so33

I’ve said this above but I don’t think this is an incompatible view with what the article says. But the predominant attitude is that everyone just ought to move to the suburbs eventually because it’s just “obviously” so much better, with the bigger living space and the lower density. We’re seeing this attitude pop up with COVID-19 once again.

For me, I so heavily despise the experience of being in a car for even half an hour. So unless I find a neighborhood where everything is nearby or maybe I can bike everywhere (not so easy in the US!) none of these supposed quality-of-life improvements will outweigh the downside for me.

(And yes, I have owned a car and used it for day-to-day stuff. I universally hated every single moment I sat in that car.)

I don’t think that’s the thesis of the article. Rather, I think the article is saying that nice things alone don’t compensate for the opportunity costs and negative second-order effects you incur when obtaining _some_ nice things.

To use the article’s example of living in a city versus a suburb: If you can get a house in a suburb and can commute 15 minutes or so and are within walking distance of the stuff you care about (including your friends/family) and don’t value any of the perks of living in a city environment (or heavily dislike the downsides), then go for it. But a big house in the suburbs _alone_ isn’t automatically going to make your life better, yet in my experience that’s a very dominant mode of thinking.

Living in downtown Palo Alto probably costs 100% more than living in Pleasanton, which is roughly a one hour commute.

As I understand, there’s heavy resistance to building any sort of density in Palo Alto. That will, of course, skew the cost of living. I believe that people are constantly priced out of the city as well (i.e. they wanted to stay but couldn’t).

I wonder if this is one of the reasons big tech companies run buses — to make the commute less painful and blend into the background of life.

The American perception toward public transit is that it is unreliable, crowded, dirty and/or filled with poor people. Knowing that there will be a seat on a clean bus to take you home without much worry is a major sell and can convince people to ditch their cars (whether or not the equivalent public transit commute actually matches the above perception).

When I was in a situation where I could take the “tech buses” regularly, they for sure helped make a long commute bearable.

the left and the right my opinion are missing the key points on freedom (the left suppressing and labeling, the right militarizing).

If I had to choose between “cancel culture” versus militarized violence, cancel me any day.

Bus rapid transportation could be a better fit, given existing freeway infrastructure. But good luck taking away two lanes of highway anywhere in the United States (true right-of-way separation is necessary for any effective _rapid _transit). A lot of other BRT ends up most of the time being express buses with fancy stations/shelters that still cost a bunch of money.

Honestly I think that the way we plan cities in North America is broken to the point where any transportation strategy is doomed to result in sprawl and congestion. To use a train analogy, I’d say that city planning is the true third-rail of American politics.

Nespresso isn't technically espresso either, as Wirecutter points out (https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/best-nespresso-ma...).

That being said, I was under the impression moka pots require a lot of cleanup. For drip, there's a lot of competition, notably the AeroPress, that's only slightly less convenient than the Mr. Coffee machine. But I'm not aware of a product like that for espresso-like drinks.

It's like saying "Delhi is too Indian" No, it’s like saying “Delhi has too many Hindi speakers” or “Delhi has too many Brahmins” or “there are too few Muslims in Delhi” or “Delhi isn’t doing enough to combat colorism”.

or "Beijing is too Chinese" No, it’s like saying “Beijing relies too much on unregistered rural hukou holders who effectively form an invisible underclass unable to build wealth” or “Beijing is mistreating its growing African minority” (https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/04/15/chinas-racism-is-wrecki...).

Perhaps you should educate yourself on the real and pervasive socioeconomic, class, and racial divides present in any country, just like in the United States, before proceeding to make reductionist analogies.

cities built around transit and biking.

I believe the first Intel product announced was the [EDIT: iMac - see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMac_(Intel-based)#1st_generat...] MacBook Pro at Macworld in January of 2006, long after it was announced at WWDC in 2005.

I think concerns about how Apple will handle the transition can generally be addressed by the relatively smooth transition from PPC to Intel. Apple has literally done this before.

The nine most terrifying words in the English language are "I'm from the government, and I'm here to help." - Ronald Reagan

In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem. - Ronald Reagan

https://en.m.wikiquote.org/wiki/Ronald_Reagan

As evidence, he pointed to data from real estate companies that showed less interest in California, New York and New Jersey as well as slowing searches for homes in larger cities

This isn’t good evidence for the argument. People who live in cities primarily rent.

As an aside, I do think that a move to smaller cities will help strengthen the American economy overall, similar to the distributed small-cities economy that you see in Germany, where no one city has the primacy and pull of NYC.

It's only when you go out to the suburbs, probably one of society's least efficient constructions, that you see the lowest prices -- a perfect balance of efficiency, I guess. It is weird and I wonder if there's some lesson in here.

I suspect the inefficiencies are just externalized! Rent is low because land is cheap(er) in suburbia, but society pays in increased average travel times* as well as the high costs of road infrastructure needed to support suburban living in general, which is paid for in our taxes and thus doesn't show up on the price tag at the store but rather as a line item on our paychecks.

* I can walk less than five minutes to the grocery store in the urban core. Admittedly I have no data on this but based on my own experience, I'd bet it takes the average suburban household at least 10 minutes to drive to a grocery store - and 20-30 minutes to drive to a Costco-like store, placed where rent is even lower - and then 2-3 minutes on average spent looking for parking and then walking across the parking lot! Time is money, and given society's obsession with optimizing time, I find it strange how little attention we truly pay to travel times.

But USPS is focused on efficiency and profitability. They have streamlined many of their operations and created new profit making initiatives (e.g. Informed Delivery), all while having the mandate that mail cost the same from Alaska to Florida as from New York to DC. They just have the aforementioned budget burden to fund retirement funds no other organization, public or private, would ever bear upon themselves voluntarily. And they can’t set their own rates. And they have to deliver to every address once a day six days a week no matter what.

TurboTax on the other hand, is a relatively nice experience.

For this tax year I used TurboTax. I have a relatively simple return, but editing stock sales was extremely tedious and I was constantly upsold on random products when I just wanted to go to the e-file page.

A car is just easier, assuming light traffic, short drives, and good parking

And that’s precisely the problem, because cars don’t scale well. Suburbs surrounding large growing urban areas in the US are often clogged with traffic. Just look at the Bay Area.

You could say the solution then is to decentralize and make it so everyone can have the light traffic car commute. Aside from possible environmental impacts (Who knows, there might not be any with all the reduced traffic from this scheme), I don’t think this is realistic right now; humans have clustered around cities for literally millennia.

Edit: I live within a few minutes’ walking distance from several grocery stores. Typically I just buy a bag’s worth of groceries at a time. Physical ability differs, of course - but that’s another argument for reducing car use in my view, so you can clear the roads for the people who truly need the car.

Now imagine how the non-bike lanes would look like if every one of those people on a bike was in a car instead!

FWIW I don’t see anything extraneous, neither in the source code nor on the page. Browser extensions can inject content, of course; that might be what’s happening here.

The check is issued by the “Bank of San Serriffe” (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Serriffe). Perhaps they have different typographical conventions...

Sure, comparisons to Gitmo might be unwarranted, but this article is not about cafes merely playing music nonstop (which is indeed ubiquitous), but about Starbucks playing the same few songs over the speakers repeatedly while denying employees the ability to control the playlist (and therefore the environment around them). FTA:

Earlier this year, irritated Starbucks employees took to Reddit to rage about how they had to listen to the same songs from the Broadway hit musical Hamilton on repeat while on the job. One user wrote that if they heard a Hamilton song one more time, "I'm getting a ladder and ripping out all of our speakers from the ceiling."

At a smaller cafe, I'd imagine employees would get much more control over what music to play (often I've noticed it's just some employee's phone plugged into the speakers).

I see your point, but still EVs are not that great for environments compare to trains, forget the energy for moving. Energy to build, the tire residues that goes to our public water and ...

Unfortunately, many seem to think that just because something is emission free, they no longer have to worry about such things as grid capacity or electricity costs.

Just look at the mayhem easy to obtain government backed student loans have caused in "higher" education - skyrocketing tuition and a bachelors degree being worth about the same as a high school diploma was in the 80's. But now with crippling debt for new graduates.

This is a problem that, as far as I can tell, exists mostly in America. I doubt this is a problem in European countries where tuition is mostly free or extremely low cost to begin with.

Maybe the key for effective social programs is not to apply a bandaid but to fix the root cause.

Maybe the smart car was too small, but “Small” cars (by American standards, anyway) are still popular. They’re just disguised as SUVs and classified as “subcompact crossovers”. With how wide American roads tend to be, the Smart car is perhaps unnecessarily small for America.

The goal of most "anti-car" (most aren't really anti-car, just anti-cars in the city) people is not just to create pedestrian zones, but also to change land-use patterns so that it doesn't feel as necessary to drive everywhere.

This is absolutely implementation-specific. American cities tried similar transit/pedestrian malls but failed. It is my belief that with good governance and infrastructure, cities can adapt to a car-free lifestyle, even in places with extreme winter.

For example, in snowy and hilly Montreal an entire underground shopping mall exists, (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underground_City,_Montreal) allowing for transit commuters to walk around (or rather, under) the city center comfortably even in the dead of winter. Even if those commuters took their cars into the office that day, they still benefit from this infrastructure, because it potentially reduces the need for additional car trips (if you're just grabbing a quick bite to eat or a few groceries).

It's important to note that public transport systems are often forced to run unprofitable routes. Late night routes and paratransit are inherently unprofitable but improve accessibility. Of course, there are more unsavory reasons, usually political (for instance, the "Downtown Express" bus routes in Toronto were created to fulfill a political promise, and are vastly unprofitable as a result).

Ride-hailing services don't have this particular problem. They only need to serve based on rider demand. Yet at this moment they do rely on subsidies by VC money.

Why should public transit be paid for by automobiles? Let the users of each service pay for what they consume.

Why should anyone pay for anything they don't use? I understand this is a fairly common position to take in general, but this situation is not unique to public transit.

Regardless, true cost of driving private cars is already obscured beyond just for road construction and maintenance. Free or subsidized municipal on-street parking, below market rates, is one big example.

Most city centers that go "car-free", especially in Western Europe, only do so for a few blocks. Imagine the entire area around Times Square becoming pedestrianized.

And yes, as much as they seem to clutter city streets, electric scooters and the like are seemingly becoming a viable last-mile transportation option.

Isn't it wonderful how the car allowed a large number of families to own a home with a piece of land, yet have access to the amenities of a city?

That was an illusion. House prices are soaring in the inner suburbs (case in point: the Bay Area) to the point of complete unaffordability, forcing people out further and further from where they work and, consequently, creating situations where commuters drive for hours every day because there is no other choice.

To drive to the city, you have to find a place to park your car. As more people want to drive to access the amenities of a city (and they have to, because they might live more than an hour away as they can’t afford anything closer), they will need to pay more and more to park, because of the costs of real estate.

And tunnels are no panacea. The congestion created by single occupancy trips created by people who might be living an hour or more away from their destination will persist.

Density would go a long way to solving some of these problems. Simple things from lowering minimum lot sizes, to mid size apartments and condos, would increase access to home ownership. But we can’t have anything lowering those property prices, can we?

Actually, no. The MTR’s farebox recovery is over 100%. They make a profit on fares and make even more money on real estate.

City Observatory is a publication that lobbies for urbanism. So you have to take that into context when considering their argument.

Their argument is not that removing roads doesn't reduce quality of life – their argument is that cities _adapt_ and that tearing away infrastructure for cars in favor of housing and "human-scale" neighborhoods won't necessarily result in doom and gloom.

Of course removing a highway will result in some temporary issues. But cities are living organisms and they can adapt. America is after all a free-market economy. If a road trip to a faraway store becomes inconvenient, a new store will open in due time. If it becomes impractical to drive around, neighborhoods will reconfigure to serve customers within walking distance. And if a hypothetical highway closing permanently were to cause single-car commutes to become impractical, companies will respond by moving offices, encouraging telework, and subsidizing public transit commutes.

We all think we need our cars, but somehow the majority of commuters in cities outside the United States manages to commute via public transit just fine.

The reality is that roads provide something people want - the ability to get around quickly, on one's own terms, without dealing with waiting times or trip planning, and without some of the unsavory experiences that can sour public transit (e.g. https://www.sfgate.com/crime/article/BART-takeover-robbery-5...).

Build public transit out enough, and you get that as well. And funny enough, cities in developed nations other than the United States don't have issues with crime on public transit. Is it a problem inherit to public transit or is it systematic underinvestment?

Building roads doesn't "induce" demand. Rather, it _fulfills_ demand. There is a limit to that demand - it's not like supplying infinitely more of something would infinitely scale the associated behavior. There are only so many humans and only so many trips they are willing to make in a day. And an area that is 100% roads obviously would not have any destinations worth traveling to (leaving aside edge cases like race tracks).

First of all – building roads absolutely does induce demand. In fact, _any_ sort of transportation infrastructure, _including public transit_, induces demand. This is pretty well-known. Induced demand isn't about creating larger trips - it's about creating demand through trips that were once not possible. For example, a new train line or highway out in the suburbs will induce people to move close to that piece of infrastructure. This is a well-documented phenomenon, and it happens even for public transit.

The problem is that roads for one-person cars don't scale. Downtown Seattle, in particular, is constrained by Elliott Bay on one side and Lake Washington on the other. Amazon is building out tons of towers in the last bit of open land near downtown Seattle. If every Amazon worker were to commute by driving alone, it just wouldn't work because there's no place to put in new highways! Public transit (or living close to where you work, or not commuting at all and teleworking) simply scales better.