies.

Note this is not a position regarding the viability of cars only one regarding planned economies

DivineJustice, in [meme] How would you rather see this land developed?

If the buildings are actual size, then those apartments must be the size of a closet

mekwall,

New York apartments

WarlordSdocy, in [meme] How would you rather see this land developed?

I mean there are genuine reasons you might want a house over an apartment. If you have a big family or the fact that you own it and don’t have a land lord that can just raise rent and force you out. You gotta have a mix of types of housing that actually matches what the needs of the people are, which is still the exact problem we have now.

door_in_the_face,

You can also own an apartment and live in it. The problem in the US, as far as I know, is that many cities make it very hard to actually build apartments or rowhouses or really anything other than a single family house on a big lawn.

Fried_out_Kombi,
@Fried_out_Kombi@lemmy.world avatar

Spot on. In pink below is all the land where it’s literally illegal to build anything but a detached, single-family house. And that’s not even touching on all the other restrictive land use regulation, such as the insanity that is parking minimums. If we want to have a mix of housing types, it needs to actually be legal to build more than one type.

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/47f66f5e-17fb-434d-bff8-f20296574322.png

nytimes.com/…/cities-across-america-question-sing…

HongoBongo,

Positive progress has been made at least, Minneapolis has done quite a bit recently to change this

Fried_out_Kombi,
@Fried_out_Kombi@lemmy.world avatar

Yup, they’re one of the examples I love to use on how to fix the housing crisis! They abolished SFH zoning in 2018 I believe, and their average rents have only risen 1% since then.

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/fa58c955-7ba5-4e4f-9821-7bebeaa2002b.png

pewtrusts.org/…/more-flexible-zoning-helps-contai…

merc,

There are always going to be certain compromises when you share walls and/or floors and ceilings with neighbours. Even if everyone owns their own unit, there’s a lot of shared infrastructure, and that means discussing, dealing and compromising on all kinds of things. If you own an entire building and the land surrounding it, you have a lot more autonomy.

I’ve had one friend vow never to buy a condo again after having to deal with his condo board for a few years, and he lived in a small 8ish unit building. Another friend served on her condo board for under a year and said it was one of the worst experiences she’d ever had to deal with.

From an environmental point of view, apartments and condos are great. They’re great for public transit. They’re much more efficient in how they use land. They are much better for heating and cooling. But, people being upright apes, a partially shared living arrangement like that can be truly awful.

orrk,

i hear this often, turns out a lot of these compromises are due to the shit construction with no sound dampening

merc,

Definitely. Noise from neighbours is a huge thing, and when you have good sound insulation that massively cuts down on fights with neighbours. But, you still get confrontations when you have a lot of people living close together. Fights about parking, smells, whether or not to upgrade the building in a certain way, how much everyone should contribute to collectively pay for X, whatever.

You can also get fights with neighbours when you live in a house. But, because of the distance and more strict division of property, they tend to be fewer and smaller.

nickwitha_k,

Another part of it in the US is that the construction used in many apartments should be criminal. Every corner possible is cut. In every one of my apartments, save the one that was a converted 1920s hospital, I could gain access to neighbors’ apartments through the ceiling, if I wanted, with no tools beyond a chair to stand on.

Every apartment that I’ve lived in also had electric baseboard heating placed before windows and poorly insulated, often mold-infested walls, the windows were usually modern and well-sealed (except for one that was not properly flashed, causing water to pour in during a storm), this means that the placement was about as energy inefficient as possible - without drafty windows, that placement just resulted in thermal loss through the shoddy insulation.

And that’s before the landlords who cut every corner possible in maintenance, legal or not.

Quality construction would likely help with adoption of owner-occupied apartments but, that’s something that we’re unlikely to see without forcing it.

photonic_sorcerer, in You're so close ...
@photonic_sorcerer@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

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.

admiralteal,

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.

ElCanut,

From what I’ve seen battery trains are mostly for places where electrification is too complicated/expensive, and in replacement of diesel trains

Zron,

If you’re already laying miles of tracks, how much more expensive is it really to dig a trench for an electric cable?

admiralteal,

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.

conditional_soup,

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.

ElCanut,

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

conditional_soup,

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?

admiralteal,

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.

conditional_soup,

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.

ElCanut,

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

someguy3,

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.

rynzcycle, in the pipeline

Mine was shorter.
Move to a big city → Hate all cars and those in them (excepting delivery/work vehicles).

quindraco,

Have you considered leaving said big city for literally anywhere else?

rynzcycle,

Yes, quite a bit, but my better-half's job requires it for now. Also, I like a lot about a big city, I'd just like it so much more without private cars.

quindraco,

Ah, I hear you.

Konlanx, in [image] Both cars fit the same amount of people

Both of them are used to transport mostly a single person at a time. Even the small one is too big.

hglman,

Fuck cars, not just big trucks. They all tuck, they all are responsible for the harm done.

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • random
  • wartaberita
  • uselessserver093
  • Food
  • aaaaaaacccccccce
  • test
  • [email protected]
  • CafeMeta
  • testmag
  • MUD
  • RhythmGameZone
  • RSS
  • dabs
  • Ask_kbincafe
  • KbinCafe
  • Testmaggi
  • TheResearchGuardian
  • feritale
  • Socialism
  • oklahoma
  • SuperSentai
  • KamenRider
  • All magazines