jakelarkin

Congestion pricing is great, but I am pointing out the underlying politics, its just being used to prolong the car first status quo in these cities. theres not really an earnest follow through for road/parking diets, protected bike lanes and 2x, 3x public transit that are actually needed.

The financial & car industries have been immensely successful at making cars accessible to all consumers. Anyone with an income, a bit of credit history and a pulse can roll out of dealership with a car. Roads on the other hand are publicly funded and physical constrained. It's inevitable that car owning will have to become much more expensive via taxes in the decades ahead.

The mayors listed are not however making their cities particularly more accessible to pedestrians and bicyclists. They generally sandbag those improvements on the slightest complaints about loss of parking or access. DiBlasio drives to a gym in Brooklyn everyday and has the NYPD run a war on ebikes/bikes, Durkan just canceled a long-planned bike lane on an important arterial, Portland's doing a massive freeway expansion. Most of these cities are failing on Vision Zero efforts.

The reason congestion pricing is catching on is that the wealthy & politically connected older generations finally settled on it as the way to reclaim their privilege to drive straight into the downtown from their suburbs. Congestion pricing is now just another way to maintain a vehicular status quo.

"the plane should never have gotten the green light to fly."

this is an overstatement. airframe fuel efficiency is a undoubtable good thing vis a vis climate change, costs, etc. Obviously they've reached a point were the aerodynamic profile of a modern, efficient airframe is difficult to control via manual pilot input alone in some scenarios. This was the case for stealth technology with fighter/bomber designs.. the B2 for example has no vertical stabilizer and would not be controllable at all without fly-by-wire. Of course pilots will lament complexity and the loss of manual input. Regardless, the FAA wanted MCAS in the 737Max. Augmenting human input in the face of instrument failure and possible human failure is an extremely hard problem and uncharted territory for the industry. Doesn't at all mean its a not a worthy goal or that the designers or regulators had ill intent or negligence.

agree with most of the other comments in this thread, but would add

- BART is an extremely filthy and dangerous transit system by any 1st world standard, and I say this as a lifelong transit rider.

- Oakland, Berkeley, & Richmond govs/regs are business unfriendly & tech hostile. It's a traditionally poor working class area undergoing massive housing displacement & the political class is all old money or non-profit types.

there's always been bad information but it was previously hard to disseminate NEW bad information quickly. It was incredibly expensive, slow and there were watchers, gatekeepers ... various religious authorities, newspaper editors etc. now the russian election manipulation cyber warfare division or your local anti-vax grifter can anonymously target a limitless number of impressionable rubes with the click of a mouse. often for free if the content's viral. thanks social media!

financial illiteracy is a real problem in journalism. You can't really judge how egregious/successful these guys were without knowing the annualized NET revenue of this business.

another clickbait article from this organization. "${TechCo} paid X% in taxes but it should have paid Y% * Current Year Net Income".

What specifically is ITEP arguing for? GAAP profitability is not Taxable income is not Net Cash flow. The IRS has different multi-year schedules for various asset amortizations/depreciation than GAAP so of course the tax rates can be significantly different if the company is investing in growth.

tl;dr we are upset GAAP net income does not equal taxable income.

Caltrain electrification is a comparatively small project and seems will happen quickly regardless of HSR.

the Bay Area provides 40% of state tax revenue and, even worse, externalizes the costs of its awful development policy on a large chunk of Northern California population in form of increased housing and transportation costs.

how pointless that the state is spending decades and tens of billions on HSR from SF to LA for a hypothetical sub-3 hour journey, while it still takes 1.5 to 2.5 hours to get between various important locations in the Bay Area by public transit.

+ VTA light rail

+ BART in 2026

too bad the SJC airport runway axis runs straight across downtown. They could otherwise go much much higher/denser in the urban core.

Capitol Corridor really could use an investment from the state (instead of HSR boondoogle). Huge chunk of the north-bay could be shifted to proper public transit connections to SF/East Bay economic centers.

from my observation, the primary drivers are

1) the heroin/fentanyl epidemic

2) political choices or fiscal constraints as local spending on public healthcare/shelters/mental-wards/criminal-justice has not kept up with spiraling costs increases and population growth

3) the minimum rents in coastal cities exceeding the max SSID benefit ( ~$750/month) in the early 2010s

The sub causes of (3) are myriad but include; a decade of easy credit inflating property values, revival of American cities, local zoning/permitting strangling construction, and I guess the economic success of West coast technology companies (although this tax base keeps the government sector afloat particularly in California, so think the progressives protest a bit too much)

The east coast does not have as many problems with (2) because there is an effective "right to shelter" with subfreezing winter temps. Having enough shelter capacity helps prevent the short-term homeless from becoming "chronically homeless".

it's a non-violent crime of opportunity. police time is $150/hour at least. all your loses seem to be covered by the banks, aside from the car window, which um happens to people all the time. its the kind of thing they pursue occasionally in realtime or with a sting, but not each individual case.

change your key, open a new checking account & close old, lock your credit. and that ends your exposure.

you won't get the video footage because it creates a legal liability for the owners to release it.

EDIT I'm all for broken windows but thats still implemented as a sampling approach. They don't actually pursue every low-level crime.