HN user
That's true, I hadn't thought of that and in my city 70% of PT is indeed funded by taxes. But if there wasn't PT my city would probably need to be less dense because of the additional required parking, roads, suburbs, etc and therefore generate less taxes per acre. Also once a high enough percentage of people use PT, it could pay for itself through fares (Tokyo apparently?). The entire situation is complex and hard to measure IMO.
I never thought about how you could be coerced into voting a specific way like that and it does seem to be a big problem to me. But is that already possible with mail-in voting?
I wanted to provide an anecdotal example, my bus commute is about 30 minutes and by car would be about 15 minutes. The extra time I spend commuting is ~150 hours per year (- WFH days/personal days/sick days). Owning a car and buying parking would cost me about $4506 more than having a bus pass per year. So I'm essentially getting paid ~$30/hr for those 150 hours each year to read books / listen to podcasts in public. I understand this is leaving out a lot of details. And if my commute times were twice as long I would only be getting paid ~$15/hr, still not bad if you already enjoy reading books or listening to podcasts for free.
Shouldn't a prototype city of the future be built around walking and public transit with cars being more of an afterthought?
As opposed to banning research on everything that hasn't already been researched because it could have some negative health effect we don't know about?
I once made anki flashcards while reading a book on linux. I think I was able to memorize a lot of useful CLI utilities because of that. It also helped me stay motivated to get through a very dry book.