Reveal Your Uncool Conservative Beliefs Here

Which, if you are able to externalize every other cost, I suppose it is.

old cars are fucking cool. I’m really into reading about restoring barn finds lately.

I love restorations, no doubt. Maybe that's uncool?

People like driving for a lot of reasons that make good sense (more targeted mobility, in some cases much shorter transit time, ability to easily transport children and stuff, control over climate/environment, not having people's armpits in your face, etc.), and if you want to move people toward driving less, you have to improve the alternatives rather than just make driving harder or more expensive. I know that's far-fetched in many parts of this dysfunctional country, but that's what I think needs to happen. Even when we build bike lanes they tend to not be very good or well thought out bike lanes. I barely ride a bike, but getting around Berlin on a bike was easy because of the way the lanes and roads are designed. My town just put in a basically useless bike lane that is only marked by paint on the ground and only goes on the main throughfare, and unsurprisingly it gets little use.

What would really make sense in my town is some kind of shuttle bus to downtown/the train station. The town is small enough that you can get from one end to the other in like ten minutes and from most places to the downtown and train station in 5-7 minutes. Even if a shuttle took a few more minutes I think people would take it to not have to deal with parking, and it would reduce a lot of car use. I would gladly hop on a shuttle with the kids if we just wanted to go downtown for a meal or ice cream or whatever.

Anyway, that's not really conservative or liberal I guess - I am pro-transit and car alternatives, but anti-knee-jerk-anti-car-reaction. Cars have their uses but there are a lot of situations where we should be giving people a better alternative.

Driving can just simply feel good, in a sensual way almost.. not driving in traffic

i want to drive

Right, it can be enjoyable too, but the sheer enjoyment of driving isn't even #10 on my list of reasons to have a car. I don't think it benefits anyone to pretend that anyone who prefers driving is an asshole, especially when, on top of some of the inherent advantages of driving, our society (at least in the US) is structurally set up to privilege driving in a way that's beyond most individuals' control.

When we lived in the city, I used to take my then baby/toddler on the subway a lot, and you know what? It's fucking hard! The elevators don't work half the time and I would wind up either carrying the stroller down those massive stairs or precariously taking it on the escalator (many of which also often didn't work). And I was lifting regularly at the time and strong enough to carry a toddler in a stroller up 4 flights worth of stairs, but a lot of parents aren't going to be able to do that. Then it's hard to find space for the stroller at any peak time (which in NYC is huge swaths of the day) and you never know if you're going to wind up with someone's butt in your kid's face. And the delays and getting stuck in the tunnels are like 10x more stressful with a little kid. And the bus was fucking impossible with a stroller. Thankfully we could walk to groceries and we eventually got a car, but I can't imagine having to do any kind of shopping via subway with a kid in tow. Is congestion pricing going to fund legit improvements to these issues? I certainly hope so.

Like what I have now is a very short car commute and the ability to work from home half time, and I certainly prefer less driving to more. It's not about wanting to drive for its own sake.

yeah good points

(breathes)

(bites tongue hard)

you seem to be missing the point that cars make life absolutely hellish for the people who don't own them , which in a place like nyc is more than half of everyone, and closer to 80% of manhattanites.

I think man alive's points did implicitly address yours, Deflatormouse?

I love restorations, no doubt. Maybe that's uncool?

― immodesty blaise (jimbeaux)

i mean what kind of restorations are we talking? the stuart restoration? i'd say that's an uncool conservative belief. restoring, like, art, or old cars, or shit like that... i don't necessarily think of that as conservative or uncool.

idk if this is a 'conservative belief' but i wish we had japanese laws around cars:

* must provide proof of having a place to park yr car when you purchase it
* no overnight street parking allowed

a lot of ppl in the US would read this as 'conservative' because poor ppl don't always have off-street parking available and thus a law like this makes owning a car the sole province of the landed, which i get, but man you really notice how different the urban environment in tokyo is without all the fuckin cars

granted i think these laws have been on the books there since the 1950s or something so yknow

cars specifically make life hellish for parents trying to take baby/toddlers on the subway, because absolutely enormous amounts of public money are spent on roads and highways, versus expanding, maintaining, and improving infrastructure and service standards on transit. many or most of your subway complaints, man alive, are really issues of investment in these things, not innate to the transportation mode. as it is, the deck is stacked, so, yeah, no surprise that driving works really well for some people; we've made it that way! we've built huge swaths of the country entirely around this mode of transportation! but at the expense of so much else.

I think man alive's points did implicitly address yours, Deflatormouse?

this?

, our society (at least in the US) is structurally set up to privilege driving in a way that's beyond most individuals' control.

which is why i am griping about ebikes upthread instead of cars

the subway in new york objectively sucks in a million ways compared to pretty much every other underground metro system i can think of. that’s not an argument for cars it’s an argument to stop starving the MTA of cash. a point you pretty much made with your bike lane story to be fair.

when you think of the number of people subways serve and the economic function of moving workers and consumers from place to place it’s just astonishing how poorly they’re funded. businesses ought to be donating large sums to their upkeep and improvement.

bordeaux - a famously conservative city! - has been working on a tram system for about 20 years now and at this point it is extremely good. it’ll take you to and from the airport, the train station, the universities, the outlying suburbs, etc. In fact, there is apparently a plan to ban cars from the entire urban centre (unless you live there). which will drastically reduce the hassle of driving for locals, and make it a nicer place to be for tourists and well, everybody else too

xxp yep cars make every other form of transit more miserable, if not extremely dangerous

xp to Dr Casino: that was kind of my point. Only I think structures drive individual behavior much more than the other way around. NYC is only as car-oriented as it is because of top-down decisions, and it only has as good a subway as it does for the same reason. You can brow beat people all you want, but they're just never going to take the 2 hour sweaty train or bus trip over the 45 minute air conditioned car trip if they can afford the latter, because that's just how humans are.

It's not "people driving cars" that make transit miserable, it's structural investment in car infrastructure and lack thereof in transit.

xp, right, so like it seems to me the way to address that in a place like nyc would be to give over the vast swathes of public space devoted to cars back to new yorkers by banning them

thereby making bicycles much safer, buses much faster etc etc

so that we can have green space instead of walking out the door into a concrete hellscape

so that we don't have to carry groceries across roads designed to accommodate bridge traffic etc etc

Pedestrians much safer.

yeah see ymp's post about the scooter, we are sharing the sidewalk with ebikes now, and even the occasional motorcycle because they feel too unsafe in the road

I kind of thought that was the way policy had been going in the last decade or two. E.g. a bunch of bus and bike lanes have been created, citibike, reducing parking in a lot of parts of Manhattan, pedestrian corridors, etc. But they need to also do things to make buses and subways much more user friendly - better maintenance, create spaces for strollers and/or grandma carts of groceries, make the buses easier to board, etc.

I was living in Queens when they built the bike lanes on Queens Blvd, which were tbf not terribly designed or terribly unsafe - they were separated from the main road and seemed fine. At the time we left they were still not getting much use and I don't really know why. For us they just didn't serve any purpose, because there weren't a lot of scenarios where we'd be going down Queens Blvd - everything was pretty much either local in the neighborhood and we walked to it, or we occasionally drove or took the subway for longer trips, but there weren't a lot of trips where "let's bike down Queens Blvd with the kids in a tow cart" would have been a feasible option. Maybe part of the problem is that patterns of living and working need more time to adjust.

TBF, aside from when you have a stroller or a lot of stuff, I think buses are actually a massively underappreciated mode of transit in NYC. In a lot of ways they're much more pleasant and easier than the subway.

if they were more frequent and didn’t feel about a billion years old and falling apart people would probably use the more. agree on the general superiority of the bus for many kinds of trips.

where I live, your public transportation is a really mediocre local rail (Sunrail) that doesn't even fuckin' operate on weekends or run anywhere near late enough to be effective, and covers only a tiny fragment of the city.

we finally have high speed rail between cities (i.e. like Orlando to Miami), which...fuckin' finally, but local transit? a joke, man.

or a bus system (Lynx) that doesn't remotely adhere to its schedule and makes 5-10 mile trips take hours, and half the time you get stranded mid-way through because you have to change buses so many times and invariably one of them either doesn't show up on time or blows by the stop. it's a complete joke. I once had my car towed and trying to take the bus to the tow yard took two hours, and it was like...5 miles away. this was pre-Uber.

eight years ago, my roommate tried to go car free and take the bus 3 miles to work each morning, it showed up so late every day that he was late to work constantly and they threatened to fire him, and the path to work is not well accommodated for cyclists at all (no bike lanes, and one of the most unsafe roads), so he wound up buying a car he couldn't afford.

I don't particularly love being beholden to a car, but man some cities give you little choice. and at this stage, the cat's out of the bag, so I don't see Central Florida getting much better in that regard, esp with Republicans in charge.

xxp i lived off Queens blvd in forest hills at one time
crossing was notoriously dangerous with many pedestrian deaths
i used to use the subway underpass just to cross the street for basic errands like grocery shopping.
bike lanes on Queens Blvd should be protected by concrete barriers from buses and ambulances etc, with no private cars.

Neanderthal for some reason i thought you live in the burbs.
i'm not familiar with your area, and i don't know how feasible banning private cars would be in most places but def think it is very feasible in nyc and especially Manhattan and this is absolutely the right place for it to happen

xxp i lived off Queens blvd in forest hills at one time
crossing was notoriously dangerous with many pedestrian deaths
i used to use the subway underpass just to cross the street for basic errands like grocery shopping.
bike lanes on Queens Blvd should be protected by concrete barriers from buses and ambulances etc, with no private cars.

― A street taco cart named Des'ree (Deflatormouse), Thursday, March 7, 2024 2:35 PM (eight minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Yeah, that's where I lived. Crossing QB was definitely dangerous (I had to do it every day to take my kid to preschool) and I sometimes used the underpass too, but I don't think safety was the reason almost no one used the bike lanes - they were in the service road and not in the main road, which was much less dangerous, and they had those yellow divider thingies between them and the car lane (cars would occasionally still double park or use them to go around other cars, but it didn't seem like a major issue).

Interestingly, I could hypothetically commute to my job on a single bus that stops relatively near my house. It's around 1 hour each way. But the car takes 15-20 minutes. It's hard to justify losing that time every day. Maybe I'll try it sometime just to see how it goes.

WRT Manhattan, I agree a near-ban on cars is plausible but I don't think you can do a complete ban. There are too many legit commercial uses, people with limited mobility, people with tons of stuff to transport, etc. And then it becomes a question of how you would limit cars to only those uses, but I assume that's part of the reason a lot of parking now in Manhattan is commercial vehicles only most of the time.

For me, the game-changer was being able to bring a bicycle or scooter ONTO the subway train. Making the last mile easier has been of significant benefit. Yes I can walk, but it's way faster on wheels.

i spend a lot of time in Vienna and i adore their investment into public transit. between the subway, street trams, buses, rail and drivers that actually respect the pedestrians/cyclists it's such a pleasure getting anywhere in that city. plus, they don't check for fares on the public transportation - only downside is if you haven't paid for the fare and you caught by patrol you're getting a heavy fine.

xxp do you remember when they put the bike lanes in? i'm fairly sure it was after i moved out (i def have no recollection of a bike lane on qnz blvd, and when i visit the area now i head straight for metropolitan ave, invariably)

buuut you also have to consider that for most people, part of their trip is going to require cycling down a road that doesn't have one. for me personally, and i'm sure many others- i would totally ride a bike if i didn't have to share the road with cars, but getting to and from the bike lanes is scary enough to put me off it completely.

some of the proposals to ban private cars in manhattan would still allow for taxis and rideshares, though i have mixed feelings about it. i can tell you that my health insurance covers door to door transportation to doctor visits (they'll send a shuttle if i request it in advance, not that i ever have). i feel like there are workarounds to everything you're saying, and that some of them are obvious if we don't privilege driving.

i think of the vehicle ban in ancient rome, how deliveries were required to be made overnight.

they don't check for fares on the public transportation - only downside is if you haven't paid for the fare and you caught by patrol you're getting a heavy fine.

this is many nyc buses now

cash strapped mta can't afford the fare evasion tho

i spend a lot of time in Vienna and i adore their investment into public transit. between the subway, street trams, buses, rail and drivers that actually respect the pedestrians/cyclists it's such a pleasure getting anywhere in that city. plus, they don't check for fares on the public transportation - only downside is if you haven't paid for the fare and you caught by patrol you're getting a heavy fine.

I lived in Switzerland for a while and the public transport there sounds similar to Vienna. Yes, Swiss Nazi gold lol but shit was so efficient and clean and well planned - and run on a similar trust system. Once a month, inspectors would be out in force dishing out fines. Even getting out to rural areas was well-planned. You'd get a train to a remote mountain area and there was a bus there waiting to take you the final step of the way (said bus would inevitably double up as a post bus as well).

It's not "people driving cars" that make transit miserable, it's structural investment in car infrastructure and lack thereof in transit.

― longtime caller, first time listener (man alive), Thursday, March 7, 2024 2:17 PM bookmarkflaglink

agreed! i think we're on the same page in terms of the basic issues here.

but how do we get from A to B? what's going to drive a change in structural investment/disinvestment? there are probably a lot of steps, but i think part of it has to be a culture shift around driving, the status of cars, how our social problems are defined. many, many drivers have to start seeing the landscape they live in, and the way they're made to live in it, as a problem (social, environmental, economic, etc.). because car people are going to have to get to where they will vote for things that are not 100% gigantic giveaways to cars, car people, and car usage.

like to take one example: "build more bike lanes" ---- great! however: the car people are going to vote against this. they come out to every local government meeting to rail against the ones that are already built. they oppose Departments of Transportation being led by people who would support them. they won't let it happen.

so the structural disinvestment continues; as we're all recognizing, the lanes themselves end up being ad hoc, partial, not networked, not really designed as if they're truly a key part of the transportation system. and that severely limits the safety, utility, and pleasantness of biking, so the lanes don't serve the people who need them, and don't shift anywhere close to the needed numbers away from driving. either the car people have to change, or everybody else has to out-organize them, or both.

the car people are going to vote against this.

boy wait until you meet 'vehicular cyclists'

so the structural disinvestment continues; as we're all recognizing, the lanes themselves end up being ad hoc, partial, not networked, not really designed as if they're truly a key part of the transportation system. and that severely limits the safety, utility, and pleasantness of biking, so the lanes don't serve the people who need them, and don't shift anywhere close to the needed numbers away from driving. either the car people have to change, or everybody else has to out-organize them, or both.

― not the one who's tryin' to dub your anime (Doctor Casino), Thursday, March 7, 2024 3:55 PM (thirty-three minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

This model just seems incorrect to me in terms of how politics and development work. Our society is organized around the car because of car and oil industry lobbyists, not because of some voter preference. The voter preference is only at the micro level -- people who are already stuck for work and affordability reasons living in car-oriented exurbs might make "ease the traffic" a factor in their votes. So what do you think is going to fix that, punish the "car people" with even more traffic? No, you need large-scale structural changes that are beyond the purview of individual voters' immediate preferences in an election cycle.

I think Measure HLA passed in Los Angeles yesterday?

man alive, i agree about the industrial lobbyist thing up to a point. but now that those lobbyists have created this car-centric world, there are millions of people who have bought into it, both ideologically and literally/economically. and those people absolutely show up to support the conservative car-centric policies of city, county and state DOTs, and to yammer on in the comments under every article that so much as mentions a bicycle, a congestion tax, a train, etc.

they may be parroting industry BS talking points, but they are part of the political landscape. they block good things from happening.

yeah true that there are always the knee-jerk anti-bike types. I just don't think "make driving harder" is the solution, unless making driving harder is a mere byproduct of making another form of transit easier. And I also find a lot of myopia in the bike/anti-car activist community to the lifestyles of childless young office workers.

My region is extremely bike-friendly, there are extensive trail networks that are all interconnected. However, we also have to deal with some pretty dramatic altitude changes. I feel like if I lived someplace flatter, like Illinois, biking would be more pleasant.

u kno whats cool to keep on track?

threads

^ uncool conservative belief

man alive i just finished The Pushcart War w my 12-y-o and this thread is giving me flashbacks lol. you MUST have read it.

i'm on the same page about structural reform
and also changing attitudes
that is to say i actually think you're right that making driving harder won't solve the problem

what galls is that you seem to regard mass transit use as a kind of martyrdom

when in fact driving is an immense privilege that many people can't enjoy
and makes things worse for everyone else
maybe not where you live now but certainly in forest hills
and you know this