what_a_maroon
No bio...
User ID: 644
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
I think it's clearly true in that there clearly are wide, straight, paved roads through very sparse parts of the country, and we never really think about to what extent the cost is justified. The existence of much smaller rural roads disproves the literal interpretation of (my summary of, not even the original, which is in the video) a rhetorical flourish.
what_a_maroon
11mo ago
If paying for something, but not proportionately to its use, makes it be used above its economically efficient level, that argument also applies to other things paid for in such a fashion.
A salaried employee is, at least for now, an actual human, and thus capable of affecting how much work it actually does. But, this argument absolutely applies to other things. Education and health care are 2 notable examples--the consumer rarely pays anything close to the actual cost, which results in overconsumption and inefficiency (for some reason I feel like I would get way less pushback on The Motte if I made the same argument for these domains...).
(Actually, gas taxes pay for roads and they are proportional to miles driven, but ignore that for now.)
Gas taxes only pay for a fraction of road costs and gas consumed is only roughly related to road cost imposed. It also has very little to do with any externalities, like noise.
what_a_maroon
11mo ago
It's not a perfect substitute for I-35 because it doesn't parallel it
Yes, it's not nearby for most of its length, and even the closest stops to where it crosses aren't very close to the highway (except for the very last one, I think).
2.5M, if you include the whole metro area
That definition requires you to go halfway to San Antonio: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_Austin
The plans I've seen are divided into an 8 mile stretch in the center of the city
It may stretch along a large distance, but it's still a small portion of the total area--or road mileage, but those are roughly proportional.
Also, if you're going to use the whole Metro area for population to split the cost of a road, you should then also use the whole metro area for the number of roads that have to be paid for.
you slog through I-35.
It will still be a slog, that's the whole point of induced demand! Those other cities, as I've pointed out in this thread, have much better loops. If your primary concern is thru traffic, then look at the loops on the edge of the city.
The expensive new lanes are slated to be HOV-only
That's an improvement; we'll see if it turns out that way.
which you might interpret as "non-car-users are heavily subsidized", to be fair
Depends on the details. Probably yes, in practice, but it is possible to have transit pay for itself--Japan, most notably, has private train lines, and NYC used to have private subways. But if you're going to subsidize one form of transportation, transit has fewer externalities and higher capacity.
what_a_maroon
11mo ago
Restraining a person sometimes causes their death, as it did in this case.
If Perry does get convicted of manslaughter, it is false that it would be for restraining someone. Death is an essential component. There is absolutely no reason to describe the events this way except to make it seem like Perry didn't do anything wrong, without addressing any of the relevant facts.
Our prior for Penny acting violently or in a threatening way on the train should indeed be affected by his previous arrests.
"Our" prior does not justify your claim that he was violent. This is at best extremely weak evidence; the only witness statement I saw claimed he was not violent, which while obviously far from perfect is better evidence.
The question is whether Neely's behavior justified Penny's actions, not whether they justified the result.
This is just bizarre. Are you of the opinion that the consequences (or at least, expected consequences) of an action, have nothing to do with whether they are justified? I suppose this would be consistent with your idea that drivers shouldn't be held responsible for driving recklessly.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
So I dunno, you tell me why he doesn't allow Rob's content on his subreddit.
I'm not him and I can't read minds. But it doesn't seem unreasonable to want to keep the subreddit for his channel primarily focused on his stuff and stuff he agrees with? It's probably not what I would personally do, but again I don't think it should be stronger evidence than what he explicitly says. Like, for another example, this line right here. Doesn't sound rabidly anti-car to me.
No, of course not. The problem is, while his solutions are technically not banning cars, it results in dramatic lifestyle changes that many people aren't much keen to take on.
I wonder if they aren't keen to take them on in part because they don't seem to understand what the changes actually are. For example, you write:
so the urbanists say you should just go to the supermarket every day. Well, many people take issue with that, and don't want to go to the grocery store every single day, and there's also concerns about impulsive buying
"Every day" is probably an exaggeration. I shop largely by foot (or I stop on the way home from driving somewhere else, but buy enough I could easily carry it on foot). That's 2-3 trips a week. Just for me, but I also work from home and go out to eat pretty rarely. The other thing is that you don't have to "go to the supermarket;" you can stop by a small store or 2 on your way home from somewhere else. You can still drive, too--he points out the parking lot at the grocery store in this video.
And for what it's worth, looking at obesity and food waste rates in the US, it seems hard to imagine that "impulse buying" could get any worse. Maybe it would even be improved if you had to think more about what you buy, I don't know. I'm less concerned about this particular argument since there are many secondary costs and benefits one could think of. If you don't want to live in the middle of a big city and never use a car, you don't have to--again, at no point have I ever seen NJB or the other channels I mentioned say we should ban all cars everywhere.
For example, having to pay for a rental car instead - it has all the potential headaches of having to pick up the car, or if not that then the car potentially not being in working order, or maybe there's no cars available or you have to wait a while, etc.
Based on his video on the subject, it actually seems extremely convenient (I haven't had much reason to rent a car recently, so I can't personally attest). Owning your own car has headaches too--it can also run into mechanical trouble, for example, and then you don't have any alternatives and it's your responsibility to fix, while in a populated area, you might have several rental apps each with multiple cars. You also have access to different vehicles for different purposes. And it seems like it's much cheaper, unless you are driving more than a few times per week.
Or using one of those cargo bikes which really don't look like they can carry very much.
Serious question: have you tried? Or done some investigation to find out exactly? Or this just a guess? Personally I very rarely cary lots of cargo--rarely enough that few trips that couldn't fit in a cargo bike could be done by renting, Uber, or having things delivered (e.g. when buying furniture, most of which wouldn't fit in my car anyway).
proposition of ditching a car in any meaningful way is a very serious proposition to make to someone,
Well, yes. That's the point: If you design cities and towns differently, then ditching the car isn't so serious! Obviously ditching a car in a car-dependent place is a big deal.
For example, Not Just Bikes hates the implicit message of Road Guy Rob's videos, where car infrastructure in the USA isn't fatally flawed and if we just fix a few things here or there it'll be all good.
I mean, I think that message is wrong. There are a lot of things that you would have to change to make it so that a substantial portion of the population could reasonably not own a car if they don't want to. As emphasized in the video about IKEA I linked above, it would be nice to have options. Most American cities don't give you an option: You need a car to do the most basic things. It's literally written into a lot of municipal codes, which have parking minimums for homes and businesses that assume at least 1 car per customer/dwelling. Adding a bike lane here or there is an improvement, but isn't going to change that basic fact. But again, I think this is a disagreement, not "NJB secretly wants to ban all cars everywhere."
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
That's the second time I've been told "it's just a joke".
... the video is literally entitled "Roasting Other Urban Planning and Transit Channels" and consists entirely of short snippets making fun other channels. I don't know what to tell you.
The other "joke" was... NJB mentioning those people using cocaine in the pedestrian bridge? Right? Where he says "the people were nice enough to offer him some of their crack cocaine. Canadians are so friendly!" That doesn't seem even remotely close to me. Like are you legitimately concerned that NJB is going to literally use this as an example of how Canadians are friendly?!
This is the most complete enumeration of the interactions between Not Just Bikes and Road Guy Rob that I could find. If you have any evidence of NJB feeling differently, I would love to see it.
Ok. It seems like they disagree, and NJB prefers his subreddit to not have that content. Rather than reading into the choice of the term "car apologist" (which is generally anybody who defends a thing or position--it's not "apology" like apologizing for a personal insult) or the timing of videos, I think his direct statements on his opinions on cars and driving are much stronger evidence. I think it's much more likely that you are missing something, or misinterpreting something, than his whole video about rental cars and his whole video about driving in the Netherlands being, as well as the vast array of videos where he says "there should be some car-free areas" and "separate cars from pedestrians and cyclists" and very much does not say "ban all cars" are what, a big psy-op? Like if those are all lies, why not allow Rob's stuff on the subreddit?
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
Isn't this hellscape exactly the product of government regulation? I.e single-family zoning (with a lot of additional bizarre rules) in the US? Doesn't sound very libertarian to me... Single-family suburbs wouldn't dominate a libertarian economy even if people really wanted it.. because they are grossly economically inefficient if not net burdens and when there are no subsidies you either abandon your white picket dream or pay a hefty price for it, most won't consider it worth bearing that additional cost.
Yes, although IMO a lot of self-described libertarians seem fine with them for various reasons, mostly around the (IMO false) feeling of freedom that comes with cars.
The rest of your rant is about how the moral failings of libertarians can be disregarded based on its shoddy premise.
I don't get this claim at all.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
I never heard of the law that mandates people buying a car. What is this law?
Buying a car is not literally mandated, but it's the only way to get around after zoning, parking minimums, lots of big roads with no alternative infrastructure, etc. (Actually in some cases, cars are literally the only legal way to get certain places--there's no sidewalk, bike lane, or transit, and the surrounding land is all roads or inaccessible).
Nobody ever "pays all the costs" in our society.
Whether or not this incredibly vague statement is true, it still remains that "some people find that cars have more utility than costs" doesn't mean anything. The extent to which cars are subsidized could easily vary by quite a lot. If they were subsidized less then fewer people would use them. The reverse is also true.
sprawled, low-density environments
That isn't what I said. I very specifically used some important words.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
I can't see how it being MORE crowded would help me with my 3 bags of shopping or bulky items.
What are you even talking about? Just because a place isn't car-dependent, doesn't mean it's downtown Manhattan at mid-day.
It's really not a big loss of times, especially if you can it on the way home from somewhere else. A seriously, your example of something that's hard to carry is a 6 pack of water bottles? I can easily put a gallon of milk, 5 pounds of potatoes, and several other items just in my backpack. It's not hard to carry in the slightest.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
I'm not well-versed in Netherlands politics but I'd imagine that the Green Party wouldn't have won the election on a platform to remove 10,000 surface parking spaces if it didn't have reasonable compromises like giving the car owners another place to park their cars.
Based on the NJB video, it does in fact seem like they are just net reducing the number of parking spaces in the city.
f not, then look at PolitiFact, which says it's 13 lanes at its widest not counting frontage roads (which reasonably lines up with the 6 lanes per direction I see on Google Maps
Why not count the frontage roads? I don't know your level of familiarity with them, but almost all of the frontage roads I drove on in Texas were basically highways themselves, with high speed limits and wide lanes. There were lights, but generally very apart, so if the main highway was uncongested you were better off on it, but if it were even mildly congested you could go just as fast on the frontage road. If the claim is "Houston still has congestion despite having X lanes" than the frontage roads should absolutely count towards X.
residents should have a say in this regard.
Sure! Through the free market, which gives all of them a say, rather than top-down planning, which lets a majority control everything.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
More often than you think, if you've ever had to live without access to a car. I wouldn't want to carry anything remotely expensive or breakable on the bus, and I wouldn't be able to carry a week's worth of shopping home from the nearest supermarket while walking -- to say nothing of my ability to bounce around different shops and get my preferred brands of things.
I think you're still picturing taking a bus in a car-dependent place. Obviously that sucks. I go grocery shopping several times per week because there's a grocery store a short walk from where I live (and 2 others that are on my way home from a regular appointment). Renting a car every day or paying for delivery on everything you buy would be expensive, but that's not what I'm talking about. 60 dollars each is expensive if you do it twice a week, but a bargain if you do it 3 times a month (at least, looking at my car-related expenses). But I was thinking about things like buying furniture or moving, which is the kind of thing people do 1-2 a year at most.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
Yes, and why AM I paying for these schools when I don't even have any children?
I unironically agree so I'm not sure what your argument actually is here.
"If you can't drive, you can at least rely on other people to drive you around" is not what I would call "freedom."
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
I'm a bit confused here at what you're arguing against. This seems... obvious to me, and not something I was saying? I'm not saying "I just want to live how I want to"; that's trivially impossible because we are all constrained by various external factors beyond our control.
It seemed to me to be the argument that the OP of this thread was making. NIMBYism means keeping people he doesn't like out of his neighborhood, which sounds good. That's why I said what I did--if public services are subsidized out of general tax funds, because they provide benefits to everyone, then that contradicts the use of government policy to serve particular citizens at the expense of others. But it sounds like you and they are making different arguments.
Well good for you, at least. Though that position seems hard to square with how expensive healthcare and college is in the US.
What do you mean? The subsidies are what make them expensive. Different parties pay for it and make spending decisions, which means that the normal incentive to spend less isn't there.
But I believe subsidizing driving is extremely effective at getting people to their destinations
It's pretty inefficient for any sort of populated area. A 3-lane highway has less capacity (in terms of people per hour) than a single light rail track. Houston's Katy Freeway reaches 13 lanes per direction at one point, and it's still congested. I agree that in sufficiently sparse areas, transit becomes inefficient. But in the US, we have cities with hundreds of thousands, or in some cases millions, of people, with borderline non-existent transit.
Sorry, I should have linked to the later reply:
Ok. That might be right, and I think I've seen this basic claim before, but I don't have time to check it all now. I think what happened is that the parish's actual spending is too low to pay for all the costs, and what they should have been spending was higher. In any event, the amount given still seems to be quite a lot for only the local taxes for an area with below-average income.
Hence my feeling that it rings hollow to paint driving as uniquely worse than homicide when deaths from both sources are hampered by lack of meaningful enforcement.
I think we're still talking past each other. My point was that these situations are similar in the sense of imposing negative externalities on others.
Is this really an objection people take seriously? I certainly don't. Yes, it is a punishment to have to be dependent on someone else, and that will suck. In fact the point of punishment is to suck, so you will have a strong incentive to not do the thing that got you in trouble. In this case, you're less likely to be a dangerous, negligent driver.
I think we agree, but my claim is that in practice it's not common enough to revoke a license (which doesn't even stop a lot of people) because it's seen as such a severe punishment. It shouldn't stop the courts from imposing it, but it should. If you drive dangerously and kill someone, you should just be in prison.
I feel like this would do nothing if the driver is drunk and not likely to care at all about how narrow the road is, which is what happened in the Strong Towns example of the State Street fatality that they just... shrug off. Charles Marohn prematurely dismisses it by saying something about how engineers consider drunk people too, even though I sincerely doubt that a speed bump or lane narrowing would've prevented this drunk driver from speeding right through anyway. And then to go further and then say "Someone needs to sue these engineers for gross negligence and turn that entire liability equation around. It’s way past time." is... certainly a take, I suppose.
Traffic calming is certainly not a panacea, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't have it. Not having ever driven drunk, I couldn't guess at whether it would be effective in that particular case.
As for negligence: Can you say that this argument is wrong? (I find this example fitting, given your link above--this is an example, completely typical in cities, of making pedestrians less safe to protect drivers who, most likely, made some sort of error).
I mean, trains are loud too, so again, seems like an isolated demand. I'm not inherently against loud things on principle either; if a train runs through your apartment, then just have good soundproofing. Pollution can be solved by electric cars, and in fact, many places around the world have already banned sales of new gas cars by 2030-2035. My point being that these externalities should be solved and not just diagnosed.
It's not isolated. Tax all the externalities (noise, congestion, pollution, danger, etc.) and let the market sort it out, sure. I think the externalities are much larger for cars than for almost any other mode of transit, and if we did that, cars would be much more expensive. But what we're currently doing doesn't make sense.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
That's still over a 50% increase in pedestrian deaths over about 10 years, enough to push it to the highest raw level since 1990, especially since the EU saw a substantial decline over the past decade. And the chance from 2020 to 2021 was massive.
This cannot be explained by cars themselves being bigger and heavier with more features.
It's not the only factor, but it's definitely one. SUVs are more dangerous to pedestrians than other cars, and the same factors that make a vehicle safe for its occupants can make others unsafe, encouraging an arms race.
Or are you looking to put people in jail for accidents (and thus discourage driving)?
I'm confused by this question. The whole point I'm making is that we use the word "accident" for a lot of car crashes that are preventable, because one or more drivers engaged in some sort of irresponsible or reckless behavior. Asking if I want to jail people for accidents is rather sidestepping the issue. If you speed and follow too close on the highway, resulting in a fatality, yeah, you should be in prison. That's manslaughter; the lack of intent to kill makes it not murder, but it's still generally a crime to behave recklessly and injure other people. A similar situation is literally one of the examples in the wikipedia page on manslaughter.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
What does that have to do with anything? Do you actually care about the evidence, or are you just looking for gotchas?
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
I do some back of the envelope arithmetic here, based solely on example numbers involving many crimes/criminal, and get totally different results
At any point, did you google to see if there is any empirical research on what deters criminals? This is an empirical question. All you have done is model the direct effect of incarceration, without accounting for whether the threat of punishment (or the memory of past punishment) might prevent a crime from taking place to begin with. In fact, you explicitly assume these effects to be 0. If you had searched around, you might have found something like https://sci-hub.ru/https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/epdf/10.1086/670398 which summarizes a bunch of research, and which says in the first sentence of the abstract:
The evidence in support of the deterrent effect of the certainty of punishment is far more consistent than that for the severity of punishment
If you tweak the parameters of your napkin math, how much does the conclusion change? What if you assume that a criminals' chance of being caught is not independent for each crime (i.e. some criminals are better at getting caught)?
If as you say they have a "rap sheet many pages long", that means we did in fact let them off too easy the first time. How could a crime be on their rap sheet if we didn't find them earlier?
-
A rap sheet includes arrests, which doesn't mean there was enough evidence to convict. If you get arrested for 20 different crimes in 2 years, it's likely you're guilty of at least some of them, but you may not be able to be convicted of any one of them.
-
The distribution is probably similar for crimes where no arrest is made, which is most of them. Smarter serial criminals may even be able to avoid getting arrested entirely, which of course only makes it easier for them to commit even more crimes.
The paper you link is entirely unrelated to the question I'm asking, namely "how fat tailed the distribution of number of crimes per criminal?"
The thing you linked to is primarily about recidivism probability. What is its relevance in this context? And why is it evidence for your hypothesis?
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
None of this ranting repeat of what you wrote above changes the fact that you have yet to provide any actual evidence of your proposed causal process. Based on some recent discussion in the CW thread (I believe), it seems like a lot of the specific issue of "pushing people in front of trains" is schizophrenics going off their meds. Their behavior is not based on a logical reasoning process and therefore cannot be influenced by a cultural more that (allegedly) allows some people to get away with such behavior.
what_a_maroon
9mo ago
Yes, at which point their language and culture were brutally suppressed, and they were forcibly assimilated into the WASP culture of whiteness.
But what problems did this actually cause prior to 1914?
No need to wait, just look around you.
Ok, what am I looking at? Is it that the children of those immigrants from the 80s and earlier have started using American names and speaking English? Is it that these 3rd generation immigrants are more likely to describe themselves as American (also more data on language)? What? Or do you not actually have a justification for anything you've written, and are expecting me to just agree because something seems obvious to you?
still carry with them a dagger with which to plunge into the back of the nation that welcomes them
That's a completely wild sort of accusation to make. Do you have any evidence for such a strong claim?
what_a_maroon
9mo ago
No, they were actively proclaiming for assimilation and suppression of foreign cultures and foreign tongues, if not explicitly foreign people.
Some people certainly wanted this, but did it actually happen? Or rather, did it actually happen any faster than it does now, or would have happened anyway? German was actually a very popular language in the US, with German newspapers in many towns, until the world wars. Lots of other diaspora communities persisted as well, like Celtish in the Carolina lowlands. My impression is actually that a lot of nativists did the opposite, and wanted the immigrants to remain separate in their own enclaves indefinitely--"No Irish need apply" doesn't seem like it encourages assimilation.
There were never as many Italians or Irish then as there are Mexicans and assorted CA hispanics now.
Do you have data to support this claim? Raw immigration numbers peaked in 1990, with the second peak being 1900-1920:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_immigration_to_the_United_States#/media/File:Immigration_to_the_United_States_over_time.svg
Adjusting for population, it's clear that we're in a pretty low spot historically (excepting the Depression and WW2)--adjusted for the 4.3x population difference, even the low point in 1900 is equivalent to well over 800,000 today. In fact, even going purely by raw numbers, "the last 60 years" is largely not that high!
Things have changed, and those changes have destroyed the mechanism for the assimilation that you take for granted. Hence the sneering. That machine's broken, it's not going to be rebuilt, and anyone who wants to do so is pilloried.
I don't see much in the way of evidence for any these things. I think people who say this don't sufficiently grapple with the history of assimilation, which I only know a little bit about, but I know enough to know that it's complicated.
This won't happen, because that goose is cooked.
Well, this is a testable prediction, at least. I think it's rather early to conclude it won't happen, when large-scale hispanic immigration is, what, 30 or 40 years old? German language newspapers existed as far back as the Revolution and was quite popular throughout the 1800s, only really declining because of WW1. Do you think that, say, the grandchildren of early hispanic immigrants (so, the children of people born in the US) don't speak substantially more English than their grandparents?
what_a_maroon
10mo ago
This is more questionable
I can only assume that you don't consider Egypt to be "Africa" if you are questioning the impressiveness of African art and architecture.
It takes a lot of organization and manpower to extract rents from the poor.
Rulers have been extracting wealth probably since rulers and concentrated societies existed. This review agrees with you that it is difficult, but it seems an exaggeration to say that Africans couldn't figure it out until the past few centuries. Unless I'm wrong, but if Africa also lacks anything worth anything worth stealing, maybe that contributes to its lack of developed nations?
what_a_maroon
11mo ago
According to this video, to be in the clear in most jurisdictions, you should... just not be there when he comes back.
The way I understand it is that if you want to be as sure as you can in all jurisdictions then yes. It doesn't mean you'll definitely be found guilty if you don't leave. But if you can't leave, as in the subway car, I'm not sure how relevant it is?
In the case of Neely... did he have a history of causing grave bodily harm to anyone?
I don't think his criminal history can generally be admitted as evidence unless Penny or someone else involved knew it. The really relevant facts are "what was he doing in the moment?"
This doctrine seems to let you do a lot of dickery before anyone is actually permitted 'deadly force'.
I mean, yes? I have to admit I'm confused by the statement. We're talking about killing a person, regardless of whether some people think that being mentally hill or on drugs or a petty criminal means you're subhuman. This is very much something we as a society should be taking seriously, and not permitting for minor annoyances or slights.
what_a_maroon
11mo ago
This is a very bizarre way of making your point.
Whether or not you personally think reducing congestion is a good goal, it is a commonly stated goal. I've already addressed the "people sitting in traffic is fine because you can eventually get places" elsewhere.
what_a_maroon
11mo ago
The sidewalks are largely irrelevant, since at the time walking in the street was much more common and generally not illegal. Removing the streetcar is a substantial loss. The buildings on the left have been replaced with a parking garage, so the loss of street parking isn't very relevant either. This example is not as bad as many cities in the US, but it's certainly no improvement for pedestrians.
what_a_maroon
11mo ago
You made a big deal about the severity of the punishment. Whether his actions were justified is not dependent on whether someone died, but the level of punishment, if a crime was committed, very much does depend on whether someone died. Why did you bother to make a big deal about the size of the punishment? Either he was justified and there will be no punishment, or he wasn't and is guilty killing another person, in which case a significant punishment is clearly appropriate.
The question is whether Penny's actions in putting him in a chokehold and thereby risking Neely's death were justified, not whether Neely's death was justified.
I think this is just semantic games. We have legal standards for when civilians can use lethal force (for what I hope are obvious reasons) which amount to "it is justified to kill this person." Using lethal force does not always result in death, but death has to be a justifiable outcome in order for the use of deadly force to be legitimate.
Do you have a source for this claim? Or that it has to do with race, rather than "mental health" advocacy?
Establish your claims, don't just assert.
...what the fuck? How the hell is this a reasonable response? Most of these people are fine as long as they are on their meds. If you want a program to require them to take said medication (or remain in a mental hospital), fine. Executing them all is completely unreasonable.
More options
Context Copy link