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Josef bugman posted:I mean, do you think that busses somehow cannot work in rural environs at all? I would think that in truly rural areas you'd still be able to do a quick form fill in and get a car if required, but I think busses could work for larger rural areas or collective car pools to help out. I'm not opposed to it, but rural America once you get roughly an hour out of a major metropolitan area makes it very hard to support a transit network. There wouldn't be enough demand to go between X and Y on an hourly basis at minimum even for a government run/subsidized bus fleet.
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Jun 23, 2023 13:17
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 definitely no forecastable x-intercept on this graph, better base policy decisions for everybody on the needs of this group forever  less flippantly a) it is entirely likely that within ~30 years the only people living truly 'out there,' not just in transit-serviceable suburbs, will be rich assholes and seasonal work crews supported by company infrastructure while in camp, both of whom are able to effectively exempt themselves from normal-private-citizen regulations pretty drat easy; b) why even make the assumption that regulations can't be structured to discern between longstanding legally-understood terms like 'urban' and 'rural'
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Jun 23, 2023 13:18
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Veryslightlymad posted:Even if I have a light and the right of way, I absolutely do not cross near drivers unless I am certain they see me. I signal them with intent when I am going to move. If I can't get eye contact on that, I don't move. There are so many times when I'll instinctive stop or just not go right away because something feels "off" and said passengers will noisily insist, "Go! You have the right of way!!!!!!" On at least three occasions in the past 20 years my actions prevented being hit by another vehicle.
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Jun 23, 2023 13:35
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As a supporter of the war on cars, banning personal vehicles doesn't make any sense. You need to make cars a less good option for urban life. Design cities for density, prioritize other forms of transit within the city. Get rid of stuff like parking minimums and single family zoning. Basically make cities good for everything but cars, while still leaving that option for people who are willing to sit in traffic or pay for high and highly limited parking. It sucks because it's a very hard battle to make headway in since you can't really get these things overnight - public transit, biking, etc. generally only start to be come attractive options when they're as good or better then a personal vehicle, but when everyone relies on personal vehicles because they're the best/only option, it's really hard to get public support for doing anything that isn't making life better for cars, which becomes a vicious circle.
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Jun 23, 2023 13:35
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Cheesus posted:This sounds similar to my attitude toward driving and certain passengers who believe "rule of law" always trumps the situation. I have a very similar approach to things like having "right of way" in pedestrian crosswalks and things like that, and always tell those people "The laws of the land can say whatever you want, all they end up doing is cleaning up the mess after the laws of physics win."
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Jun 23, 2023 13:51
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HookedOnChthonics posted:
Could you please label this graph? It looks like it is percent of people in the U.S. who live in rural areas, but that isn't immediately clear. Based on this, the percentage of rural population went from 30 to 18ish in 60 years. Assuming the decrease holds steady, in 30 years approximately 12% of people would be rural. Today, 60 million people live in rural areas, with the projected population increases, by 2050 that would be down to about 52 million (Pew projects a total population of 428 million). That's not exactly just the 1% and a bunch of loggers. Also, highly bureaucratic and pedantic organizations like the U.S. government don't even have good definitions of what rural means, other than simply non-urban. There are several overlapping metrics. So regulating it is actually harder than it looks, even without getting into the different geography of each state and every Tribe/Native Village, most of which are far from metropolitan centers and are exactly the people counted as rural. https://www.hrsa.gov/rural-health/about-us/what-is-rural
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Jun 23, 2023 13:58
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Kammat posted:I'm not opposed to it, but rural America once you get roughly an hour out of a major metropolitan area makes it very hard to support a transit network. There wouldn't be enough demand to go between X and Y on an hourly basis at minimum even for a government run/subsidized bus fleet. That is more than fair, it's more that I can understand needing to drive now, but I can't understand actively wanting to drive if you don't have to. I get the ease and the simplicity, but well funded and available to all public transport of all kinds would be better for everyone in my opinion, with some obvious caveats for those that truly need cars.
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Jun 23, 2023 14:18
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oh yeah sorry its from here https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/rural-population and i extrapolated to 30 years very grossly by looking at the pre-pandemic percent-change trend (-.5 -> -.7%/y 2018-2020) versus current total share (~17%) and assuming that it would roughly continue along those lines, which is a big assumption! but i do think that you can reasonably guess that the pressures and factors pushing that population trend will only increase--economic trends, the end of health care availability, climate change, and the disproportionate age demographics of rural areas: https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/newsroom/press-kits/2019/paa/paa-poster-older-population.pdf posted:Urban and Rural Population by Size and Geography maybe some big return-to-the-country movement will eventuate and reverse the trends? who knows. the pandemic spike in WFHers going rural for decreased CoL definitely didn't have staying power despite all the NYT profiles about it also just to share some additional thoughts: *there is a full spectrum of options in between single-occupant cars and heavy rail--jitney busses, for instance, would be fine in rural areas. *the policy approaches that have a volume of case study and advocacy behind them for reducing car use don't go for ownership restrictions but use and cost burdens to change the economic calculus. hefty registration fees in singapore, reductions in road and parking space in milan, london's whole fee zone thing *my personal policy recommendations for reducing car use in a city given a totally free hand would be (roughly in order of priority but also with the understanding that it needs to be a package deal to really work): --fully funded social safety net (not strictly transit-related i guess but i'm the one writing this list) --converting first every third and then every other street in one axis to transit/pedestrian only so the bulk of PT has an entirely separate RoW from private cars --good park and ride infrastructure around the periphery with direct links to major destinations and ToD clusters --gradually but steadily reduce street parking availability in the urban core to near-0 --first building out BRT infrastructure on the arterials, then laying track for trams --changing norms back to a having a second operator aboard each bus/train car in a conductor & safety role (jobs program and a transit accessibility solution!) --mixed-mode utilization, ie light local busses that can be flagged down from the sidewalk & take you to collection points for heavier transit then finally after all that: --regulatory/economic burdens on car ownership at consumer level HookedOnChthonics fucked around with this message at 14:59 on Jun 23, 2023 |
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Jun 23, 2023 14:21
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Banning cars in any way on the US is a complete nonstarter so it's not even worth debating. As others have said, you have to make the public options more and more worth it for people and they'll use it. If you're competing with the prospect of traffic and losing there has to be room for improvement.
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Jun 23, 2023 14:46
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HookedOnChthonics posted:
 More seriously, there's a reason the areas that grow the food for everyone wield a disproportionate amount of political influence. Rural areas are not going to be totally depopulated within 30 years. People are needed to grow that food--and more than just seasonal workers.
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Jun 23, 2023 14:49
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Cars are such a convenience that I am kind of surprised no one here is suggesting trying to make cars that are more environmentally friendly/electric or otherwise. Some people are treating it as an all or nothing situation.
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Jun 23, 2023 14:52
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Madkal posted:Cars are such a convenience that I am kind of surprised no one here is suggesting trying to make cars that are more environmentally friendly/electric or otherwise. Some people are treating it as an all or nothing situation. the inefficiencies car-oriented design forces on us land-use-wise is as much the problem as the cars themselves also we're seeing increased awareness that tire particulates are as much an environmental and health detriment as combustion emissions--EVs are actually worse in that regard than gas because of the much higher weight, so it's a more complex problem than just 'yay electric' (im sure youre also aware of the extraction externalities etc.)
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Jun 23, 2023 15:07
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HookedOnChthonics posted:the inefficiencies car-oriented design forces on us land-use-wise is as much the problem as the cars themselves Do you have a link you can provide that tires wear and tear is as bad for the environment and human health than combustion emissions? I have never heard that before and it seems extremely unlikely to me that tire particulate is worse than diesel exhaust for your health or CO2 for the environment.
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Jun 23, 2023 15:10
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Tire particles are killing salmon today, while climate change promises to do so eventually. There's no coherent way to measure the actual harms against each other
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Jun 23, 2023 15:13
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Madkal posted:Cars are such a convenience that I am kind of surprised no one here is suggesting trying to make cars that are more environmentally friendly/electric or otherwise. Some people are treating it as an all or nothing situation. more environmentally friendly cars is almost borderline just "clean coal" - there's so many downstream & upstream impacts of car-centric city design and culture. It's not that we shouldn't make cars more environmentally friendly, it just wont solve the dozen other problems cars create. A switchover to electric cars is also no good if we're just shifting around where we burn the fossil fuels, but they obviously benefit if the powergrid switches over to renewables. Like, being able to take a 5 minute walk to the grocery store vs. a 5 minute drive to a grocery store in an electric car is a no-brainer for which is better for the environment.
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Jun 23, 2023 15:17
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There are some people that will always need a car/truck - mostly people in rural areas. They are a minority though. Urban/dense suburban areas should have enough public transit to render cars unnecessary. Sprawling exurbs shouldn't exist. Yes I know these are big changes, but it's not as bad as continuing down the current path.Oxyclean posted:more environmentally friendly cars is almost borderline just "clean coal" - there's so many downstream & upstream impacts of car-centric city design and culture. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/jun/03/car-tyres-produce-more-particle-pollution-than-exhausts-tests-show
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Jun 23, 2023 15:24
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Leon Trotsky 2012 posted:Do you have a link you can provide that tires wear and tear is as bad for the environment and human health than combustion emissions? I have never heard that before and it seems extremely unlikely to me that tire particulate is worse than diesel exhaust for your health or CO2 for the environment. They said worse “in that regard” so EVs aren’t worse overall (and are in fact much better) but in terms of tire particulates would be worse than an ICE when comparing two similarly classed cars. Now if you go from a ICE SUV to a hatchback EV the weight difference isn’t as much. Like someone else said, the answer is to stop making cars so convenient. Get rid of parking minimums in cities. Do public transport right in the places where it is way, way easier (high population density areas) and it’ll be a while by the time we get to the more rural areas but we’ll know a lot more by then.
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Jun 23, 2023 15:36
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Close the light truck loophole
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Jun 23, 2023 15:37
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the chicken tax will be eliminated 20 minutes after michigan stops being a swing state and at no point before that
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Jun 23, 2023 15:43
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Leon Trotsky 2012 posted:Do you have a link you can provide that tires wear and tear is as bad for the environment and human health than combustion emissions? I have never heard that before and it seems extremely unlikely to me that tire particulate is worse than diesel exhaust for your health or CO2 for the environment. So there’s two distinct categories worth keyword searching here—“road runoff” will get you a quite established body of literature and regulatory action on the heavy metals, surfactants, oil, &etc that washes off road surfaces and into water supplies, ie https://d1wqtxts1xzle7.cloudfront.n...LOHF5GGSLRBV4ZA (first-brush result but has links to further studies) And then more recently to my understanding there have been investigations into airborne tire and brake particulate as an emission; keystone study being the one referenced here: https://www.emissionsanalytics.com/news/gaining-traction-losing-tread But the point I guess I want to make, just to state explicitly, is that car dependency and all the negatives it brings is a social/economic problem first and foremost, not a technological one or one based around any immutable extrinsic factors. We have structured both our built environments and our social-consensus understandings of normative daily-life activities and obligations around assuming car use, so of course cars are a necessity! And of course attacking car ownership itself in isolation is going to feel hostile and unworkable—you have to start with reducing the pressures that make them so vital to leading a sane existence. But ultimately this is something we chose to create, over no more than three or four short generations, and we could choose differently—though I don’t have high hopes that we will. E: DeadlyMuffin posted:I think building more public transit is half the solution, the other half is density. If you want to turn groceries into a 5 minute walk instead of a 5 minute drive, you need more people per square whatever so you have the demand needed to keep that grocery store alive. As you get denser, driving becomes less convenient and walking or public transportation more so. From an urban planning and development perspective these are the same thing—more transit/less cars = less road surface and parking land use = more density Parking is the greatest anathema to urban density because any proposed use of a given lot has to have an economic justification that outweighs pay parking, and that’s a crazy high floor for all the nice lovely things that make a city feel walkable and human (which, coincidentally, parking lots detract bigly from). It’s the whole Georgism thing but on steroids. HookedOnChthonics fucked around with this message at 16:10 on Jun 23, 2023 |
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Jun 23, 2023 15:58
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cat botherer posted:There are some people that will always need a car/truck - mostly people in rural areas. They are a minority though. Urban/dense suburban areas should have enough public transit to render cars unnecessary. Sprawling exurbs shouldn't exist. Yes I know these are big changes, but it's not as bad as continuing down the current path. This article seems like a good argument for regulation around car tire material. quote:"You could do a lot by eliminating the most toxic tyres,” he said. “It’s not about stopping people driving, or having to invent completely different new tyres. If you could eliminate the worst half, and maybe bring them in line with the best in class, you can make a massive difference. But at the moment, there’s no regulatory tool, there’s no surveillance.” Framing tire particulation as a problem potentially equal to greenhouse emissions like these two posts do really needs better data. Harold Fjord posted:Tire particles are killing salmon today, while climate change promises to do so eventually. HookedOnChthonics posted:also we're seeing increased awareness that tire particulates are as much an environmental and health detriment as combustion emissions--EVs are actually worse in that regard than gas because of the much higher weight, so it's a more complex problem than just 'yay electric' (im sure youre also aware of the extraction externalities etc.) I think building more public transit is half the solution, the other half is density. If you want to turn groceries into a 5 minute walk instead of a 5 minute drive, you need more people per square whatever so you have the demand needed to keep that grocery store alive. As you get denser, driving becomes less convenient and walking or public transportation more so.
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Jun 23, 2023 15:59
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It'd also help if Wal-Mart hadn't created food deserts all over the country
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Jun 23, 2023 16:04
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DeadlyMuffin posted:I think building more public transit is half the solution, the other half is density. If you want to turn groceries into a 5 minute walk instead of a 5 minute drive, you need more people per square whatever so you have the demand needed to keep that grocery store alive. As you get denser, driving becomes less convenient and walking or public transportation more so. 100% - which is part of why it makes it hard to solve - Americans have been (understandably) sold on big spaced out suburban houses. The other thing with density is just how effective tax revenue is. Big sprawling suburbs mean a lot more infrastructure to maintain. For areas with snow, it's more roads to clear, for trash pickup its more distance to cover and more constant starts and stops.
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Jun 23, 2023 16:07
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And the problem of needing higher density is also a car problem. Look at an overhead of a medium sized city and see how much space is dedicated to parking. Imagine shrinking half of that out. Just by doing that you’ve increased density substantially. A lot of things are now walkable that weren’t. And of course the proposition of driving and trying to find parking is going to look worse than taking public transport.
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Jun 23, 2023 16:10
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e: misclick
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Jun 23, 2023 16:11
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They haven't even run internet to where I live, you think they'll run a bus?
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Jun 23, 2023 16:12
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Angry_Ed posted:It'd also help if Wal-Mart hadn't created food deserts all over the country Umm.....what? This is the first I heard about food deserts all over the country being caused by Walmart. Can you elaborate? On a casual search I see there's a couple headlines about them closing some stores, but I think that food deserts are a much larger problem than just those couple areas.
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Jun 23, 2023 16:14
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Byzantine posted:They haven't even run internet to where I live, you think they'll run a bus?
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Jun 23, 2023 16:15
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Kalit posted:Umm.....what? This is the first I heard about how food deserts being caused by Walmart. Can you elaborate? Walmart comes in and is cheaper than existing grocery stores so those stores are run out of business. If that Walmart goes then there is now a food desert. Or even if the Walmart stays, for the people who had a grocery store they went to that was much closer than Walmart, they may now experience a food desert if they don’t have a reliable way to get to Walmart.
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Jun 23, 2023 16:17
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The IBEW has successfully resolved its negotiations with all four major railroad companies to get paid sick days for all members. Under the deal, they would get 4 additional paid sick days that they could use with no notice per year, plus the ability to convert 3 of their existing personal days into no-notice sick days per year. Unused sick days can be paid out or rolled over into their retirement fund at the end of each year. All of the major railways (CSX, Union Pacific, Norfolk Southern, and BNSF Railway) have agreed to the terms. Two smaller railways (Canadian Pacific and Kansas City) are still negotiating. https://twitter.com/IBEW/status/1671264424785747970 quote:After months of negotiations, the IBEW’s Railroad members at four of the largest U.S. freight carriers finally have what they’ve long sought but that many working people take for granted: paid sick days.
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Jun 23, 2023 16:17
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Kalit posted:Umm.....what? This is the first I heard about food deserts all over the country being caused by Walmart. Can you elaborate? Wal-Marts are built on the outskirts of towns, but their presence indirectly causes smaller stores--including grocery stores--that are more centrally located to close. It's the same deal with Dollar General, at least around where I live.
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Jun 23, 2023 16:18
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Byzantine posted:They haven't even run internet to where I live, you think they'll run a bus? It’s a problem that we should solve in major cities and large cities first, then smaller cities. Then use a lot of those learnings to reduce car usage in suburbs. It would be a long long time before we got to rural areas, and at that point the best answer may well be “have a car.” Or we may come up with new solution in the meantime. But rural places existing is not a reason to not push public transport in cities through city design.
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Jun 23, 2023 16:20
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Madkal posted:Cars are such a convenience that I am kind of surprised no one here is suggesting trying to make cars that are more environmentally friendly/electric or otherwise. Some people are treating it as an all or nothing situation. I really thought autonomous vehicles would help, but it seems like public opinion has turned decisively against them for now (thanks mostly to Elon Musk being a giant hubristic rear end in a top hat.) I understand people's safety concerns but considering the low bar human operation of vehicles sets, they could actually be safer not too long from now. (Of course, that's safer statistically - I feel like people may be more comfortable with 40,000 deaths they can "blame on" somebody than 10,000 caused by an algorithm misfiring.) They would make car sharing way more practical (hopefully drastically reducing individual ownership) and lessen parking requirements, allowing for more density for more non-car travel. HookedOnChthonics posted:the inefficiencies car-oriented design forces on us land-use-wise is as much the problem as the cars themselves
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Jun 23, 2023 16:23
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Leon Trotsky 2012 posted:The IBEW has successfully resolved its negotiations with all four major railroad companies to get paid sick days for all members. I looked into it and this seems to include about 80% of all class I railroad workers. I don't know how much of the remainder is working for the two railroads for which negotiations are on-going. Weird that this was posted on Tuesday but no one in the news media noticed until today. https://twitter.com/Moms4Liberty/status/1671913113103347712 Also a moms4liberty chapter did some light Hitler quoting and apologized but people are still mad about it? Buh? zoux fucked around with this message at 16:29 on Jun 23, 2023 |
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Jun 23, 2023 16:26
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Veryslightlymad posted:I also think a big difference could be made by requiring a low light headlight always be on. From the driver's perspective, that doesn't matter too much, but as a pedestrian, I can say that a white or grey or light blue vehicle with its lights off on a modestly overcast day may as well be invisible, and making cars run with less noise only makes their distance harder to judge. Having front facing lights mitigates this issue almost entirely. Daytime running lights are literally this and already mandatory. Edit: apparently I'm wrong - the EU mandates DRLs, but the US apparently had them banned for a long time and it literally took GM petitioning to get the ban removed and people freaked the gently caress out about "glare" even though headlights are much brighter so they still aren't required and there has been some effort to make them illegal again  Edit: GM petitioned to have them made mandatory as well and the NHTSA said no. quote:The NHTSA proposal for DRL intensity reduction was rescinded in 2004,[30] pending agency review and decision on a petition filed in 2001 by General Motors, seeking to have NHTSA mandate DRLs on all U.S. vehicles.[31] The GM petition was denied by the NHTSA in 2009, on grounds of severe methodological and analytical flaws in the studies and data provided by GM as evidence for a safety benefit to DRLs.[31] In denying the petition, the NHTSA said: KillHour fucked around with this message at 16:52 on Jun 23, 2023 |
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Jun 23, 2023 16:41
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zoux posted:Weird that this was posted on Tuesday but no one in the news media noticed until today. There was still a principle violated by prohibiting the railroad strike, and the deal is for less than the 15 days they had initially asked for. But I think that, within a year, getting seven chances to call out per year without penalty (four of which can be cashed in if unused), on top of the pretty massive pay bump in the new contract (14%), is an outstanding outcome. It's not surprising that the IBEW seems pretty pleased.
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Jun 23, 2023 16:42
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Mellow Seas posted:Based on the relative resonance of good and bad news these days I imagine many more people will remain furious about the administration stepping on labor's toes in December than will even be aware that the unions got their remaining demands met in six months, with the support of the Labor department. Have all the unions gotten all of their demands with all of the rail companies? Last time I had checked in on this a lot of them were making progress but rail companies were still holding out on agreements with unions representing Engineers, the people who would have the most impact if they called out sick.
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Jun 23, 2023 16:51
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KillHour posted:Daytime running lights are literally this and already mandatory. This was a hypothetical we did in freshman year of college. Basically, given the assumed rate it saved lives versus the assumed cost of running the headlights all the time, was it worth it? I have no idea if the number is still accurate and it’s been close to 20 years so I doubt it but it’ll always stick out in my mind that it worked out to $7M per life saved.
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Jun 23, 2023 16:52
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Fork of Unknown Origins posted:This was a hypothetical we did in freshman year of college. Basically, given the assumed rate it saved lives versus the assumed cost of running the headlights all the time, was it worth it? I'm going to go ahead and say the cost of running halogen headlights from 20 years ago is probably a lot higher than the cost of running LED DRLs.
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Jun 23, 2023 16:54
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The FDA has approved lab-grown meat from two companies for commercial sale in the U.S. No info on when it will be available in grocery stores, but one of the companies plans to partner with a restaurant in San Francisco sometime this year to debut it and allow the public to try it. They eventually plan to try and get it distributed in grocery stores. The other company has no immeadiate plans to distribute via grocery stores, but is partnering with famous restaurateur Jose Andres to debut the meat in his restaurants in Washington D.C. and then branch out to other partnerships with restaurants. Getting FDA approval that it is safe to consume was one of the two major hurdles. The other is that they still need to ramp up production and get a good estimate of how much it costs to produce. There is currently no estimate for roughly how much it will cost. It will most certainly be several times more expensive than traditional meat initially, but they don't have good projections for how much more expensive it will be or how long it will take for technology improvements/production capacity to increase to the point where it becomes competitive price-wise. The primary appeal of lab-grown meat is that it can be created while producing a tiny fraction of the greenhouse gas emissions created by traditional meat. https://twitter.com/CNN/status/1672268812429795328 quote:Cultivated meat, also known as lab-grown meat, has been cleared for sale in the United States. Leon Trotsky 2012 fucked around with this message at 17:01 on Jun 23, 2023 |
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Jun 23, 2023 16:59
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