A lot of people insist that any highway projects always just induce demand, resulting in even more congestion, but the Big Dig did nothing of the sort. To this day, 30 years on, Boston traffic is still not as bad as it was pre-Big Dig.
Induced traffic does not mean that traffic on a specific place inevitably goes back to what it was before a new highway. It means that total traffic, including old and new infrastructure, always goes up if the total road capacity goes up.
Do you think the total car traffic in the Boston area today is greater than it would have been had the Big Dig not been built? If yes, the ‘infrastructure naysayers’ were correct.
Of course, this means new highways can be locally beneficial, for example when they are used to divert car traffic from a city center. But they still deepen the overall car dependency. Investing in rail-bound transportation while imposing heavy fees on car traffic into the city would likely be a better use of resources.
It’s probably gone down, actually, at least in per capita terms. Boston’s population is a lot bigger than it used to be, so that has to be taken into account.
The comparison is between today and ‘today but without the highway’, not between today and before the highway was built. If the population increase is greater with the highway there, that’s still part of the induced demand.
Boston is far from car dependent; it’s probably one of the worst cities in America for drivers, and best for cyclists and pedestrians.
A city being “bad for drivers” is not a great indicator of it not being car dependant. Cities in the Netherlands are probably the most walkable and bikable on the planet, and also great to drive in because there are hardly any cars.
Because the point of the comparison is to determine if the infrastructure investment was cost effective. What would traffic look like today if the money had instead been used to build public transport, bike lanes, and walkable streets? If the alternative investment had improved traffic even more, building the highway was the wrong thing to do.
Every programming language is an abstraction layer between the programmer and the machine that will run the code. But abstraction isn’t free. Generally speaking, the higher the abstraction, the less efficient the program.
C++ optionally provides a much higher level of abstraction than pure C, which makes C++ much nicer to work with. But the trade off is that the program will struggle to run in resource constrained environments, where a program written in C would run just fine.
And to be clear, when I say “low-end hardware”, I’m not talking about the atom-based netbook from 2008 you picked up for $15 at a yard sale. It will run C++ based programs just fine. I’m talking about 8- or 16-bit microcontrollers running at <100 MHz with a couple of hundred kB of RAM. Such machines are still common in many embedded applications, and they do not handle C++ applications gracefully.
We’ve known for years that the owner is a lying, creepy, out of touch dipshit and that it’s a very flawed car and the company will cut costs to save money on safety items, every time....
Getting rid of cars is inevitable. The amount of resources it takes to maintain anywhere close to a 1:1 suburbanite:car ratio is massively unsustainable. Read that word again. Unsustainable. It doesn’t say “makes environmentalists sad”, it says “cannot be sustained”. Cars will go away, and everyone currently clinging to a car dependant lifestyle will have a bad time.
No amount of peasants separating cans and bottles or using cloth diapers would have changed the temperature of today, that was just a way to shift blame from the perpetrator with the bully pulpit to powerless individuals like us.
The idea of the powerless consumer is a lie the consumer class tells itself to feel better about its impending, largely self-inflicted, doom. Individually, consumers are certainly less to blame for climate change than billionaires, but they are neither powerless nor blameless.
Individual action is every bit as meaningless as voting in elections, or participating in any other large scale social movement. By repeating to ourselves the comforting lie that my own contribution to the problem is both negligible and inevitable, we play right into the hands of the billionaires.
Responsibility for the climate disaster does not divide cleanly into perpetrators and victims. Many, many people fall into both groups, or will eventually. The climate disaster has already claimed many victims, but the global consumer class is not among them, yet. But their time will come.
"Progress" (lemmy.world)
Programming Languages (lemmy.ml)
No offence
Anybody who bought a Tesla in the last few years is a goddamn tool.
We’ve known for years that the owner is a lying, creepy, out of touch dipshit and that it’s a very flawed car and the company will cut costs to save money on safety items, every time....
actual causes of global warming rule (lemmy.world)
World records hottest day for third time in a week (www.bbc.com)