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PaperclipPerfector  10d ago (text post)   33741 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 11, 2024

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I think that we should create a CDS - car derangement syndrome, similar to TDS. To me it seems that those are the types of people that just plain hate cars and are latching on everything to make the anti car case.

I used to suffer from carbrain, and now I suffer from CDS. It's tough. I can't wait for the walk sign at an intersection without noting that the wait was caused by the cars. Whenever I see free street parking or a speeding driver, I can't help but try to quantify the untaxed negative externality. Everywhere I go in my American city, I see the ghost of the city that once was, before the cars took over the streets, and the ghost of the urbanist utopia that the city could one day become. The only thing that helps me is driving in a rural area, which feels natural, peaceful, and truly necessary.

There's an inherent scaling problem with cars and dense cores.

It becomes especially problematic because some people love driving and have a very entitled view and won't accept that investments in things like commuter rail benefit them by reducing the number of people on the road.

Commuter rail is fairly inefficient in most cities, and in any case doesn't replace the automobile. That is a large public capital investment to not even replace a lot of privately held capital.

For some people the dense cores are the problem.

Then it sounds like everyone is in agreement-- those people shouldn't be driving in the dense cores!

Commuter rail doesn't reduce traffic.

Can you expand on that?

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