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These 'new urbanists' remain clueless regarding 'real life 101', since they are totally oblivious to the fact that people will NOT surrender their automobiles should they decide to return to the city and abandoni the suburbs, which is in no danger of taking place anywhere in the USA anytime soon.
People will still need automobiles to go grocery shopping, go to the movies, go to work, go out for recreation, take the kids to soccer or ballet practice and so forth, and no public transportation system anywhere will serve those needs and a myriad of others.
In other words, the social engineers with their degrees from these lofty institutions of higher ignorance don't have a clue about how the real world works, and their ludicrous mindset which despises private automobiles as do all lefties makes zero sense whatsoever.
Put it this way---how many trips on a subway or on a light-rail system would your typical 'soccer mom' have to make while wearing her business clothes to do her grocery shopping, stop at the dry cleaners, go to the post office or any of a myriad of other everyday chores if she didn't have a car?
New urbanists and other social engineers are just plain stupid period; Portland, Or. is contemplating doing away with upwards of 70% of their public transit system because the percentage of residents who ride it today in lower than it was in 1980, as Joel Kotkin pointed out in Sunday's Orange County Register.
He also pointed out that under 6% of LA's resident utilize public transit to go to work; the corresponding rate in NYC is 30%.
In other words, private automobile use in this country isn't going anywhere; it's as much of a necessity as breathing, and anybody whose IQ is higher than their shoe size knows that already, that except for those brain-dead liberal elites.
Cities such as Phoenix, Atlanta & Charlotte as well as Dallas-Ft. Worth have spent billions of dollars on rail systems, and all for the benefit of the 2% or less of the local citizens who use it.
These 'new urbanists' remain clueless regarding 'real life 101', since they are totally oblivious to the fact that people will NOT surrender their automobiles should they decide to return to the city and abandoni the suburbs, which is in no danger of taking place anywhere in the USA anytime soon.
People will still need automobiles to go grocery shopping, go to the movies, go to work, go out for recreation, take the kids to soccer or ballet practice and so forth, and no public transportation system anywhere will serve those needs and a myriad of others.
In other words, the social engineers with their degrees from these lofty institutions of higher ignorance don't have a clue about how the real world works, and their ludicrous mindset which despises private automobiles as do all lefties makes zero sense whatsoever.
Put it this way---how many trips on a subway or on a light-rail system would your typical 'soccer mom' have to make while wearing her business clothes to do her grocery shopping, stop at the dry cleaners, go to the post office or any of a myriad of other everyday chores if she didn't have a car?
New urbanists and other social engineers are just plain stupid period; Portland, Or. is contemplating doing away with upwards of 70% of their public transit system because the percentage of residents who ride it today in lower than it was in 1980, as Joel Kotkin pointed out in Sunday's Orange County Register.
He also pointed out that under 6% of LA's resident utilize public transit to go to work; the corresponding rate in NYC is 30%.
In other words, private automobile use in this country isn't going anywhere; it's as much of a necessity as breathing, and anybody whose IQ is higher than their shoe size knows that already, that except for those brain-dead liberal elites.
Cities such as Phoenix, Atlanta & Charlotte as well as Dallas-Ft. Worth have spent billions of dollars on rail systems, and all for the benefit of the 2% or less of the local citizens who use it.
Does that make sense to anyone?
I don't think you get it, it isn't about getting rid of cars, it is about getting rid of car dependency and providing options. Try to do all those things now without a car, you probably can't because you are dependent on your car for every single thing, even recreation.
A city like Portland, Or understands this and now has a city where half its residents commute by alternative transportation.
It is fine that people are happy being car dependent, but we shouldn't force areas to be totally car dependent. Also when people choose alternative forms of commuting, you take cars off the road and prevent traffic from getting worse which is better for those that are car dependent.
Do you bike to the grocery store? Are there suitable bike routes between your home and the grocery store? Do people in your neighborhood bike, walk, and drive to the grocery store or just drive? It is easy to assume when I grew up in the modern day suburbs and well aware that we had three grocery stores all within a couple miles away and no one biked to get their groceries because there were no good routes to bike, each grocery store had a sea of parking, and none of them had a suitable place to lock a bike, therefore where I grew up was a typical car dependent suburb.
This is a good point. If you are functionally able to use an alternative to the car but that alternative is implausible from a practical perspective--due to distance, danger or other factor--then you are effectively dependent on the car.
Not everyone minds this. Hell, this isn't even a problem to some, and that viewpoint should be respected. But that respect should be returned in kind, because not everyone wants to build their life around the car.
These 'new urbanists' remain clueless regarding 'real life 101', since they are totally oblivious to the fact that people will NOT surrender their automobiles should they decide to return to the city and abandoni the suburbs, which is in no danger of taking place anywhere in the USA anytime soon.
People will still need automobiles to go grocery shopping, go to the movies, go to work, go out for recreation, take the kids to soccer or ballet practice and so forth, and no public transportation system anywhere will serve those needs and a myriad of others.
In other words, the social engineers with their degrees from these lofty institutions of higher ignorance don't have a clue about how the real world works, and their ludicrous mindset which despises private automobiles as do all lefties makes zero sense whatsoever.
Put it this way---how many trips on a subway or on a light-rail system would your typical 'soccer mom' have to make while wearing her business clothes to do her grocery shopping, stop at the dry cleaners, go to the post office or any of a myriad of other everyday chores if she didn't have a car?
New urbanists and other social engineers are just plain stupid period; Portland, Or. is contemplating doing away with upwards of 70% of their public transit system because the percentage of residents who ride it today in lower than it was in 1980, as Joel Kotkin pointed out in Sunday's Orange County Register.
He also pointed out that under 6% of LA's resident utilize public transit to go to work; the corresponding rate in NYC is 30%.
In other words, private automobile use in this country isn't going anywhere; it's as much of a necessity as breathing, and anybody whose IQ is higher than their shoe size knows that already, that except for those brain-dead liberal elites.
Cities such as Phoenix, Atlanta & Charlotte as well as Dallas-Ft. Worth have spent billions of dollars on rail systems, and all for the benefit of the 2% or less of the local citizens who use it.
Does that make sense to anyone?
Sir,
If you want to talk about reality, then let's face it. Being car dependent is costly. To the individual, there are significant costs of purchasing, maintaining and using a car, estimates for which run up to 30% of income. Society, then, pays for the externalized costs; oil runoff in to our water supplies, pollution and the resulting health costs, and the health cost of using a car for everything instead of walking or biking. The governments, local, county, state, and federal, then top it off by using taxpayer dollars, hundreds of billions of them, to build and poorly maintain out roadways.
And, no, it is not as much a necessity as breathing. To compare it to respiration is to suggest dependence on the car is both natural and necessary. But car dependency is entirely man-made, a product of government policy, from zoning to mortgage deductions to infrastructure spending.
This is a good point. If you are functionally able to use an alternative to the car but that alternative is implausible from a practical perspective--due to distance, danger or other factor--then you are effectively dependent on the car.
Not everyone minds this. Hell, this isn't even a problem to some, and that viewpoint should be respected. But that respect should be returned in kind, because not everyone wants to build their life around the car.
Amen! And, this does not mean we want to force everyone to sell their car and live there against their will.
And you are car dependent for those stops, that is fine for you, but not everyone wishes to be forced to be dependent on a car just to live in the suburbs. It is just silly to think that only people living in urban neighborhoods get the convenience of having options for travel. In the suburbs it is more than often the default which is car dependency.
Everyone has the option. It's just silly to think that everyone cares about the option enough to pay for it. Most don't. Why should jurisdictions provide an option that the residents overwhelming don't care about, especially if it's a hugely expensive one like public transit? Places like San Francisco's transit/road spending ratio is 9:1. $9 is spent on transit operations for every $1 spent on roads. We hear over and over again how unsustainable road spending is from anti-car zealots who refuse to acknowledge that public transit is way, way more expensive to provide than roads. In dense cities, maybe it makes sense as the cost of not having transit in major cities is very high. Think of NYC after Sandy or San Francisco during the BART strikes. Cities grind to a hault. Life wouldn't be that impacted for my suburb, however. So maybe it doesn't make sense to spend $9 on transit for every dollar of roads here as San Francisco does. Unless, of course, the goal is to force people to live in cities by artificially inflating the cost of suburbs such that it can be bastions for the wealthy as the early railroad suburbs were.
I don't think you get it, it isn't about getting rid of cars, it is about getting rid of car dependency and providing options. Try to do all those things now without a car, you probably can't because you are dependent on your car for every single thing, even recreation.
A city like Portland, Or understands this and now has a city where half its residents commute by alternative transportation.
It is fine that people are happy being car dependent, but we shouldn't force areas to be totally car dependent. Also when people choose alternative forms of commuting, you take cars off the road and prevent traffic from getting worse which is better for those that are car dependent.
Bolded is wrong.
Close to 70% of Portland's residents commute by single-occupant personal vehicle. If you include carpooling, that numbers rises to over 75%. What's remarkable is how little those numbers have changed. Portland spends huge amounts of money incentivizing carpooling with preferential subsidized parking and the rate stays constant. Portland spends hundreds of millions of dollars for decades expanding fancy choo-choo trains and transit use remains flat. The only time it actually increased noticeably was the recession, and it's gone right back down since then. With transit, it's not actually fair to say it's increased. They may have spend hundreds of millions of dollars on the choo-choo trains for yuppies, but they cut just as many bus routes. Transit options really weren't expanded which is why transit numbers didn't go up. They just shifted transit from disadvantaged neighborhoods where people were reliant on it by building expensive choo-choo trains through yuppie neighborhood. It's a policy of purposely forcing the people that rely on transit to become car-dependent or face increasingly long commutes, and I agree that's wrong, while spending hundreds of millions of dollars to provide toy trains to satisfy the "urban lifestyle" of a few select neighborhoods. It's bad policy, unless you're a self-absorbed urban hipster who is only concerned with me, me, me.
The slight dip in car usage in Portland is entirely attributable to the doubling of bicycle usage and walking. The stereotype is urban hipsters, but if you actually spend any time you'll see even more decidedly uncool engineer-types commuting with helmets and clipless pedals as you will earplug and tattoo canvases on fixies.
Eh. Do the Portland light rail even service the hipster neighborhoods much? They're mostly useful from some outlying neighborhoods. I suppose the entire area west of the river is well service, but since light rail converges on downtown, it has to be well served. But those trip are short, 2 miles max.
Everyone has the option. It's just silly to think that everyone cares about the option enough to pay for it. Most don't. Why should jurisdictions provide an option that the residents overwhelming don't care about, especially if it's a hugely expensive one like public transit? Places like San Francisco's transit/road spending ratio is 9:1. $9 is spent on transit operations for every $1 spent on roads. We hear over and over again how unsustainable road spending is from anti-car zealots who refuse to acknowledge that public transit is way, way more expensive to provide than roads. In dense cities, maybe it makes sense as the cost of not having transit in major cities is very high. Think of NYC after Sandy or San Francisco during the BART strikes. Cities grind to a hault. Life wouldn't be that impacted for my suburb, however. So maybe it doesn't make sense to spend $9 on transit for every dollar of roads here as San Francisco does. Unless, of course, the goal is to force people to live in cities by artificially inflating the cost of suburbs such that it can be bastions for the wealthy as the early railroad suburbs were.
Your logic doesn't follow. First you say PT doesn't matter, it's not important. But, then, you admit that when PT goes down, "cities grind to a hault." If it's not important, then, logically, it must not have much of an effect when it suddenly ceases to be an option; conversely, if it has a huge effect when it suddenly ceases to be an option, it must be important.
Everyone has the option. It's just silly to think that everyone cares about the option enough to pay for it. Most don't. Why should jurisdictions provide an option that the residents overwhelming don't care about, especially if it's a hugely expensive one like public transit? Places like San Francisco's transit/road spending ratio is 9:1. $9 is spent on transit operations for every $1 spent on roads. We hear over and over again how unsustainable road spending is from anti-car zealots who refuse to acknowledge that public transit is way, way more expensive to provide than roads. In dense cities, maybe it makes sense as the cost of not having transit in major cities is very high. Think of NYC after Sandy or San Francisco during the BART strikes. Cities grind to a hault. Life wouldn't be that impacted for my suburb, however. So maybe it doesn't make sense to spend $9 on transit for every dollar of roads here as San Francisco does. Unless, of course, the goal is to force people to live in cities by artificially inflating the cost of suburbs such that it can be bastions for the wealthy as the early railroad suburbs were.
Actually in many suburbs there aren't options, not everyone wants to live in SF to have good transportation options. Also, I noticed you did a ratio for transit but not single vehicle, why is that?
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