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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 27, 2023

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The issue with traffic is that more traffic causes more traffic.

Uh... how? I am severely confused as to how this could be the case. This would imply that cities could generate however much arbitrary economic value they want simply by building more roads and letting the traffic cause more traffic.

Many parents drive their kids to school because it is too dangerous to walk and the danger is other parents driving their kid to school because it is too dangerous to walk.

Is this really true? I would imagine there are more dominating factors in these parents' decisions, such as the desire to see their kid get to school quickly and on time.

A person in Houston can't really choose a low car lifestyle in the same way that a person in Barcelona can.

Is this really true? Downtown Houston seems pretty walkable to me.

Public transit works best when transporting relatively large amounts of people relatively short distances. Urban sprawl is absolutely awful for public transit with vast distances and few people in walking distance of each stop.

See, the reason why not everyone is on public transit (yes, not even in the countries urbanists put on a pedestal like the Netherlands and Japan) is that those people are dispersed over a wide area, so either public transit can't serve everyone or it will get slowed down trying to do so. I know you blame urban sprawl for causing this problem but this is still a problem even in countries without urban sprawl.

Cars make public transit worse.

I don't see how this could be the case, and in general, I'm skeptical of the theory that building one type of infrastructure inherently antagonizes and competes against other types of infrastructure. Such an approach is short-sighted and fails to see the bigger picture.