Americans have been stripped of the right to walk

[alfred russel]

What you guys are missing is that there are many places in the US where little accommodation is made for pedestrian traffic - there may be one crossing per mile.  This is a deliberate decision and local governments in this places have zero interest spending more tax money to fix it.

Yeah, I haven't traveled extensively in the US but I've been to a number of places that were pretty poorly laid out for the purposes of walking compared to what I'm used to. It seems pretty obvious that those were deliberate design choices - like not putting a pedestrian crosswalk at a traffic light at all, or like only having sidewalks and other walking paths connecting buildings to parking lots, but not connecting buildings to buildings.

In Atlanta at least the suburbs have been seriously (and successfully) fighting expanding public transportation in their communities for years on the basis it will enable poor people to live there. Not hard to imagine the same thought processes with pedestrians.

[mongers]

What you guys are missing is that there are many places in the US where little accommodation is made for pedestrian traffic - there may be one crossing per mile.  This is a deliberate decision and local governments in this places have zero interest spending more tax money to fix it.

Yeah, I haven't traveled extensively in the US but I've been to a number of places that were pretty poorly laid out for the purposes of walking compared to what I'm used to. It seems pretty obvious that those were deliberate design choices - like not putting a pedestrian crosswalk at a traffic light at all, or like only having sidewalks and other walking paths connecting buildings to parking lots, but not connecting buildings to buildings.

In Atlanta at least the suburbs have been seriously (and successfully) fighting expanding public transportation in their communities for years on the basis it will enable poor people to live there. Not hard to imagine the same thought processes with pedestrians.

AR, that's not an attractive picture you paint there.

[Malthus]

Heh, in some very wealthy areas in Toronto, the local rich folks have successfully lobbied to avoid repairing the potholed streets, to discourage any but residents from driving through there.  They do however need public transit - how else would the nannies and maids get there, if they aren't live-in? 

[alfred russel]

AR, that's not an attractive picture you paint there.

It isn't, but the situation is more complicated than it seems. There is heavy concentrated poverty in the city, and most importantly schools are shockingly awful both in terms of safety and education. Parents in the middle class and above rarely send their kids to those schools.

They have two options: private schools, which are expensive, or the suburbs where schools are good (prominently mentioned in any home listing is the school district the kids will be in). So many middle class parents, unable to afford private schooling, have moved to the suburbs. The problem is there is no public transportation there, and the roads are inadequate to accommodate all the people in the suburbs, so the commutes into the city can take hours (the average commute in Atlanta has been measured at longer than anywhere in the US). The obvious thing to do is to build trains into the city from the suburbs, even right next to the roads that are choked with gridlock every rush hour, but the suburbs fight that tooth and nail, out of concern that the schooling problems they have escaped will just move to where they are now.

I live in the city, but am single. Lots of people in the city have no kids, there is a large gay community, and there is a lot of affluence. There are not many middle class families with kids.

[Martinus]

So wait, I misread the original article Tim posted. Was the woman crossing a busy road with her kids *not* on a zebra crossing? What a cunt. Even if noone was hurt, she should be charged with reckless endangerment and have social services take her kids away from her.

Your calls for blood and vengeance towards people who have done you no harm always puzzles me.

There are few things that piss me off more than stupid people having kids. It's the world's worst vicious cycle - and, as far as humanity's follies go, the belief that everybody has a right to be a parent and to raise their own biological kids is probably one of the dumbest and at the same type the hardest to change. We have made amazing strides in almost every other way when it comes to separating ourselves from the state of nature and developing a civilization, but this primitive and harmful belief still somehow eludes us as a race.

[Jaron]

So wait, I misread the original article Tim posted. Was the woman crossing a busy road with her kids *not* on a zebra crossing? What a cunt. Even if noone was hurt, she should be charged with reckless endangerment and have social services take her kids away from her.

Your calls for blood and vengeance towards people who have done you no harm always puzzles me.

There are few things that piss me off more than stupid people having kids. It's the world's worst vicious cycle - and, as far as humanity's follies go, the belief that everybody has a right to be a parent and to raise their own biological kids is probably one of the dumbest and at the same type the hardest to change. We have made amazing strides in almost every other way when it comes to separating ourselves from the state of nature and developing a civilization, but this primitive and harmful belief still somehow eludes us as a race.

[garbon]

I'm wondering if he read Plato'so Republic lately

[Eddie Teach]

Is that why you've voluntarily taken yourself out of the gene pool, for the good of humanity? 

[mongers]

AR, that's not an attractive picture you paint there.

It isn't, but the situation is more complicated than it seems. There is heavy concentrated poverty in the city, and most importantly schools are shockingly awful both in terms of safety and education. Parents in the middle class and above rarely send their kids to those schools.

They have two options: private schools, which are expensive, or the suburbs where schools are good (prominently mentioned in any home listing is the school district the kids will be in). So many middle class parents, unable to afford private schooling, have moved to the suburbs. The problem is there is no public transportation there, and the roads are inadequate to accommodate all the people in the suburbs, so the commutes into the city can take hours (the average commute in Atlanta has been measured at longer than anywhere in the US). The obvious thing to do is to build trains into the city from the suburbs, even right next to the roads that are choked with gridlock every rush hour, but the suburbs fight that tooth and nail, out of concern that the schooling problems they have escaped will just move to where they are now.

I live in the city, but am single. Lots of people in the city have no kids, there is a large gay community, and there is a lot of affluence. There are not many middle class families with kids.

Thanks for that, AR.

[Eddie Teach]

Just want to clarify one thing, the Atlanta commute is longest in distance, not time.

[alfred russel]

Just want to clarify one thing, the Atlanta commute is longest in distance, not time.

I thought I saw at some point that it was the longest in terms of time too, but maybe not. The different surveys have different results. I did find this from Forbes citing Atlanta as having commuters spend the second most time stuck in traffic behind LA, and as the #1 worst city for commuters, and 13% spend more than an hour getting to work (this was from 2008):

http://www.forbes.com/2008/04/24/cities-commute-fuel-forbeslife-cx_mw_0424realestate3_slide_11.html

[11B4V]

I finally read this article. It was stupid.

[MadImmortalMan]

The obvious thing to do is to build trains into the city from the suburbs

But Marchetti says that would just lead to enabling even farther sprawl as people get as far away as they can and still maintain the same commute.

[alfred russel]

The obvious thing to do is to build trains into the city from the suburbs

But Marchetti says that would just lead to enabling even farther sprawl as people get as far away as they can and still maintain the same commute.

But we are talking about communities that have commute times well in excess of Marchetti's constant (even if the overall commute time for the metro area is in line). I think I saw somewhere that roughly 19% of commutes one way in Atlanta are an hour or more. The problem is that they are all jammed up on the same handful of roads into the city every morning. I know some of these people, and they don't feel it is a lifestyle choice--they feel they have no other options. One guy in this spot just took a lateral move to Tampa when he could have been promoted here, primarily to get away from the commute.

[Valmy]

So wait, I misread the original article Tim posted. Was the woman crossing a busy road with her kids *not* on a zebra crossing? What a cunt. Even if noone was hurt, she should be charged with reckless endangerment and have social services take her kids away from her.

Your calls for blood and vengeance towards people who have done you no harm always puzzles me.

There are few things that piss me off more than stupid people having kids. It's the world's worst vicious cycle - and, as far as humanity's follies go, the belief that everybody has a right to be a parent and to raise their own biological kids is probably one of the dumbest and at the same type the hardest to change. We have made amazing strides in almost every other way when it comes to separating ourselves from the state of nature and developing a civilization, but this primitive and harmful belief still somehow eludes us as a race.

So who are these geniuses who should be raising the children? You? I don't see you adopting all these stupid people babies