A) this is RT propaganda under the hood
B) I'm betting I could find quite a few US soldiers (plus the Secretary of Defense) who have prevalent Nazi symbology tattoos and/or post pro Nazi materials online.
azimir
joined 2 years ago
Every city should be repurposing every above ground parking lot.
Housing, open plazas, parks, transit systems, 5+1 housing everywhere.
If you want a parking lot in a city it should be below ground and taxed out the ying-yang.
I ran into a guy driving a F650 as his daily commuter when he was going for coffee at Starbucks. He made sure to tell every person behind the counter how great of a vehicle it was.
He had to jockey it to get into the parking lot.
While the F250 is less common than the F150 we're still faced with a plague of oversized, dangerous, and ecological driving disasters on our roads.
Show Toronto how Paris built 13 tram lines in the last 20 years. Make sure to do it in Parisian French too.
Of course my city is delaying the construction of a fucking BUS line to 2030 because the freeway build out (which is about 3 miles away from the someday bus line) is delayed. Why these two are connected, the public isn't sure. Given my city's ineptitude, at least Toronto is trying at all so I can't throw any bricks.
Edit: but we did declare a downtown parking garage a historic building and put it on the historic register so we have that going for us.
The dumbest part of the US's "fuck you poor people, die in the gutter" approach to homelessness is that it's more expensive than using a system to provide homes to people:
"A further study of Finland's Housing First program found that giving a homeless person a home and support resulted in cost savings for the society of at least €15,000 per person per year, with potentially even higher cost savings in the long term.[7] These cost savings for society are in part a result of reductions in usage of emergency healthcare, police, and the justice system when homeless people are given a home."
[7]"London wants to eradicate homelessness. Here's how Finland is doing it". cbc.ca. Canadian Broadcasting Centre (CBC). 28 January 2023. Retrieved 10 January 2024.
(From Wikipedia)
Children are especially vulnerable and costly to not provide housing to. The US is, at its core, an essentially a selfish and heartless nation. You can removed all you want about that stance, but a budget is a statement of your values. Those values don't include helping people and they don't include being cost effective, so what is being achieved here except paying more to be cruel to children and their families?
I'm not convinced of the author's details and models on fares vs taxes. The overall concept seems on track, but there's differences between direct fees (bus fare) and general funding (taxes).
The US has a long history of not understanding just how valuable and efficient shared resources are, even with the overhead of government administration. In fact, government administration is usually much more efficient than private corporation administration of the same kinds of services so we get a lot more bang for our buck.
The author does leave out the libertarians of the world. They do want every bus ride (even school busses), even police, fire, and library service paid for via contracts with the person receiving the service. It's completely infeasible and never works in practice, but they're out there.
The vast majority of public transit systems that go to a fully (or nearly fully) non-fare based model do great. People use the busses, trains, and other resources. They make better transit choices and have more money to spend in the local economy. The author hints at this, though I'm not sure they really made it clear in their writing.
To sum up: make the transit paid for by the community at large because the community at large benefits from it, even if they're not actually riding the bus. It gives us freedom as a community to have free public transit and our economies are healthier.
It's also California: the weather is usually really good. Maybe this "Becker" should add an amendment that requires bike roads to be built instead of parking spots.
I assume he's against being proactive in problem solving, though.
The research is in (it has been for decades now): our roads are designed to be dangerous because we focus on speed of cars, not balancing safety in our considerations:
https://www.cnu.org/publicsquare/2024/06/05/exposing-pseudoscience-traffic-engineering
https://islandpress.org/books/killed-traffic-engineer
It's almost hard to read the whole book. Each section is only a few pages, but they just keep hitting you with data about how badly our traffic systems are designed. The mixture of bad policy, bad modeling, bad engineer training, and bad community perceptions about solutions makes it very hard to get change done quickly, but at this point all new roads and any rebuilds should follow drastically different approaches than we used 80 years ago. To do otherwise is just open negligence on the part of the road designers.
Our roads are also designed incredibly poorly. They encourage speeding by being too wide, straight, and flat. They don't have intersections that require people to pay attention (like roundabouts do). They have high quantities of conflict points among people turning, crossing roads, walking, and riding bikes. Add in vehicles that have terrible lines of sight because they're oversized and it's a recipe for failure, regardless of the training provided.
Just another TACO Tuesday.
Very few of the pots in my city are city owned. They're all private. They refuse to build anything else since using it as a parking lot has very low taxes so the profits are good, plus the land value goes up so just waiting makes them millions.
Tax them like crazy or all you get is downtown Houston in the 1980s.