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So I realize this thread is relatively inactive, but I'm curious on a few things that people brought up a few months ago. I'll keep it general rather than quoting since the posts are over two months old. Firstly, I saw a lot of people talking about EV investment being wasteful. Some of the complaints can be generalized to: - we need to change out of the urban mode that allows cars at all, because the infrastructure is currently being used for SUVs and trucks with bad fuel efficiency and little consideration for pedestrian safety. - EVs off the current grid will be using fossil fuels to charge anyway - it's far from clean in a vacuum - The parking requirements for electric are even more expensive and onerous for potential new construction than they are for ICE vehicles, and this will lead to further issues for affordable vs green construction. I think I agree to some degree with most of these points, but I think this thread also has an odd tendency to be oddly myopic about the "urban" part of urban planning, where things outside of the immediate metro are if ores for the conversation and the dichotomy is purely urban/suburban What I mean is that even walkable neighborhoods and 15-minute cities still ultimately need shipping infrastructure and loading docks and the like, and it doesn't really feel like that gets much focus here even though that is a needed consideration for infrastructure. People have talked in this thread about issues of density growing without service growing - usually it seems like people are talking about personal transit or government services like utilities, but maybe that's my misread due to not having a background in planning. I think it is worth pointing out specifically though that even if people don't care to do shopping for durable goods in person (typical retail), there still needs to be a way for those items to be delivered (i.e. Amazon fulfillment centers and associated truck fleets), and perishable items like most food will probably never stop being relevant both for restaurants and grocery stores. That infrastructure currently requires roads, and it is difficult to imagine a last-mile solution that wouldn't - maybe because I lack imagination, so folks with more knowledge of situations in other countries should feel free to tell me how that looks and how scalable other options would or wouldn't be. Based on that, I somewhat feel that the complaints against road-based infrastructure are a bit too strident. It is certainly true that highways have caused harm, especially in my reference frame of the Boston metro. However, it seems basically indisputable that urban areas need interstate commerce to be viable, and I don't know that the distances involved in America would allow rail to be a full replacement even optimistically, certainly not for localities like Minneapolis that have no way to supplement land routes with water routes. If we want bike lanes and bus lanes, this sort of forces us into pretty wide roads even without street parking or other complications. It's definitely wasteful to have more than 5 lanes, but I'm not sure it really makes sense to draw a hard line against EVs when the R&D and highway charging stations for consumer use will ultimately be important for trucking that has no clear replacement even in a fantasy scenario. Similarly, we probably need the lithium to flow, so we should start working out what that looks like and make what improvements we can to the environmental impact and humanitarian conditions starting now. Hopefully we find other battery tech in the meantime or get better at recycling so that the consumer vehicles in the interim have less negative externalities - but even if we don't, we'd still want to work towards reducing diesel use. It also should be said that once electric vehicles are scaled up it will be much easier to pass restrictions on vehicle emissions - making a rule that only 20% of current cars will meet is just a guarantee that the implementation won't happen on the planned timescale, do we do need the harm-reduction of supporting EV production in the mean time to make it possible to ban ICE vehicles getting under 25 MPG or whatever The usual "I already agree with you" disclaimers apply (cars bad, housing good, density good, public transit good).
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Nov 8, 2023 15:59
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| # ¿ May 13, 2024 04:06 |
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I literally don't have a license lol, I don't think personally-owned vehicles are something we should be building around, but I work on issues of food insecurity and the current urban landscape is hugely lacking in affordable grocery options. If you assume that the model you want to follow is mixed-use where the first level is grocery, you need to account for the fact that trucks are going to need to get in there, and the denser you build, the higher the volume of resources needed on a daily/weekly/monthly basis to sustain the population. Yeah, we need fewer cars overall, ideally WAY fewer but rather than sniping about how poo poo Teslas are (real poo poo, we all know this) can someone point me to a viable model for that scale of transport that wouldn't involve trucking as a fairly major component? You can definitely reduce the width of roads in totally residential areas and build towards people walking to a grocery, but you still definitely need to be able to support the major arterial roads. Even in absolute fantasy land where urban environments are perfectly optimized, they don't produce their own food - you still will have a lot of vehicles for the segment of the population that do all of that. The brodozer is a meme, but there are people that need to haul poo poo. It would be preferable if you had to demonstrate that it was actually the case rather than just being culturally indicated, but Ford trucks won't go away because for all the idiotic marketing you do actually need that much space in your vehicle if your job is construction or whatever. I don't have a good idea of how many fewer cars would be reasonable for America if it reached a a better equilibrium, probably at least a 50% reduction if not more, but the current patterns of land use aren't there and we are far enough away that an EV rebate is mostly just going to change which type of car people buy rather than making people buy when they wouldn't - a new car is already such a luxury item. The conversations in this thread are so centered on 5 or 6 states that it comes across like people don't know the rest exist. Even within the Dems, a bunch of senators represent states with no metro over a million (Montana, New Mexico, West Virginia, Vermont, Maine). There is no universe where Vermont depopulates or densifies to a degree that makes cars irrelevant. We need policies that reduce the harm done by people living in the housing that exists right now even as we work towards building better things BougieBitch fucked around with this message at 00:14 on Nov 9, 2023 |
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Nov 9, 2023 00:11
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Llamadeus posted:
I think you are speaking of your own view and assuming others also hold it - here are some examples from this very page that stake out substantially more extreme positions: Minenfeld! posted:Yeah, sure. But we should spend absolutely 0 (zero) dollars on infrastructure for EVs. Minenfeld! posted:I'm sorry, are you arguing that urban areas can't have food without trucks or...? Minenfeld! posted:There is no substitute for reducing VMTs. EVs, while cleaner at point of emission, still have their own emission costs associated and further lock us into unsustainable land uses. They also require people to own and operate a new toy to fully participate in society. Charging infrastructure isn't going to be distributed equally and this also means urban areas need more parking spaces to devote to charging. There's also the entire issue of spending public money for the benefit of private individuals. I don't actually think urban areas are a good place for charging infra, but to say that there should be 0 funding for EV infrastructure is absolutely wild to me, and something similar was said prior to my first post which is why I even brought it up. Adding a dollar to the cost of gas is political suicide, so the only way you will ever be able to get movement away from ICEs is by incentivizing alternatives. On a state level maybe you could add more costs to vehicle ownership to disincentivize it, and removing parking and such is totally valid. At the same time, yes, I absolutely do think you won't get sufficient quantity and variety of food in dense urban areas without trucking - and I honestly can't decide if that post is trying to say "why is your point something so obvious" or "wow, what a car brain, never even heard of German advancements in self-propelled food". If it's the second, I havent seen anyone post about this in the thread from page 1, and if it is the first I don't understand why you wouldn't then follow to the next step of "...and therefore we should actually discuss EVs in this context in addition to the low value of converting your mom's Prius to a Tesla" Nitrousoxide posted:Battery powered personal vehicles are undoubtedly not ideal. Though clearly less bad for the global environment than gas ones even if worse locally near lithium mines. A lot of existing car infrastructure can be reworked for mass transit though. Existing roads can be used by buses. People complain about the wires for trolley buses and the noise and emissions of diesel buses. Battery or hybrid buses largely eliminate those concerns (though I would say complaints about trolley bus wires is just NIMBY bullshit, and they are way cheaper to operate long-term after the expense of the wires is recapitalized.) Basically agreeing with this post in August, and responding to the conversation that was happening immediately before it where people were staking out pretty hard "no EVs, no lithium mining" positions that I think are untenable Greg12 posted:We would make a huger dent in the carbon we put in the atmosphere if we just Ham Equity posted:EVs are going to loving murder us. It's just more car infrastructure: more parking that won't be used exclusively by EVs, more roads, stroads, and freeways that won't be used exclusively by EVs, more tires that require more oil that spew out more rubber and microplastics, more brake pads doing the same, more minerals needing to be mined out of the earth that requires yet more fossil fuels, and more chemicals being used in the manufacturing that get dumped back into the ecosystem. I don't even necessarily disagree that consumer EVs reinforce bad urban design, but it just feels like a leap to go from that to "therefore do not invest in it whatsoever". It is up to states and cities to make the changes that reduce car use, the federal government exists primarily to represent all the empty space and you will never get city-focused policy out of them. BougieBitch fucked around with this message at 16:17 on Nov 9, 2023 |
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Nov 9, 2023 15:56
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Minenfeld! posted:I mean, you're not really making an argument. If you want a discussion, maybe make a point other than "trucks exist." My point is that the funding for EVs that people are talking about (from the feds) is split between consumer rebates, fleet upgrades, and battery production capacity and the investment in domestic production of batteries and charging infra is important even if the current tech doesn't allow for a replacement of diesel vehicles because the technical knowledge base to produce the eventual solution to that problem is going to come out of that sort of work (either domestically or abroad). Your statements seem to argue that it is unimportant or undesirable for governments to invest in any of that. I can understand the arguments that car-centric development is unsustainable and allowing people to live in cookie-cutter suburbs is too environmentally harmful in the long-run, but even with an infinite budget we are decades away from having the level of infrastructure that would make it possible to support mass movement out of that lifestyle. Boston has a bunch of the rail system "slow zoned" because there are serious issues with the maintenance work done by the existing workforce - there's also been a shortage of bus drivers for ages because the shift structure is untenable (and biased in favor of the senior workers) and the wages aren't good enough to fill all the slots. This all happened as a handful of stops were finally added to the northern section of the green line, which took literal decades to happen, and now that work is in question because the rail gauge might be wrong. That's not even getting into the amount of housing build out that is necessary, which is also rate-limited by the availability of construction workers of all stripes. That issue has gotten plenty of effort posts by more qualified people in the thread, so suffice to say that the rate of construction isn't keeping up with the current demand and policy actions taken to make rural and suburban housing less desirable will exacerbate that problem. Some other countries can do transit construction faster and cheaper, but it isn't like they don't have their own issues,. Having more funding and more positions dedicated to doing that work in government offices will probably be effective in the long run, but it takes a LOT of time to change the culture of a government body to the extent that needs to happen for projects to start going smoothly when everything is constantly a trash fire at present Given that, investments in EVs as a way to bridge the gap between now and the next few decades just seems kind of obvious. The Minnesota plan is called 2040, after all, it's not like they expect to get it done before the EV rebates expire. sim posted:What is your point exactly BougieBitch? That we should stop aspiring for an ideal transportation grid? That we should undercut our dreams of an emission, particulate, and crash-free society because it's not politically viable or 100% realistic to enact tomorrow? No, more that there are points between now and then, and if you say you only want to build things that exist in the final iteration it may not actually be possible. To analogize to chemistry, you usually don't make a complicated chemical compound in a single step, and most of the energetically efficient methods involve completely separate compounds that aren't part of the final compound (catalysts/enzymes). If you want the future where commercial vehicles are electric, it might be faster to incorporate consumer electric so that there is more capital focused on the problem, even if you want to live in a society where you need to have a government-approved justification to own a car. Someone (sarcastically, I assume) suggested that now that we have electric cars being made it's time for the next step to start, banning electric cars. I don't think that is necessarily that far from the truth, even if the actual space between the steps will be 15-25 years or whatever. The same environmental logic that lets you legislate emission standards will work just as well applied to tire particulates or battery waste or whatever other environmental consequences people are pointing out, so sure, studies started now will probably be used as evidence in the future environmental regulations drafted. A full ban probably never happens, but once electric cars are a substantial market segment then you can regulate that charging stations must source power from non-fossil sources or whatever. Gas taxes will start moving towards taxes by weight or whatever, which is also good. The highway funding will be undercut because the legislated pool is primarily gas taxes at present. Maybe to some degree this is cope, because I don't think the federal government will ever make choices that would lead to the idealized urban future that people seem to envision, at least not given the current structure of the Senate and EC. At the same time, I do think any theoretical solution needs to show what your path is to accomplishing your goal in sufficient detail to prove viability as a model. A lot of times it feels like people take it as a given that if everyone just tried harder we could have working systems, but you need to convert bad systems to good ones somehow, it feels like a handwave to assume that a workforce able to handle these sorts of big changes in a small time will come into being just because society needs it to. I'm not saying that every solution needs to be politically viable, but there has to be coalition building and consideration for how to make a solution that appeals to people in the middle states to some degree. If your plan requires the federal government to raise income taxes to fund California and NY rail then it's a non-starter. Edit: Nitrousoxide posted:Wait, why can't Vermont towns densify? Densification doesn't just stop working below 1 million regional residents or something. You just need good public transit locally and good regional public transit to connect the towns. I was talking to a transit-fan friend that has never left MA the other day and he was talking about how we should have more interstate passenger rail (built out in a way not competing with shipping). I'm originally from Indiana, so that's the context I was rebutting him from. He was saying, "why wouldn't Indiana want that, what if the town you grew up in (Muncie, for those who want to see on a map) could get to Indianapolis and Chicago, don't people make that drive anyway?" I explained that actually there already was service between the two (by bus rather than train currently), and Amtrak does pass through several cities in the state, but there aren't enough passengers to justify expansion of service. This isn't just because people have cars (though it certainly is a factor) - it's also just not a place people really want to go often enough. Muncie is a college town, it has what it wants locally for the most part and people don't commute to Indianapolis. Indianapolis absolutely could use improved public transit, but the suburbs where it would matter are Carmel and Fishers, not Muncie, Bloomington, or West Lafayette. And regardless of whether such a thing was implemented, it would never be useful to people in southern Indiana who go to Louisville or Cincinnati if they go anywhere (and they usually don't). It's maybe worth noting that Muncie has had a bus system (MITS) since the time I was growing up, but it also has all the usual problems to make that not work well for most residents (clear neighborhood lines between rich and poor, a downtown full of poo poo no one cares about, major grocery like Meijer on the furthest outskirts). If there wasn't a university there, it would have shrunk into oblivion when factory closures in the early 2000s hosed over a huge portion of the working class. There are a bunch of places all throughout the Midwest and, really, the rest of the country that are like that. You will never convince the reps from those areas to vote against their interests, and you will have a real uphill battle to convince people living there that public transit can be good enough to replace their cars. Any given project is probably best off looking for funding solutions that draw from the people benefited, because federal and state level will just not happen as often as not It's a dangerous assumption to think everyone in a city is in the same type of city, or to suggest that a nucleus like Muncie or Bloomington (or Burlington) could gain enough gravity to become a recognizable metro (or get enough service to get subsumed into a different metro). Plenty of people live their lives in census-designated cities without interacting with denser cities at all, and none of those people are thinking about infill and biking. These cities are shrinking or staying roughly level, it's not the same environment as a NY or SF in the slightest, and that's why you get Fox News talking points about "dangerous cities" penetrating their public consciousness. BougieBitch fucked around with this message at 17:45 on Nov 9, 2023 |
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Nov 9, 2023 16:43
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There aren't enough people with the expertise to do all the projects that need doing across all 50 states - I don't feel like this should be a controversial statement, but it seems like it is. I agree that we should be scaling up local government to do the work and keep public goods done by public employees as much as possible - that's also sort of a no-brainer At the same time, federal funding is an incredibly bad way to fund your local government employees - you are counting on the national government not changing hands and defunding all those staff before they get trained up enough to do their jobs well. There is no universe where city governments can scale up by 50% or whatever would be necessary for efficiency on the back of funds provided by the feds in 4 years. Given that, it seems like the argument would be for the feds to make the departments that do the work themselves, but that has the exact same vulnerability. Even the IRS budget, which is revenue positive for obvious reasons, is already under attack. Do we really think that strategy has a ghost of a chance in the current national political environment? Ironically, MA is much better placed than virtually everywhere else to invest in infrastructure at a state level because of the ballot measure millionaire tax, not to mention holding the #2 slot for highest median income, so yes, they can actually use the money hose to try to fix these problems with the MBTA. It has taken this long and gone this poorly even though the state is massively blue and is basically the leading edge of income and progressiveness. At the same time, the fact that they are able to do so makes it that much less likely that a metro in the Midwest or the South would be able to. The problem isn't the distances involved, the problem is that geographic wealth inequality is massive, population density varies wildly, and federal planning needs to meet the needs of the median, not the extremes. If you can picture what a metric like "tax base per square mile" might look like on an overlay, you can see why this will be an insurmountable problem. Density is already bad enough, but when you start thinking about funding it becomes so much worse. The people who currently have any real experience planning transit have high salaries and live in major cities - they aren't going to go work for the median wage in Mobile, AL. If projects are prioritized based on the impact they will have, all the projects that get done in the next 20 years will be in like 8 states - the people in the other 42 know and understand this, and that's why it's a federal non-starter. Given that, yes, we are reduced to lovely harm-reduction measures and capital funds from the federal government - that's been the state of play for multiple generations and while we can all WISH for more, it doesn't make it even slightly politically reasonable. Yes, basically everyone voting for Dems agrees that governments should do more, but the steps to bigger transit projects and city densification are bigger state and local governments and budgets, not bigger federal governments or budgets. The federal government will always be horrible at long-term planning and talent retention so long as we have the Republican party, and that isn't going to change in the next couple cycles. We literally have spent an entire year on the verge of shutdown and debt default, do not hitch your wagon to this horse if you want big transit Edit: I suppose this might seem inconsistent if you view what I initially said as "EVs are an unalloyed good", so let me reiterate that they are not - and I don't view it as the best possible use of money in a vacuum. However, I do think that money that is collected by the federal government is not "money in a vacuum" - there is no way to direct that money through anything other than the mechanisms currently in place or ones that can be passed by house/Senate/president. Given that, I think with the boundaries set by what it will take to get votes from each rep and senator, this expenditure is a good thing compared to deficit reduction, and definitely better than "consumer gas price relief" or whatever would have been on the table in terms of "car-centric funding". We know what WON'T pass because it was already put on the table and failed, and the people engaging with this conversation are not the people that need to be convinced in order for that to change - you can frame it as the handful of people in the House and Senate, but it's more honest to frame it in terms of voters. There are a lot of programs where you can say "a majority of voters like this thing!" like M4A or whatnot, but transit infrastructure and urban densification are absolutely not there and are not close and will not be getting there in the next 10 years, so you work with the population you have for the feds. BougieBitch fucked around with this message at 18:42 on Nov 9, 2023 |
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Nov 9, 2023 18:22
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FWIW I have heard scuttlebutt that the state budget is hosed for the year due to these tax cuts: https://www.mass.gov/news/governor-healey-signs-first-tax-cuts-in-more-than-20-years Healey basically decided to spend the revenue from this new tax on cutting taxes a bunch of other places in the first year it took effect: https://www.wbur.org/news/2023/12/28/mass-fair-share-millionaires-tax-anniversary-revenue However, as mentioned in the article, state tax revenue has been below expectations this year - they link this article which has more details: https://fallriverreporter.com/massachusetts-tax-collections-not-keeping-pace-as-state-spending-soars/ Bottom line, the state has been looking for places to cut across all departments, and hitting Milton on this might be as much a result of the state budget crunch as it is any actual desire to enforce affordable housing compliance. It would be nice to be proven wrong, but my impression is that MA is moving into austerity mode and this is more a symptom of that than it is that affordable housing is a high priority for this admin
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Feb 25, 2024 17:25
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| # ¿ May 13, 2024 04:06 |
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Elendil004 posted:That 140 will probably go another actually eligible recipient, not into the state coffers. The state hosed up by cutting taxes but the MBTA stuff and Milton about to get pounded are two different things. I don't see what mechanism could possibly be used to achieve that - the grant awardees were decided mid-December at a pre-scheduled meeting: https://www.mass.gov/info-details/l...%201%2C%202023. Furthermore, the projects for that grant can be up to $1 million, so even if they had the chance to pick a different project they would be pretty constrained in what they could pick. I think it would be pretty easy to justify not making an alternative selection just for that reason alone - you can't expect a $400k project proposal to succeed if you give it $140k, so even if they wanted to re-adjust the distributions it probably wouldn't be possible to do it in a way that wouldn't be arbitrary or capricious. It's possible that it will get rolled into the pot for the following cycle, but it isn't like they would have selected a runner-up to slot in at that meeting and they aren't going to arrange an emergency meeting to decide on one award. Even if they do roll it into the pot, the state budget year is July 1 to June 30 - so the next decision point in May would put the liability off to the following budget year. That said, I probably overstated the case for this being monetarily motivated - it might be a contributing factor, but probably not the primary one. BougieBitch fucked around with this message at 17:09 on Feb 27, 2024 |
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Feb 27, 2024 17:06
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