Besides, how would businesses screen potential employees if they couldn’t ask for “reliable transportation”?
“Before asking commuters to abandon their cars, we must first improve mass transit capacity and reliability,” a draft of the report says.
The governor is picking up a cause that was championed by former Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg in 2008, but that met stiff resistance. It died in the State Assembly without coming to a vote. The current mayor, Bill de Blasio, has said that he favors a tax on millionaires and has argued that congestion pricing hurts the middle class and poor who live outside Manhattan and drive into it.
The report dismissed those claims, saying only 4 percent of residents of other boroughs commute to jobs in Manhattan in a vehicle, or approximately 118,000 residents. Of those, it said, more than half were higher income individuals, and fewer than 5,000 of them would qualify as working poor.
Yeah, mixed mode light rail is an unfathomable idea.
Truck deliveries and rampant construction routinely block traffic. Midtown traffic now crawls at an average of 4.7 miles per hour, down from 6.5 miles per hour five years ago.
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That income level breakdown is interesting. In my neighbourhood we have a downtown express that costs twice the regular fare; I knew someone who took it because she didn’t like riding with the hoi polloi on the streetcar.
It’s good to keep in mind how cultural “public transit is for poor people” is. It used to be transit was for wealthier people who didn’t want street mud on their clothes. They found Toronto transit tickets belonging to a second class passenger in the Titanic wreck:
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OK, but that’s why I’m bringing it up. I am well aware white collar jobs don’t need personal transport, and I would hop on alternate transport options if they were available for me. So it does matter a lot that San Franciscans are not going to a smelter or a factory when millions of people work in factories or to support them as their primary income. Literally 20% of the US economy and a larger portion of the global economy is dependent on jobs those kinds of job. Right now the most environmentally friendly places still exploit the non-friendly places, which tends to involve exploiting the wealth and health of the third world to achieve their local results.
I also never claimed it can’t be improved, but you will never (for instance) be able to bring public transportation into hazardous locations. Electric vehicles become less energy efficient (overall) the heavier the load becomes (outside of special cases like trains, but trains also can’t deliver a load to a site directly).
Also, what I have been saying has nothing to do with the last points you are making. I agreed both up-thread and during this back and forth that most uses of vehicles is unnecessary. The entire reason I bring this up is because the bona fide cases being larger than anyone really thinks about. Right now everything around you and everything around me, and all the medical care you receive, and what we are using to communicate all depend on heavy industrial use.
As far as pre-1950s-80s goes the US used dormitories, slave labor, worker death, even more fuel, etc. to make up what technology could not accommodate. Modern life comes with a lot of things that we do hold dear that could not exist in previous decades. And what I’m advocating for (careful planning and trying to meet the demand for current and future growth in technology and population) would slow down the rampant construction and expansion more than real estate costs have, but it is a problem that can’t be hand-waved away by saying other places have solved it when they have not. The closest solution isn’t permanently feasible for other reasons - allowing industrial sites to be pressing against agricultural and residential sites, forcing employees to live on site during work hours, etc.
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Right, rampant construction routinely blocks traffic as in one of those personal transports that can’t be easily replaced by a form of mass transit.
The logistics are the same. What you do when you get to work doesn’t matter.
I’m kind of getting that you’re saying blue-collar workers support white collar workers, but it’s not coming out very well, and I’m not sure what it has to do with how people get to work. You can ride the bus in coveralls as easily as you can a suit. Besides, often the coveralls get left at work or brought home in a bag.
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I get that I’m too deep into the weeds in the conversation, and it’s not helping anything. Because that’s not what I’m saying, and to explain what I am saying would require explaining in detail how worksites are built and how they function day to day.
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The blockchain will separate the sucker from their money.
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Self-driving in the simulator…
I remember talking about this with my friends back in high school, probably while we were waiting for the rare sight of one of our suburban buses to take us from the mall to home. Urban planners should consult more teenagers – they know about travelling the burbs without access to a car, and they’re tomorrow’s voters:
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Anecdotes aren’t evidence but they often provide perspective for future study. And perspective to wedge ourselves out of received ideas about people’s practical problems.
9:30 a.m.: I’ll begrudgingly spend $20-$30 on gas every 2-3 days because everybody is allergic to the abhorrent inconvenience that is traveling to the south side. So, because of segregation in Chicago and black people not always being able to choose where to live, I travel to various jobs, meetings, and auditions 30 to 60 min north of where I live.
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Not everyone, not entirely, but a lot of people potentially could. We have the technology and historical precedent. I’m thinking of historic downtowns, even in small cities, that often have apartments above the businesses. That wouldn’t work for giant factories (without the dorms you mentioned), but with >80% of the workforce in service sector jobs, it would make a huge difference if most of them could easily walk to work (and other places they needed) instead of spending 1-2 hours a day commuting. Might not work for hospitals and some other large employers, but it could work for a lot of people if the businesses weren’t all out in some strip mall entirely across town from residential housing and if residential areas weren’t often zoned to 2 people per acre and to keep commerce out of walking distance.
To an alien, it might appear as though for 70 years or so we intentionally designed our cities to cause as much expense, traffic congestion, time wasted, and loss of life (in traffic accidents) as possible. Sure there’s good reasons for some of it, keeping the lead-painted asbestos factory away from the playground, but not so good for a lot of it. A grocery store’s not a big danger, why would you rather the nearest one be a 2 hour walk when you could have one two blocks away?
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Fine people, the finest… etc.
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A classic.
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Meh. Privatized Colonialism can handle everything, even the glad-handing.
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Satire, of course, but the owners of our technology are failing because they don’t have any idea of the demand for real quality.
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Don’t overstep…
Wait, who shouldn’t overstep? The idiot abroad or the servant?
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Can a britisher explain this article? The tone, the fictionalised (no zed, see) passive language, etc?
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A PR slogan one word too long to be entirely true.
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