SwingingTheLamp

I figured it out a while back. It’s a definitional mismatch. While you and I think about entry level as the level at which we enter a career, the companies think of entry level as the level at which somebody enters the company. They ditched any notion of social responsibility in the form of cultivating new workers long ago.

Nah, I feel like you’re really reaching. Walking is an innate characteristic of all humans. One of the defining characteristics, some say. That poor people walk in Houston is not a revelation. However, it is unconsciously making cars an instrument of punishment for the poor (forced to walk in a car-dominated hellscape), that is the dipshit behavior, and hell yes I’ll judge Americans all day for being so cruel. It’s anything but innate; you can’t choose your skin color or sexual orientation, but you certainly can choose not to scream about removing a few street parking spots for an important bike lane.

The observation that Americans don’t walk unless it’s a special event comes from a lifetime of observing my fellow Americans. Hell, I watch my neighbors drive 4 blocks to the grocery store almost daily.

Thankfully, calling out dipshits for the dipshit things that they do is not racism. Houstonians have a choice, and they choose… that kind of abomination.

If the U.S. is so large, then don’t we have plenty of room to build the necessities of life (stores, schools, offices) near where people live? The size of the country has next to nothing to do with the layout of a city. That’s absurd.

As yes, in the immortal words of Kris Kristofferson, “Freedom’s just another word for deciding where you want to go based on other people not wanting to go there, too. (And somebody building a road to get there.)”

Funny thing, flattening the entire city is what did happen in the 20th century. But for cars.

Bad transit and big parking lots are a policy choice, and many cities around the world are showing that we can still make better choices. We don’t just have to put up with car shit.

Americans do walk sometimes, but only if it’s a special event raising money for charity, or on vacation to a theme park like Disney World or Europe. Otherwise, if you can’t park your car literally within sight of your destination, “there’s no parking!”

But cars are freedom! They let you go anywhere you want, right? /s

Incorrect. You get credit for the donation; it does not affect the company’s taxes. Its just that most people don’t claim the tax credit, because most of us don’t donate enough to itemize rather than take the standard deduction.

I’m not sure how California works, but that’s wholly inaccurate for Wisconsin, and most other states. Gas taxes and registration fees go to the state, and they do not even cover the whole state transportation budget. Non-car zones area far, far more economically productive than car-oriented areas. Strong Towns has a whole series of articles about it, based on data analysis performed by a consultant called Urban3.

I did the numbers once on the apartment building that I lived in, with ground-floor retail, and it absolutely blew the nearby Walmart out of the water as far as return on investment for the city. More jobs per acre, more taxes per acre, less infrastructure cost, the whole deal.

Yes, there’s this persistent myth in America that cars are good for the economy and local business. It is a myth, though. When you actually look at the real-world numbers, cars are destroying cities financially.

Another fun fact: Walkable neighborhoods are cheaper to build. But we’ve made that illegal, and instead build insanely expensive car infrastructure everywhere, then wonder why we have an affordability crisis.

That suggests a lack of correlation between those two qualities.

Understood! I’m just thinking about my own life, where I feel like I’ve noticed an inverse correlation between conscientiousness and sexual attractiveness in the men that I know.

I have a built-in hand soap pump in the kitchen, and a big bottle in the bathroom. Plus, separate refill bottles for each. No one wants to come over to my house. With the popularity of the bad-boy archetype, I have to wonder if there’s some sort of correlation?

UAV meaning Unmanned Autonomous Vehicle. (In contrast to rideshare services, like Uber. When they were heavily subsidized, it must be noted, they increased traffic congestion.) Availability of them will increase. The reason that we have an auto-dominated landscape today is that car makers wanted to sell more cars. There’s approximately 0% chance that car makers today will be satisfied selling a limited number of vehicles for ride services, when they could sell vastly more cars to individuals.

Is that realistic, though? A car is already a status toy, what’s to stop conspicuous consumption in the form of buying one’s own self-driving car? Or, say, moving to a cheaper house further from the city, because commute time can now be used as work time? Shared cars won’t work in that scenario.

Also, rush hour is still a thing. There have to be enough UAVs to handle peak demand, and then most of them will be parked somewhere, idle most of the time. Or running errands. Traffic congestion is bad enough now, with average vehicle occupancy of 1.2 people; it’ll be apocalyptic when that number drops below one.

Also, in cities with sky-high housing costs, i guarantee that people will live in self-driving RVs, because road space is “free.”

In short, the only way to realize the benefits of the shared UAV future is to ban private car ownership, and cap the number of UAVs in a city. That sounds a lot like a train, except trains’ enormous capacity offers better service.