djrobstep

Cars seem to live in a special category in peoples minds where the costs simply do not exist, and thus the problems can be solved by simply throwing infinitely more resources and space at the problems.

Cars are inherently spatially inefficient, which makes them a terrible form of transport for cities. That is the hard mathematical reality that so many people avoid reckoning with.

Think of the space taken up by 1000 people on a single metro train, vs 1000 people in nearly 1000 cars. Think of 1000 people on bikes vs 1000 people in cars.

It's so obvious that this is a terrible way of moving people about, and we see this in congestion, in longer commutes in spite of cars traveling at higher speeds, sprawling patterns of urban development, road deaths (the biggest cause of death of children in most western countries), noise, pollution, sprawl, inactivity and social isolation.

Only ideology (car brain) prevents people from seeing it as the problem it is.

> Public transit needs a lot of money and time

Public transport is far, far more cost effective than car infrastructure. And that's just direct costs - not even including the cost of sprawl (which makes all other infrastructure more expensive), road deaths and injuries, noise, pollution, storage costs for vehicles, the health costs of inactivity and social isolation, etc etc.

> build good transit for the busiest part of the city (downtown) and build large parking lots around the terminals

This is a terrible idea because the numbers simply do not stack up. A typical metro train can carry roughly 1000 people. A large car park might fill half of a single train. At a station with good frequency, a train will leave the station roughly every 5 minutes.

A much better idea is to run good regular public transport to the station, build bike paths to the station and quality bike parking at the station, and build more housing at/near the station instead of a big parking lot.

People are products of their environment. What purpose is served by being judgemental and separating people into deserving/non-deserving baskets?

Everybody should have a right to healthcare.

The concept of a business can only exist within the context of a myriad of laws (property law, contract law, etc) all of which require violent enforcement or the threat thereof, ie reduction in personal liberty.

> You can't have free markets without personal liberty

I literally just explained why the exact opposite is true. Not a proactive conversation if you’re not going to engage at all with what I said and just talk past it.

Good example of how ideology (and motivated reasoning) really clouds people's thinking.

Personal liberty and free markets are in direct conflict with each other. Free markets require private property, which requires enforcement through violent aggression (or the threat thereof).

Free markets and private property might be justified for any number of (other) reasons, but "personal liberty" isn't one of them.

Uh huh honey. Newsflash: Most people are doing their jobs because they have to to get by, and don’t have the choice to work on socially-useful-but-not-lucrative stuff.

What are you talking about? It will have overwhelmingly strongly positive effects, while also raising revenue to fund stuff like more transit. Congestion charging is great and every city should do it!

You’ve never heard of public housing?

How much do you think supply needs to increase in Australia to bring homelessness to zero?

Are you actually living in Australia? Because nobody here would describe it as having an extensive public housing program.

Your own source says that public housing is a small percentage of housing and is at a 40 year low.

But it’s not just the block sizes, it’s also the streets. Often Western Sydney streets have no trees at all (and even no footpaths)

From wikipedia:

> Cycling is increasingly popular in New York City; in 2018 there were approximately 510,000 daily bike trips, compared with 170,000 daily bike trips in 2005.[2][3]

New York City, for one. Heavily used transit, and in recent years much improved bike lanes, and a v successful bikeshare scheme. I highly recommend reading about Janette Sadik-Khan's great efforts to make NYC more walkable and bikeable and reduce car dominance (she has a good book called Street Fight).