Americans have been stripped of the right to walk

Started by jimmy olsen, December 10, 2015, 07:33:25 PM

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alfred russel

Quote from: Jacob on December 11, 2015, 12:21:02 PM
Quote from: The Minsky Moment on December 11, 2015, 12:09:16 PM
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.
They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.

There's a fine line between salvation and drinking poison in the jungle.

I'm embarrassed. I've been making the mistake of associating with you. It won't happen again. :)
-garbon, February 23, 2014

mongers

Quote from: alfred russel on December 11, 2015, 01:42:29 PM
Quote from: Jacob on December 11, 2015, 12:21:02 PM
Quote from: The Minsky Moment on December 11, 2015, 12:09:16 PM
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.
"We have it in our power to begin the world over again"

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.  :D They do however need public transit - how else would the nannies and maids get there, if they aren't live-in?  ;)
The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane—Marcus Aurelius

alfred russel

Quote from: mongers on December 11, 2015, 01:43:55 PM
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.
They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.

There's a fine line between salvation and drinking poison in the jungle.

I'm embarrassed. I've been making the mistake of associating with you. It won't happen again. :)
-garbon, February 23, 2014

Martinus

Quote from: Valmy on December 11, 2015, 09:17:33 AM
Quote from: Martinus on December 11, 2015, 01:50:47 AM
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

Quote from: Martinus on December 12, 2015, 01:13:50 AM
Quote from: Valmy on December 11, 2015, 09:17:33 AM
Quote from: Martinus on December 11, 2015, 01:50:47 AM
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.

:rolleyes:
Winner of THE grumbler point.

garbon

I'm wondering if he read Plato'so Republic lately
"I've never been quite sure what the point of a eunuch is, if truth be told. It seems to me they're only men with the useful bits cut off."
I drank because I wanted to drown my sorrows, but now the damned things have learned to swim.

Eddie Teach

Is that why you've voluntarily taken yourself out of the gene pool, for the good of humanity?  :hmm:
To sleep, perchance to dream. But in that sleep of death, what dreams may come?

mongers

Quote from: alfred russel on December 11, 2015, 01:59:19 PM
Quote from: mongers on December 11, 2015, 01:43:55 PM
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.
"We have it in our power to begin the world over again"

Eddie Teach

Just want to clarify one thing, the Atlanta commute is longest in distance, not time.
To sleep, perchance to dream. But in that sleep of death, what dreams may come?

alfred russel

Quote from: Peter Wiggin on December 12, 2015, 07:34:34 AM
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
They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.

There's a fine line between salvation and drinking poison in the jungle.

I'm embarrassed. I've been making the mistake of associating with you. It won't happen again. :)
-garbon, February 23, 2014

11B4V

"there's a long tradition of insulting people we disagree with here, and I'll be damned if I listen to your entreaties otherwise."-OVB

"Obviously not a Berkut-commanded armored column.  They're not all brewing."- CdM

"We've reached one of our phase lines after the firefight and it smells bad—meaning it's a little bit suspicious... Could be an amb—".

MadImmortalMan

Quote from: alfred russel on December 11, 2015, 01:59:19 PMThe 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.
"Stability is destabilizing." --Hyman Minsky

"Complacency can be a self-denying prophecy."
"We have nothing to fear but lack of fear itself." --Larry Summers

alfred russel

Quote from: MadImmortalMan on December 12, 2015, 05:24:56 PM
Quote from: alfred russel on December 11, 2015, 01:59:19 PMThe 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.
They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.

There's a fine line between salvation and drinking poison in the jungle.

I'm embarrassed. I've been making the mistake of associating with you. It won't happen again. :)
-garbon, February 23, 2014

Valmy

#59
Quote from: Martinus on December 12, 2015, 01:13:50 AM
Quote from: Valmy on December 11, 2015, 09:17:33 AM
Quote from: Martinus on December 11, 2015, 01:50:47 AM
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 :hmm:
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Zmiinyi defenders: "Russian warship, go fuck yourself."