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What defines a "community"? Is it your neighborhood? Your street? Literally just your family? The town? The state? The country? Right now most of these laws are passed at the municipal level, but municipalities can range in size from millions of people to a handful, and as current events in California indicate, if you change from town to state, you can get very different policies.
In general I don't think that "collective ownership" is a good framework for coordination problems. At some point, a plot of land (or building, etc) needs a person who is going to make decisions and be responsible for the outcome; rule by committee or democracy is marked by lots of public choice problems. A market with individual owners, and Coasian bargaining for externalities, is usually going to be better at capturing everyone's preferences given all of the relevant costs and other information. Complete bans are a very heavy-handed and unnecessarily extreme solution.
It's easy to say you support a policy, when the costs are spread among everyone else. For example, when you live in a neighborhood of all single family homes and drive everywhere, do you pay all of the costs for the roads, infrastructure, and other services? Often not. You might not want to live next to an unmarried couple, but are you willing to pay for all of the costs that come with forcing neighborhoods to be that way?
To take your argument about NIMBYism more generally: In the US at least, we are way past the point of just not wanting to live near homeless people. Highly-paid software engineers need to find multiple roommates just to live near the center of their industry. Professionals with families and white-collar jobs are forced to live an hour commute from downtown, because "home values" are literally sacred. In the most extreme cases, it exacerbates the very homeless problem it attempts to, well, not solve, but avoid. And it imposes, on other people, very similar externalities to the ones you are trying to avoid. Cars are a good example: NIMBYism inevitably requires lots of driving because everything is low-density and stores are required by law to be far away from homes. Driving is incredibly dangerous; car crashes kill several times more people each year than homicide in the US, and a substantial portion of those deaths are not drivers. They're also very loud, they pollute, etc.
This is a non-sequitur / isolated demand at best, and wrong at worst. It sounds sensible to argue for the principle that you must pay for all the costs of services you use, except in practice no one has ever truly done that and it's much more practical to get people to pay for a portion of stuff they use. For example, on average 50% of road funding comes from gas taxes, and 50% of transit fares are subsidized. Both transit and road subsidies here are reasonable because infrastructure has economic benefits for all of society. If you told a transit operator that riders aren't paying for all of the costs of their services, they'd stare at you blankly and go, "of course they aren't; the point of infrastructure is to get them to their destinations, not to turn a profit".
In general, I am skeptical of Not Just Bikes and Strong Towns. Strong Towns especially since they've been shown to not be honest with their numbers, and Not Just Bikes for repeating Strong Towns's argument without any criticism, as he does in the video you linked to.
This rings hollow to me because a significant factor in both car crashes and homicide is a lack of accountability. First off, anti-police sentiment has been on the rise, resulting in less police and less police funding, so traffic enforcement goes down and along with it traffic safety. (Cue the arguments from activists about how pretextual traffic stops are just harassing minorities and resulted in the death of George Floyd and whatnot.) And of course with less police, there's more homicides. Next, judges and prosecutors release people that probably shouldn't be released, so you get cases where police end up pursuing a six-time felon whose license is suspended which hasn't stopped him from actually driving in the slightest.
I mean, yes, you can argue cars are just a bad of an externality as the homeless. But personally I'm like, well people have been railing against the police these past few years, what else did you expect?
I believe that some transit can actually pay for itself. For example, the first NYC subway was private (the city took it over after refusing to allow them to raise the fare to account for inflation, bankrupting them). Japan currently has private train lines. If you don't care about that, then fine--but then "I just want to live how I want to" isn't valid either. If you expect that public services will be provided to you at below cost, then you should also expect that you might have to give up some of what you might want to benefit other people in turn.
I disagree that it's an isolated demand for rigor, because I oppose a broad array of government programs on similar grounds. Medicine and education are heavily subsidized, for example, and thus are over-consumed.
(This is somewhat outside the scope of NIMBYism specifically, but it's also the case that if you're going to subsidize some service, you should account for how effective it is and what the externalities are. Driving is low-capacity and has high externalities and negative side-effects, so it isn't a good choice to subsidize.)
The numbers in the linked video are actually from a separate organization, Urban3. I don't really think that the linked comment "shows ST to be dishonest." gattsuru seems to agree that funding is coming from the state and local government, which is also something that ST has pointed out. They then complain about the fact that ST's comparison between 2 lots is (misleading? inaccurate?) because one lot has more businesses than the other, when in fact that is the whole point. Complaints about which things are being taxed (property vs gas etc.) seem to be irrelevant when the cost of replacing a single piece of infrastructure is 25% or more of the median household income. Overall I would describe this as "someone disagrees with them" not "they're being dishonest."
Why does it "ring hollow"? I agree that reckless driving doesn't get enough enforcement; I've previously complained about that. But I think this problem long predates BLM protests and backlash against police. Car crash fatalities had been declining prior to COVID, but this is due to the cars themselves being bigger and heavier with more features, but deaths of pedestrians and others outside of cars have been increasing. Even the use of the term "car accident" is arguably misleading; we already have a concept of negligence in law, but seem reluctant to even apply it to car crashes, even in theory. What the police do is irrelevant if the legislature and/or courts have decided that nobody is actually to blame. Also, any sort of meaningful enforcement is discouraged because, ironically, of how car-dependent we are. Preventing someone from driving, in most of the US, means they are entirely dependent on someone else to do things like work or buy food.
I am also skeptical that enforcement has/would have a big effect, but I would love to see some empirical research. However, even better than enforcement is prevention. There are ways to design roads and other infrastructure which are safer because they naturally cause drivers to be more careful. For example, posting a low speed limit on a sign does nothing if the road itself is straight with wide lanes. People tend to drive at the speed they feel comfortable, regardless of the posted limit, so rather than just posting a sign, make the road itself narrower.
Finally, the negative externalities of cars go well beyond deaths related to negligence. They're loud and they pollute, to give 2 examples.
Funnily enough, most urbanist discourse I've seen online is against privatization of trains and in favor of nationalization, e.g. so Amtrak will actually gain the right-of-way over freight rail that they ostensibly have on paper but isn't meaningfully enforced.
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. More to the point, all planning decisions go through a committee and people will argue over what the best possible plan is, which indeed may include some people having to give up something in order to benefit others as you said (that's called compromise). This is true even if public services aren't provided to you at below cost.
Well good for you, at least. Though that position seems hard to square with how expensive healthcare and college is in the US.
Yes, you should. But I believe subsidizing driving is extremely effective at getting people to their destinations (well, as long as you aren't Myanmar and build a 20-lane highway in the middle of nowhere). It seems hard to believe that this analysis is getting applied evenly to, say, buses in Tulsa, Oklahoma that are running at basically empty capacity (and will even waive your fare for the rest of the day), which I would consider not effective and incredibly wasteful in fact.
Sorry, I should have linked to the later reply:
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I should've been clearer; this is also part of my point. Courts seem to let just about anyone out on bond these days no matter how bad of a crime they were arrested for. San Francisco recently had its prosecutor recalled because he kept just not prosecuting crimes. And this all stems from rhetoric of "restorative justice" along with complaints about minorities being unfairly persecuted.
My point is people will kill someone and then just get out of jail and then do it again, no matter if they did the killing by running them over with a car or stabbing them with a knife. 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.
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. And personally, someone being dependent on someone else is the least of my worries if it's because they killed another person.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
That's probably the case. I admit that I'm very sympathetic to people who don't want to live near unpleasant or disruptive behavior, though. But maybe it's fine for them to live there if their externalities are taxed somehow?
Okay, this makes more sense than the assertion that they are over-consumed. Which was in contrast to the many tales of Americans actively refusing medical treatment because they'd rather die than pay the medical bills.
Yes, if your only metric is capacity, then a single light rail track wins hands-down over a 3-lane highway. However, there are usually other factors people consider in efficiency, such as the amount of people who actually use it, plus other harder-to-quantify factors like the fact that people using the highway can get off and on at any on/off-ramp, and can thus easily make journeys with a wide variety of starts, destinations, and stops, whereas people with the light rail must get on or off at specific stations, and the more stations you add, the slower the light rail becomes, and this limits the amount of starts and destinations people can get to.
I judge each project on a case-by-case basis; I personally wouldn't make generalized statements like saying a mode is inefficient "for any sort of populated area", and in the real world urban planners consider more factors than just capacity.
As for your claim that the Katy freeway reaches 13 lanes per direction at one point, is this actually true? The most lanes I could find at any point were 6 lanes each direction. I'm not counting ramps or tollways here, and I don't count frontage roads either since they have stoplights, bikes, and sidewalks, and freeway lane counts elsewhere don't include any parallel roads either. As for the congestion today, that can easily be explained by the fact that Houston is one of the fastest-growing metro areas in the US, and when the expansion was completed in 2011, congestion was definitely reduced, only to slowly be undone by the growing population. I think it makes intuitive sense that any significant population growth or density would put a strain on the transportation system; compare this to the trains in Mumbai which are packed full of people, because so many people live there in such a small area.
What, like Tulsa, Oklahoma (pop. 413,066)? There are plenty of buses there and they're pretty empty. And not for a lack of trying; the city keeps running the empty buses under the assumption that if they're there, people will use them, when that's clearly not the case.
I'm a bit confused by the pictures he showed. The pole seems to be mounted on a concrete bollard two or three feet above the ground, so I don't see how it follows that if a car veers off the road and hits it, the pole will shear away, when the car would just be stopped by the bollard.
But even assuming that the pole and shear are mounted at ground level, I guess the argument is not-even-wrong? I don't think it necessarily makes drivers safer, though. If the pole breaks away, then that will bring down traffic lights onto the ground with it, which can crash onto drivers on the roadway below. In fact if the driver isn't stopped by the pole then there's also the possibility that they will continue and crash into other vehicles too, if they're approaching from a side road heading towards another side road. If they're approaching from the middle of the intersection, then the pedestrian would be injured anyway (and maybe even pinned against the pole if it didn't break away).
So the narrative that traffic engineers have gross negligence for the regard of pedestrians in favor of drivers is completely unwarranted.
There is over-consumption, because it's subsidized, which is why it's expensive. The case where it isn't subsidized then become ruinous.
Transit becomes very flexible when you add in multiple forms of transportation, such as a walk or cycle near the station. Roads have plenty of their own issues, and will also slow down and/or run much below theoretical maximum capacity, for example due to lights, congestion, and crashes. In the cases where transit exists but is unused, it's usually because the city is designed to prioritize cars and so transit runs rarely, buses don't have their own right of way, it doesn't go lots of places, etc. Yes, there are reasons to have cars. But they're only necessary (edit: this should say, "only necessary for every trip") because of the specific way in which North American cities have been (re-) built since the end of WW2.
Who are "real world urban planners"? In much of North America, they consider car capacity and congestion, and basically no other factors. I stand by the statement that cars are, as a general rule, inefficient for populated areas, because they take up so much space.
This is the description I found:
I think however you count it, it's already a lot of capacity, and yet it's still congested, even though Houston is, as you point out, growing, with space for lots more people. Increasing capacity will temporarily improve congestion, but unless maximum demand is capped, it will never last. A combination of induced demand and population growth will put strain on any system if it can't adapt, but transit gives you much much more room to carry people. I mentioned light rail, but a full underground subway line can carry dozens of times more people than a lane of car traffic. It's also standard for transit to have the ability to implement congestion pricing, which is rare on roads.
That's barely more than the population of Zurich, which has a ton of great transit options which get used by lots of people. I agree that simply running buses in an area that's not designed for it is unlikely to generate much ridership. There are several issues here. One is land use, where transit is often surrounded by parking and empty lots, on the expectation that people will drive to the station, rather than stores and homes. Another is inconsistency. If there's 1 bus or train every hour and it's always late, people won't bother trying to use it. Running more frequent service encourages ridership, and Zurich is probably running dozens of times more trains, trams, and buses than Tulsa, but they're still full. A third is traffic priority--in many cities outside the US, bus-only lanes are common, so buses can avoid congestion. Transit also often gets priority at intersections. These things make it faster than driving in traffic, even with stops to pick up and drop off passengers.
Breakaway infrastructure is substantially safer for drivers who hit in than a solid post or pole in the same location: https://youtube.com/watch?v=RCErGL2WIto
Any combination of events/circumstances is possible, but breakaway poles are beneficial to the driver in the most likely situation and so represent a net benefit. That's why they're very common.
I think the point of the argument is that engineers know that cars regularly drive into the area that pedestrians wait at high speed, but haven't done anything for the pedestrians, and in fact encourage them to stand in this exact spot.
I agree that for people living and working within walking/cycling distance near stations (or have their other destinations near them), transit will work fine for them. (In fact there's a lot more of these places near transit than internet urbanists would have you believe.) I wouldn't describe this as flexible, though; they are pretty much limited to those places unless they take a car. I also agree that any form of transportation may not reach their theoretical maximum capacity, which is why I compare actual observed numbers of usage and don't rely solely on arguments like "there could be much more usage if we just bit the bullet and built more". I'm not inherently against transit, I just think they should be built where they make sense to be built.
The same planners who have built many transit systems in North America. If they really only cared about cars, why would they bother building transit? Then again, I do see this weird take sometimes (from people like Not Just Bikes) where certain transit systems are described as "car-centric infrastructure", even though that makes no sense.
I'd be more sympathetic to the space argument if I didn't see people rail against multi-level parking garages (which take up much less surface space) even when they're underground (like Not Just Bikes hated when in Amsterdam they removed surface parking spaces and replaced them with a new underground parking garage). It's also just as possible for transit to take up as much space (like a rail station 40 tracks wide on the surface). As @ZorbaTHut has pointed out in the past, there's plenty of ways the surface space taken up by cars can be reduced. If an urban planner decides to have a giant sprawling surface parking lot instead of an underground garage, sure, yell at them, but I don't think they inherently must take up so much space, nor is the amount of space taken up inherent to any form of transportation.
I'd like to know where you got that description, because I can't find it myself. In any case, you can go on Google Maps and count the number of lanes yourself.
Is this really the case? Tulsa's bus routes look like they're surrounded by plenty of stores and homes. You might have to walk or cycle a bit more than in Zurich but it's doable. I did a quick perusal on Google Maps but I don't buy this narrative that transit in North America always just happens to be built around nothing and nowhere by incompetent city planners.
I don't think they're running more in Zurich just based off the notion that ridership will just get better if they invest more and ignore how much ridership currently exists. I think they do it because at some point in the past they found that their existing capacity could not satisfy the existing level of demand at that time. Which leads me to the fact that Tulsa is considerably less dense than Zurich, hence why they have very low ridership.
If there's a North American city that initially had very low ridership (like Tulsa does now) but managed to generate tons of ridership by simply brute-forcing the amount of service they provided, I'd love to know about it.
I hear this claim all the time that transit is faster than driving in countries outside the US, but is it actually true? If you do some Google Map tests like @ZorbaTHut did, it really doesn't seem like it.
Also compare this video from Singapore, a country that heavily restricts driving and it makes it prohibitively expensive for many people (understandably so since it's a tiny island nation). In the video, driving is faster (though then of course the argument becomes "well it's nicer to be able to sleep or use your phone and not have to pay attention"). Maybe they restricted cars too much and now driving, if you can afford it, is too good compared to a country that doesn't restrict driving so heavily.
Where is the proof that they know that this happens, and this breakaway pole isn't just a standard design that's used for any sort of pole anywhere? That's the impression I got doing a quick search for "breakaway traffic light pole" with articles like this. Again, I wouldn't assume malice here, and I would attribute this to ignorance before jumping to conclusions and attributing it to malice.
Sure, but this goes back to my point about land use. Cities with extensive transit + infrastructure for other modes of transit are also typically laid out so that you can get to a lot of places via those modes. The transit isn't a handful of lines, it covers the whole city, and places you need to go tend to be much closer.
NJB seemed ambivalent about replacing surface lots with double the number of underground parking spaces, not "railing against."
Cars do take up more space, I'm not sure how this is controversial. A parked car takes up several hundred square feet, and one on the highway takes up several thousand once safe following distance is accounted for. If you look at the downtowns of even cities with over half a million people there's an enormous amount of space dedicated to parking.
I quoted it from https://charlesandcharles.co.uk/f/take-a-look-at-the-katy-freeway-in-texas
There might be "some stuff" but it's much less than there should be. Why do you think that there's so low ridership in Tulsa?
I never said that merely increasing frequency will cause the buses to all be full. But the combination of fewer things near transit, low frequency, buses being stuck in traffic, etc. all contribute. It's not a population problem--it's a design problem.
I know that Zorba made these claims, but it's pretty laughably weak evidence in my opinion. Is there any reason to believe that Google Maps is sufficiently accurate for all modes? I'm very skeptical, as in my experience maps doesn't handle varying congestion very well. Same with traffic lights.
It's possible that Singapore in particular has gone off the other direction, but there are good reasons to believe it's unlikely, and she mentions that she's driving in at *noon. Hardly rush hour. In any event, the person being interviewed prefers transit even with the longer time spent. Time spent driving is almost pure loss, while you can actually do things on the train.
If all of the people on those trains drove instead, how long do you think driving would take?
Know that what happens? Know that pedestrians stand next to the button they have to push in order to cross? I'm confused by your question.
That's... basically what negligence is?
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Not really.. Pedestrian deaths declined from 1979 (8096) to 2009 (4109) Non-pedestrian deaths dropped precipitously starting after 2005, more or less plateaued from 2010 to 2014, rose again until 2016, then fell until 2019. This cannot be explained by cars themselves being bigger and heavier with more features.
Certainly we have it; it's what determines who is "at fault" in an accident. Even no-fault states apply it to some sorts of damages. Or are you looking to put people in jail for accidents (and thus discourage driving)? Negligence doesn't result in that.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The term "accident" does not imply "not preventable", so yes, we use that word.
You are conflating the various mentes rea here. Reckless behavior that results in a fatality is manslaughter. Merely negligent behavior is typically not, and even when it is, the standard for criminal negligence is generally higher than that for ordinary negligence. You are trying to say most traffic accidents should be treated serious crimes; the reason for this would seem to be to discourage driving.
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?)
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!
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!
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.
If you're analyzing things during COVID, you might want to consider that a high speed collision with an immovable object is a handy way to commit suicide without stigma.
We certainly use the word "accident" for plane crashes.
The attempts to move away from "accident" as the term for accidents are basically political, either for the perhaps laudable purpose of getting people to take them more seriously to reduce them, or the less laudable purpose of stigmatizing drivers.
That the NY Times erroneously uses the formula "leaving the scene of an accident" for leaving the scene of an intentional act does not mean "accident" is not used correctly elsewhere; the actual statute the NY Times (VTL 600) is referring to is worded "leaving the scene of an incident".
This is not true in either case. Pushing someone through accident or negligence or even recklessness is not battery; battery is an intentional act. If they fall and crack their head open on the curb, it is only manslaughter if it was at least reckless (or in some states criminally negligent, which as I noted earlier is a higher standard than ordinary negligence).
Ok, it does exist. I think "plane crash" is a far more common term than "aviation accident" whereas car accident is much more common than car crash. Google trends showed similar results.
As far as I can tell, it's mostly lawyers (because insurance companies use the word "accident" to imply their client is not at fault, hey would you look at that) and people who study traffic safety and have found that a substantial portion of the population does think that most car crashes aren't preventable.
I think it's more likely that they just defaulted to "car accident" because it's so ingrained that's what we call car crashes.
Speeding, tailgating, changing lanes without sufficient space, etc. are also typically intentional acts. I'm not a lawyer but a traffic violation resulting in death is literally the example of manslaughter on the wiki page. d
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Citation needed. Can you point to a metropolitan area in the US that successfully implements YIMBY principles, keeps a handle on the vagrant problem, and generally results in superior outcomes? There's lots of NIMBY areas with good economic and social outcomes, but has YIMBY ever actually been implemented at scale in the US?
I mean, yeah? NIMBY-ism is a thing of the past forty years. If anything, the homeless have been more of a political issue since then, not less.
has YIMBY been implemented, though? I know NIMBY has been done, and can observe what the results look like. YIMBY is supposed to make things better. Has that positive effect been demonstrated in a concrete fashion somewhere?
One of the reasons I'm extremely skeptical of Progressive ideas is that I've observed a fundamental pattern to their behavior: they announce a theory that they claim will fix a problem, they implement this theory, the solution doesn't work and the situation gets way, way worse, and they ignore the results completely and just keep pushing the solution. I have observed this pattern express itself in a wide variety of social and political contexts, from the housing projects to educational reform to criminal justice, on time-scales of multiple decades at a minimum.
The best response to such behavior is, when a new plan is proposed, to ask whether it has actually proven itself workable in a similar environment, and whether its claimed benefits have actually materialized. There's fifty states in America, a whole lot of cities, towns and counties, and if YIMBY principles work cleanly and efficiently, at least one of these places should be able to implement them locally and demonstrate the benefits in a concrete fashion.
If the response is that YIMBY is a perfect solution but it only works if we implement it everywhere simultaneously, on the other hand, my recommended policy is that such claims should never under any circumstances be entertained. Any plan that requires hegemony to implement is flatly unacceptable, unless of course it's my tribe that's the hegemon.
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I'm not aware of any that do a good job over the whole metro area, no (good enough to evaluate their effects in this way, at any rate). You could probably point to individual towns or neighborhoods, but these would probably be A) subject to selection bias because they're rare, B) too few in number, and C) surrounded by other places with different policies. Not Just Bikes made a video about a streetcar suburb of Toronto which seems pretty nice, and if there are any crowds of druggies, they haven't stopped housing prices there from rising faster than in the rest of the city (because of course, such places are mostly illegal to build now, so the supply is constrained).
However, I think you've misunderstood the point of this sentence. Policies generally associated with NIMBYism are not just about keeping vagrants or other obvious problem-causers away. This is clear from looking at the policies themselves, as well as NIMBY arguments, which involve things like property values.
Here's one example: The ski resort town of Vail has been fighting to keep the ski resort of Vail from building employee housing. The reason they give is bighorn sheep range, but they've approved several regular homes to be built in the area and didn't care about any measures the resort offered to protect the sheep. And I think it's pretty clear that resort employee housing is not going to suddenly attract homeless people to one of the most expensive resort towns in the world!
Similarly with opposition to e.g. a duplex or retail or a school. A neighborhood full of million-dollar homes is not suddenly going to be crawling with hobos and criminals because someone put a duplex up going for half a million each side or a small elementary school.
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