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While I appreciate your honesty, I don't recognize your right to dictate what other people build on plots of land that aren't actually in your backyard.
Ah - I assume that it's implicit that I think communities belong to the entire community, not to me personally. If the majority of people in the neighborhood think that inviting more hobos to hang out is the right thing to do and should probably be considered a new amenity, well, tough shit for me. As much as I'd like to be the dictator of my own fiefdom, I'd settle for collaborative local control of policies. I suppose equally implicit is that I reject the idea that anyone that owns a given yard can do as they like with it, free from government interference.
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.
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.
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