what_a_maroon
No bio...
User ID: 644
what_a_maroon
11mo ago
I can do that, but when are you going to make the same point to nybbler ?
what_a_maroon
8mo ago
They are, but even in cold American cities it's rare that it's so cold that walking or cycling become impractical. Like, a few days a year rare--certainly similar to the frequency with which snowfall makes cars impractical in those same cities.
what_a_maroon
11mo ago
The comment I replied to is low-effort sneer that contains claims but no arguments.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
Status quo bias is good. Status quo has been formed as a result of massive amount of choices and preferences of millions over millions of people.
Oh, I see. You're not even trying to make a good argument. You're just saying whatever comes to mind. Well this is pointless then.
what_a_maroon
11mo ago
You seem to have fallen for the “induced demand” meme
It's not a meme; it's basic economics which is also backed up by fairly overwhelming empirical evidence.
People want to live in the suburbs and work downtown.
Given Austin's zoning map, a correct statement would be "Austinites are largely prohibited from living anywhere except a suburb or right in the middle of downtown." Also, people may "want"* to live in the suburbs and drive into downtown, but that's not possible. Doubling freeway capacity would not change that, because it is literally impossible to fit the whole population into cars. They simply take up too much space.
*I put "want" in scare quotes because rarely do such people want to pay all of the costs associated with doing so.
The welfare of the area would be increased.
No, it would be a net decrease, because the cost of doing so would be very high, and those resources could be more efficiently used elsewhere. It would suck for anyone who currently lives in the area and has to deal with additional car traffic, construction, and possibly have their property sized to make room. It would separate downtown from East Austin even more, etc.
People hate driving through Austin. Other Texas cities with functional freeway systems are objectively easier to get around.
There's no reason to have the only interstate go straight through downtown. Lots of cities have interstates that go around the core. San Antonio has 410. Houston has 610 and I think others I don't recall the number of. DFW has 635, 20, and again I think others. Elsewhere, 95 goes totally around Boston, while 90 and 93 go into the city. Austin only has 45, which isn't an interstate and is a toll road, so all the trucks and other thru traffic go through the city even though it's slower.
what_a_maroon
7mo ago
The 2020 election was closer than the 2016 election.
Measured how?
It came down to a judge in any of 5 states allowing a filed election contest to be heard or even a slight peek at those definitely legitimate ballot signatures.
Ah, I see. Since literally every attempt on /r/TheMotte and here to provide a shred of solid evidence of fraud has been thoroughly debunked every single time, we've come back around to "just repeat things a bunch and they'll become true."
Could Trump run and lose? Sure, and it will take another vast and more ridiculous fraud campaign.
Or, you know, Trump not being that popular. Which, if you look at the 2016 results, was actually always the case--Clinton was just an unusually bad candidate (combined 2 party vote share of only 94% in 2016).
what_a_maroon
11mo ago
A "reign of terror"? Are you deliberately taking the piss? He's not Jack the Ripper (the marine, however, did kill someone).
what_a_maroon
11mo ago
I would certainly not accepted an argument along the lines of "mini super helicopters are bad because they let people's live in single family homes outside of the urban core". Just as I don't expect the government to had out free helicopters. I'm not asking for the government to buy me an SUV.
Sure, and this all sounds good. But cars are very heavily subsidized. I know people don't like to accept this fact, because they see how much they are paying and assume that it can't be that much after subsidies. The fact is simply that driving is very expensive, and costs aside, is a terrible way to have everyone get around inside a city.
I am going to vote for a very small portion of my taxes being used on basic infrastructure such as light rail in the urban core and a robust freeway network.
Austin has almost no light rail, and what little there is, isn't near I-35. If it did, this wouldn't be such an issue!
I don't think road costs up being "a very small portion" of taxes. This one project is estimated to cost 7.5 billion; Austin's population is about a million. That's $7,500 per resident. Obviously the state is spending the money in this case, and some of the people impacted don't live in the area, but again it's only one project in one small part of the city.
what_a_maroon
11mo ago
...what? I have no idea what you're trying to say. This is just a non sequitur.
what_a_maroon
11mo ago
Why stop there? Why not buy everyone their own helicopter? It's not the responsibility of government to try to satisfy everyone's preference on everything at no cost to them. That's not economically efficient.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
How long you can walk - not 500 miles, but how about 10 miles, 20? Can you walk it every day, back and forth, day to day, rain or shine? Maybe you can. I wouldn't.
That's a wildly different amount. No, I wouldn't walk 10 miles every day if I could avoid it; ideally I would take the train. I don't think walking in the rain is that bad if you have, you know, some clothing for it. Here's my question--would you drive everywhere every day if you actually had to pay all of the costs?
Then don't buy a car and leave it to people that so see it.
I don't really have that option, because of the laws that other people passed.
I, for example, see a lot of sense and so, obviously, do many other people - do you think all people that buy cars are stupid? No, we aren't - we derive a lot of utility from it. Much more than the cost
This statement is meaningless unless you actually pay all of the costs.
People lived in non-dense-ubran places long before "past 70 years".
Oh, you never read what I actually wrote, I see.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
TBH I suspect there's even a simpler solution: his lawyers told him to do it in an effort to avoid hate-crime charges.
what_a_maroon
8mo ago
No, I mean places like Chicago, Denver, and New York. Like I said, snowfall sometimes makes driving impractical in those places as well.
what_a_maroon
8mo ago
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2020/08/20/key-findings-about-u-s-immigrants/
So we might set a new record soon, but it's only recently (last 10 years) gotten close to the level that was maintained pretty consistently from 1870 to 1920 (although this is also affected by the native reproduction rate--I think "we have more immigrants" may be less useful than "existing residents are having fewer kids"). So it's still not really accurate to say "There were never as many Italians or Irish then as there are Mexicans and assorted CA hispanics now." If this trend continues it might be true at some point in the future.
what_a_maroon
11mo ago
This is your 3rd comment and you have yet to say anything that is clearly related to the thread topic. There is no market in roads, which are all built by the government. That roads allow some people to live further out (at the cost of preventing other people from living closer in) does not change this fact.
what_a_maroon
11mo ago
What trades are you talking about? What does any of this have to do with the subject at hand? I'm well aware of what utility is and the fact that people have preferences, but you haven't explained how any of it relates to roads.
what_a_maroon
11mo ago
I missed some of these comments from before.
That's ... not a net decrease. That's a 'suboptimal policy'. It's only a net decrease if those resources would be used more efficiently elsewhere absent the highway. Which, I think you would agree when looking at the rest of the city budget, they're not likely to be any time soon.
"Don't tax people as much" is pretty efficient. You can make any project at all seem good by comparing it to something even worse, but this isn't a high standard.
A net decrease would require comparing that 'dealing with additional traffic' to the new jobs or new activities the people the additional traffic brings, or the economic benefits from the businesses employing / serving the additional traffic. And ... I can't see how that comes out net negative. Having your property sized does suck, yeah, and I'm not sure how to factor that cost in - but that's basically a universal cost of development, so it doesn't obviously bring the total negative.
You're not counting any of the money spent as part of the net negative. If we could teleport roads in for free, then yeah, that be a different calculation. But the roads are free to drive on, which means they are being used above the level which is economically efficient, and building more lanes would just exacerbate the problem. This is what I mean by net negative: We're spending more and more money for what is, yes, a fairly marginal benefit. You know what would let a lot more people commute faster, with fewer externalities? A train.
Let me ask you this: Is there any domain where this argument doesn't apply? Should the government supply every good at 0 cost to the consumer? Because I'm pretty sure that communism doesn't work very well.
what_a_maroon
11mo ago
Is this a failure?
If your goal is to reduce congestion, which is typically a major stated goal of these projects, then yes, it's clearly a failure.
And the market makes more money!
I don't think this statement means anything, but also there is no "market" here. The state government just wants to build more highway, regardless of costs or benefits.
a separate goal of 'more people getting to where they want to'
I don't know why every time I end up in a discussion about roads on here, all of the car enthusiasts use the same analogy as if I don't understand that more people driving means that more people are going places. That's not the question. The question is how this particular use of space, money, and time compares to alternatives. It's like offering starving people 1,000-dollar truffle mushrooms as food, and then when someone points out that 98% of them are still starving because you could only afford to feed 2%, you pat yourself on the back because, well, you fed some people, right?
Plus, you can't just completely ignore everyone except for the group who benefits. What about the businesses and homes that would be subsumed by the wider freeway? Are they better off? What about people who live in East Austin and would like to be able to get into downtown without driving? What about people who can't or don't want to drive?
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
If you want to fundamentally reform US society so that it does not rely on car ownership, I think it's on you to prove these costs are higher than it is obvious.
US society was fundamentally reformed by at least the magnitude I would propose, starting after WW2. Are you interested in proving these changes (which, in many cases, my "radical" changes simply seek to undo) were a net positive? In my opinion, anyone who wants substantial government interference and subsidy is responsible for showing that those interventions are justified. Your argument is just status quo bias.
The costs of cars and car dependence aren't hard to find. Car pollution likely contributes to asthma (also https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK218136/ as another example, cars produce NO2 and contribute to ozone). Several thousand Americans are killed due to being hit by cars while walking or cycling every year (https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/pedestrians). User fees only cover roughly half of road costs, etc.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
mean, the argument here was that in US, everything (emphasized in the original) has to be best
Are you making that big of a deal out of what I figured, when I watched the video, was clearly an exaggeration?
what_a_maroon
8mo ago
What pressure are you referring to? And what do you mean by "native" here? Rich old money families descended from Mayflower passengers aside, my point is that the great-grandchildren of Italian immigrants from the late 1800s are not pretty much completely indistinguishable from the grandchildren of Polish immigrants in the 1920s or from the great great grandchildren of a German immigrant from 1850 or from the 5x great grandchildren of English immigrants from the 1700s.
what_a_maroon
11mo ago
...what?
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
How much would you spend to be able to walk 500 miles? How much would you spend to be able to walk with a ton of load?
I'm not doing either of those things on a regular basis, and 500 miles is by definition outside of my metropolitan area and thus irrelevant to the question of city design. I don't really see why it makes sense to spend thousands of dollars a year on a car if the reason to do so is things that I do maybe once per year, but you do you I guess.
Was everything accessible to a person in medieval city within a 15 minute walk?
Most people did walk, yes. Your average person probably could not afford to take a horse everywhere. But do you think that history jumped straight from the middle ages to 1960? Why not at least try to make the best comparison possible, and look at what cities were like, say, after the invention of trains and street cars?
The point was to show the original argument wasn't good.
The statement I made was true, so I don't know why you think making an incorrect statement shows anything.
what_a_maroon
1yr ago
The change from 2020 to 2021 in non-pedestrian deaths was massive also. I would presume the 2020 and 2021 changes were mostly about COVID and lockdowns, in both cases.
Yes. Car crashes went down, but fatalities went up--likely due at least in part to empty roads allowing for more speeding. (I wonder what this says about the idea that we should build more roads until there is no congestion?)
The rise of the SUV and the general increase in size of cars happened both during the period while pedestrian deaths dropped, and while pedestrian deaths rose. Thus it cannot explain those phenomenon, no matter how beautiful the theory is.
Phenomena can have more than 1 explanation. For example, from 1980 to 2010, the portion of people walking to work dropped by almost half: https://www.thetransportpolitic.com/databook/travel-mode-shares-in-the-u-s/
If fewer people are walking, there are going to be fewer pedestrian fatalities. That doesn't mean it's safer to actually be a pedestrian!
The term "accident" does not imply "not preventable", so yes, we use that word.
This is how I would interpret the word, but dictionary.com is... ambiguous: https://www.dictionary.com/browse/accident
e.g. "chance; fortune; luck:"
I believe there is research to the effect that people sometimes interpret "accident" as meaning "no one's fault" although I can't find it now. It's certainly the case that we don't use the word "accident" for plane crashes, or probably for most cases where someone causes damage by breaking the law. (If I shoot a gun into the air, and the bullet hits something or someone, is that an accident?)
It's even gotten to the point where the word is sometimes used for intentional acts!
You are trying to say most traffic accidents should be treated serious crimes; the reason for this would seem to be to discourage driving.
Most car crashes don't result in death or serious injury, so they wouldn't be "serious" crimes, but they might be somewhat more penalized than they currently are. As far as I know this is consistent with the law elsewhere--pushing someone is technically battery (though unlikely to be enforced), but if they fall back and crack their head open on the curb, it's manslaughter.
Man, that's an awful lot of euphemism, nonsense, and irrelevance crammed into such a short post.
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