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My vehicle is also air conditioned, but weighs 1000 tons and has 2000hp and hundreds of couches:
Seethe in jealousy, non-Europeans!
Still a subscription. Not quite to big oil, though.
Linking the page for my favorite hair pulling topic on traffic: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand
By hyper subsidizing car road infrastructure we make it almost impossible to use anything else and competing infrastructure (trains, planes, seperated bus traffic) appears more expensive by contrast forcing more people to use cars.
Also the plot of Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988) if I recall correctly.
That’s a lot of lanes. I’ve never been anywhere more than like, 10 wide and that’s counting both ways, and that’s in the city.
Looks like Houston TX to me. Horrible experience there, they are allergic to public transportation and sidewalks.
“Can I sit in the recliner at work?”
“No. You have to leave it outside so that poor people can’t have apartments there.”
Unless you’re poor, then it’s also your apartment
But don’t let us catch you using it as one, that’s illegal.
Capitalism. That’s how that happened. They shaped the world in such a way as to sell more stuff. In this case cars.
Car-dependent development was the workaround that government officials devised to keep housing segregation in effect after the Supreme Court ruled it illegal. If one needed a car to get around those new subdivisons, poor people couldn’t live there. If Black people were largely poor, and if government programs like the GI Bill were denied to Black people, well, that wasn’t a segregation law, so it wasn’t illegal, right?
Subsidizing the white middle class with government money so that they could afford to buy cars happened to work well for the capitalists, too.
(By the way, this isn’t a conspiracy theory. The people doing it weren’t shy, and left explicit, written records of their racist intent.)
This isn’t entirely the case, but the reality is actually no different. Long story short, a major reason that most of the US interstate freeways exist and have been built the way they have been is because they will stand up to moving heavy machines, like tanks. There’s long strips of straight Highway that can be used as runways.
The highway system was built so that in the event of a civil war, domestic uprising, or invasion, the military could more or less operate very adequately anywhere with a decent stretch of highway available, and some way to get there.
Until then, automobiles rarely had to travel very far each day, and couldn’t really run any faster than a few dozen miles an hour, partly because of the challenges of the terrain.
Automotive companies then took advantage of the newly built infrastructure and sold faster vehicles that could drive farther…
So blame who you want, but it was a joint effort between the civilian government, military industrial complex, and capitalistic automotive manufacturers, that drove (pun intended) us to where we are now.
There’s more to it. While the military bought in on it, the industries were the major pushers. Many towns had tram cars or cable cars (if you’ve ever been to San Fran, you’ve probably ridden these) but were bought and dismantled up by a then illegal collusion between like GM, Firestone, and oil companies a bit over 75 years ago and the legal cases lasted another 25 years.
There is a famous antitrust case on this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_conspiracy
Unfortunately this has resulted in such a profound malinvestment in public resources that it has turned a majority of the US into giant open paved areas: dangerous to kids, prohibitive of other small traffic, causes drainage problems, sun/wind exposure, urban sprawl, housing issues, huge parking lots, etc.
I have my doubts that military considerations were anything but a ruse to help sell the nation on the cost. That claim feels a lot like an utban legend, with embellishments like the design accommodating aircraft landings. The contemporary source material from the people supporting it cited the economic benefits mostly. As well, the military voiced support for the system, but the Secretary of Defense was Charles Erwin Wilson. He had been CEO of General Motors before taking office. At his confirmation hearing, he could see no conflict of interest. It was there that he uttered that famous quote, “What’s good for General Motors is good for America.”
The capitalist automotive companies had captured the military industrial complex, so I think maybe there’s a slight possibilty that the latter’s support for something that benefitted the former so immensely may not have been wholly genuine.
They?
Everybody wants pleasure and security.
The kaijus are just the really successful ones.
What if we made two separate sections that you could add or remove? Even better, let’s add a special vehicle to the front, with a trained driver. To aid the driver; rails. Oh, more people want to join? Let’s add a hitch system to the front and back of each “car” so we can add as many as we want.
Why did my brain go to motorcycle sidecar when you said a separate section you can remove? But yeah trains are the correct solution, this is coming from someone who loves his 01 Tacoma.
Yo, not bad.
Check it; double rail… side by side connectable trains. Somehow.
Modern designs are too limited. Make a 20 foot separation between the rails, giant 4x4 train.
That was actually a thing the Germans did on a few occasions, if memory serves they had to link the tow trains for the Gustav Railway Gun. I think it’s also been done on occasion for smaller locomotives to move overloaded cars.
I used to just think of this as yeah sure things are just bigger in America, it’s a huge place with lots of people… but then I realized that the cities with ridiculous numbers of lanes like this aren’t any bigger than cities in the rest of the world. Houston (pictured) isn’t even in the Top 200 biggest world cities.
There are 29 countries in America that aren’t like this. It’s really just the USA.
I’ve looked it up and the Katy Freeway on the picture has an average of 219 000 using it per day. Let’s be very generous and assume an average of 1.5 person in each car, so around 329 000 people are moved each day thanks to this highway.
A single metro line or two tramway line moves more people per day than that.
Its crazy. At its widest it has 26 lanes. It amazes me that they just kept widening it, instead of thinking “We’ve added 5 lanes, we should probably find an alternative solution”.
In the city where that exists, they really isn’t much else that’s viable. Decades of bad urban planning mean that comprehensive public transportation is not cost-effective in that area. And “not cost-effective” doesn’t just mean “expensive”, it means “would cost an order of magnitude more than the city budget”. So the only real solution for them in the short term is to build the world’s most ridiculous laughingstock of a road.
Key phrase being “short term” - nobody seems to build with a 20+ year plan to improve the city in America, whereas in European cities every time I visit one I haven’t been to in a decade, I usually notice I’m reaping the benefits of major infrastructure improvements which take decades to plan and build. Short term, selfish (what will get me elected again, or what will pay me the biggest bonus) thinking, and corruption, is what keeps American cities shitty
It’s sprawl. Building up costs too much via some combination of building taxes, NIMBYs, and construction overhead, so people build out instead. Building out means more and more miles of infrastructure (Roads, water, electric, natural gas, signs, gas stations, etc., etc.) per capita.
Then when the people in the sprawled-out suburbs want to visit the city centers anyway, because that’s where jobs and shopping inevitably are (People live where people live), they have to build massive roads to get in and out.
Yep, just look at Tokyo.
people argue that japan has an easier time doing public transport because it’s a slim island that’s roughly linear from north to south, so it’s easy to serve it by one public transport line.
But the same is true for the US, where most people live either on the east coast or on the west coast. You basically have two slim, linear areas that can be served by 1 line of public transport each.
It’s even worse in Canada where 50% of the population literally lives in a straight line in Ontario/Quebec
Another problem is that the US has stupidly strong private property rights. Everyone whose land is going to need to be confiscated to build the railroad tracks will try to bilk the high-speed rail authority out of every dollar they can, and because the US has a very strong civil court system which strict procedural law, it only costs a landowner a few thousand dollars to cause millions of dollars worth of legal headaches for the rail authority
isn’t that also true for highways?
I have never been on a road like the one in the picture.
I’d have a nervous breakdown.
Just one more lane bro
Classic: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/0dKrUE_O0VE
The Katy cost a mere $7 billion and it’s still often a glorified parking lot. It’s got less throughput than a single train for moving people, but I’m sure adding another lane will fix it. https://www.youtube.com/shorts/o-F-7Yc-A8U
Love this reply
It’s my comfort box. Everyone is subject to my comfort box.
https://youtu.be/T6fO3xYJR30 it’s my Cadillac Hour
I can have the comfort box with the high end everything or the misery box that mostly functions as I’m broiled alive sitting in traffic. But we’re all stuck on the same Turnpike together. It isn’t as though I have an alternative to the twelve lane interchange.
I’m gonna go for the ok-ish comfort box that was kinda cheap and missing fancier new bits but was kinda decent when it came out just kinda old now and somehow mostly still works
It’s the bike lanes! 😡 /s
STAY IN THE BIKE LANE !!
How did this happen?
Convenience and Capitalism, what a wild duet!
It’s ALWAYS capitalism, people STILL don’t get this (I can’t blame them they got propagandized into believing capitalism is the holy economy or some stupid shit)
“Just a little more neoliberalism, bro, I swear we’ll usher in an era of prosperity if we just do it harder”
And it’s not even convenient…unless you purposefully destroy existing infrastructure and aggressively promote individualism in your society such that nobody has any other real choice! Walking distance? Never heard of her.
Yeah whats actually convenient is being able to step out your home, jump into the tram, read the newspaper for 15 minutes, jump out and have teleported to work.
And also I can walk 5min to grocery store or 10min to a haircut, I can have a drink and don’t need to spend Uber money to get home, all travel time is the same because there’s no such thing as rush hour on a metro or with a bicycle(actually with the metro it’s faster because it comes more frequently at those times), etc… It’s all winning, basically.
Trains are much more convenient.
This one is fully on capitalism.
Trains are convenient until you want to go somewhere without rails :( which I guess could be solved with more rails…
Cars are convenient until you want to go some place without free parking directly in front of the entrance. (Or so I gather from the whining and complaining that drivers so often do.)
Well now it’s fascism
Fascism is capitalism in decline.
I mean, the answer is in the line right above the question.
With all those luxuries, why not just live in this thing and avoid rent?
Many people do sadly
Everybody wants a back yard, nobody wants buses or trains
I don’t want a backyard, I want a park within walking distance.
I don’t want an expensive hunk of steel and plastic, I want a train that picks up every ten minutes.
I know a large number of people who feel the same way. But none of them have billions of dollars to lobby my mayor or governor or President. Hell, even when we do get a bit of outright bribery to bend things our way, a single petty asshole can foul the whole project.
Busses work perfectly well for suburban neighbourhoods with back yards. With 1000m² each, you can place more than 250 lots around a bus stop, so that no one will have to walk more than 500m. With average families of four, that’s a thousand potential passengers. Not enough for a metro station, but more than enough for a bus service every 10-20 minutes to get to the next train station.
What also works well: Build a few 3 story apartment buildings, a supermarket, a few small stores, a school, a kindergarten and a pub around a train station. Build the single family homes around that infrastructure and you have the perfect place for almost everyone. Families can live in the outer area, when the kids get older they can move out into the apartments and still be around. When they start their own family they move back into the garden homes and the grandparents who get too old to work their gardens can move to the apartments. And all that within 15 minutes walking distance of a train station.
And all that within 15 minutes walking distance of a train station.
My neighborhood used to have three bus lines. I think it’s down to one, and we recently put in the laziest bike lanes. (Painting a bicycle in the hard shoulder is not sufficient!)
…no one will have to walk more than 500m.
Well I would walk 500m.
And I would walk 500 more.
I don’t want a back yard. What I want is the noise isolation and the feeling of safety and personal space. I also like having the ability to use that space for personal projects if I want to.
I have seen condos and other urban spaces that are well-built enough to provide the same benefits that I see from a back yard. But they’re very expensive.
My basic point is that people sometimes forget what they really want, and instead focus on something that has given them those benefits.
I wouldn’t mind living in an apartment building, so long as it’s equally co-owned by the people who live in it, and by nobody who doesn’t. And that it has a green space on the property for recreation and a community garden.
I have both (not so much on the train front unfortunately).
We all now how
