This is the Quality Contributions Roundup. It showcases interesting and well-written comments and posts from the period covered. If you want to get an idea of what this community is about or how we want you to participate, look no further (except the rules maybe--those might be important too).
As a reminder, you can nominate Quality Contributions by hitting the report button and selecting the "Actually A Quality Contribution!" option. Additionally, links to all of the roundups can be found in the wiki of /r/theThread which can be found here. For a list of other great community content, see here.
These are mostly chronologically ordered, but I have in some cases tried to cluster comments by topic so if there is something you are looking for (or trying to avoid), this might be helpful.
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The pro-car post was not that good and deserving of quality contributions IMO. Really shows the biases of this place. Insane pro car legislature was a thing here long before cities became the dismal wrecks that they are today. I think honestly people also just need to grow a bit of a spine. I live in Baltimore where we have a limited public transit system that I sometimes use (I prefer to bike). There's always an unsavory character using it at the same time as me, but absolutely nothing has ever happened. Maybe this would not be true if I were an attractive young woman, but I doubt there are many users here who fit that description either. People need to learn to be a bit more inconvenienced and uncomfortable. Biking is always a suitable alternative in major eastern urban areas (Boston, NYC, and DC all have good bike infrastructure) if you really don't want to deal with public transit. I get that cars are convenient and make people feel powerful and in control, but they impose such a big negative externality on the rest of us non-car users (pollution, taxes, use of public space, not to mention the very large amount of deaths caused by accidents, far higher than that caused by urban villainy on public transit) that I have a lot of sympathy for NYC trying to price car use correctly. I get that this is not feasible in Texas or in most parts of California, but posters here are so car-brained that they can't get on board with the government trying to address the problem in place where it is actually feasible to fix it. Guys, the subway is not very dangerous during work hours, and the problems with it (congestion, speed) can all be fixed with investment.
People need to get places outside of working hours.
I don't even disagree with what you are saying overall. But "you shouldn't be worried about public transit safety, the subway is not very dangerous from 9 AM to 5 PM" is not a very compelling rebuttal to someone who is concerned.
I was thinking more of 7:30-6:30 pm which is what the original post about congestion pricing in NYC was discussing. I don't doubt that people need to get other places during other times of day, but congestion pricing wouldn't affect this: it primarily would affect commuters during these hours which I would argue are very safe times of day for public transit use.
That doesn't solve the problem. For transit to work the way the anti car people want, it has to replace, not supplement. You not only need to get to work on time, without being stabbed, you need to be able to get your groceries home AFTER you got your kids home from school and put them to bed. You need to be able to visit grandma at noon on a Saturday. In practice, this only works not only if transport is safe, reliable, and frequent, it also needs to be cheap and ubiquitous. It is never cheap now, and it isn't sufficiently automated to be ubiquitous. I mean, you could get around the last part by making laws so only people with kin in a neighborhood can move to that neighborhood, whence removing most people's need to go from place to place in cars, but that will not be very popular with anyone, even the anti car people.
I think the anti-car people need to get realistic. I'm in favor of better transit options, bike lanes, zoning reform, congestion pricing, and all the other things the armchair urbanists like, but cars aren't going anywhere. To tie in to my recent Pittsburgh installment, all of the recent affordable housing developments that are obstensibly based in the New Urbanist style have made modifications that "recognize the relity of the automobile". When Allequippa Terrace converted to mixed-income in the early 2000s and pushed out the riff raff around 2010, they became a somewhat popular option for Pitt students, despite effectively being a housing project. One of the biggest reasons behind this is because it's one of the few places near campus where it's easy to have a car, and Pitt's campus is in the middle of the third-largest commercial district in the state, and is only behind Downtown as the neighborhood with the best transit connections in the city.
The especially amazing thing about this is that most students who live at Oak Hill walk to campus, which walk is much longer and sketchier than the walk from the student ghetto in Oakland itself. So people are nearly doubling the length of their daily walk, and putting themself outside the radius of walkable amenities, just to keep a car. To be fair, this isn't the only reason, since Oak Hill is also newer and nicer and quieter than anything in South Oakland, and still comparably priced, so that factors into it, but when people are asking on Reddit about whether it's safe to essentially live in the projects, one thing often brought up is that dealing with a small amount of sketchiness is worth it if only because you never have to worry about parking.
It would have been really easy for these dedicated urbanist types to talk about how they could fit more units in and give the neighborhood a more cohesive character if they just eliminated off-street parking or relegated it to areas where there was literally no better use of the land, and maybe charged people an appropriate fee for it, but even in a low-income area that would be a hard sell. You'd certainly get less interest from the working class people who need cars to get to work, and the development wouldn't look nearly as attractive to people willing to pay market rate. It would turn into another case of forcing social experiments on poor people who are only living there because they don't have a choice. Part of ending concentrated poverty is recognizing that people with options expect certain amenities and are willing to pay for them, and are willing to move elsewhere if you aren't offering them. Getting people who aren't poor to live in a former housing project that's not in a trendy area was going to be a hard sell to begin with. In a trendy neighborhood people might be willing to jump through hoops for the privilege of living there, but not in the Hill District.
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