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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   29600 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 6, 2023

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While I appreciate your honesty, I don't recognize your right to dictate what other people build on plots of land that aren't actually in your backyard.

Most people, even YIMBYs, support the right of a community to impose some restrictions on activities with large externalities. Only the most extremist libertarians think anyone has the right to build a fish cannery or paper mill in a residential area.

Only the most extremist libertarians think anyone has the right to build a fish cannery or paper mill in a residential area.

Why does this have to be an extreme libertarian position? The free market essentially solves the problem associated with this. Neighborhoods that stink of fish will be cheaper to live in and those who are not okay with that can pay for the privilege.

I live in a city that does indeed allow the unthinkable idea of fish canning (slaughterhouse) plants in the middle of the city, they just get surrounded by dirt-cheap housing and businesses (and people do live there). It's still cheaper overall to live in a place that doesn't smell like meat because not fucking with the markets really does wonders.

The issue of course, and I'm broadly on the YIMBY side, is that the moment that slughterhouse gets plopped down it imposes economic costs on some with diffuse benefits for all. The people who paid not cheap prices for their houses are out a significant portion of their largest asset and the diffuse beneficiaries will not compensate them.

I think a distinction needs to be drawn between projects which impose a true negative externality on neighbors and projects which merely remove a previous positive externality. A slaughterhouse really is making things specifically worse and I think that should be compensated but residents who currently enjoy the seclusion brought by the woody area behind their neighborhood and thus are lobbying to disallow bulldozing it to build more houses can fuck right off.

Tough luck? Why do we have to be so soft on homeowners? It's not like a fish canning factory can just plop out of nowhere, large disruptive projects take years/decades to build and the intention to build as such is broadcasted well in advance.

We don't extend this level of hand-holding and thought about compensating business owners or owners of large amounts of stocks. Those things can rapidly lose their value as well and consist of a large part of individuals assets.

Tough luck? Why do we have to be so soft on homeowners?

I think you'll find people quite unwilling to just eat huge unfair economic hits like this. They'll lobby whatever powers they can to prevent their loss and ultimately they will succeed, even if they have to go to extreme lengths. If you don't let them do it through cities they'll do it through some other scheme. You're talking about taking the equivalent of several years of work away from people's net worth, they'll bomb the construction if it comes to that.

The ONLY reason the middle class has jumped head first into real estate investment is because of the government consistently enacting zoning regulations to deliberately benefit homeowners at the expense of everyone else, which likewise benefits a community’s most consistent voters. Anyone else who borrowed an amount of money 3-4x their salary as part of a 30-year loan, wiped down the countertops, then cried crocodile tears when their “investment” didn’t make them millionaires, would rightly be told they were an irresponsible idiot.

If it didn't cost them half their take home salary they might be a little less defensive, but that's not the system we live in and no one is going to pretend they're already living in the system you propose while you wipe away a significant portion of their net worth, and for many many people this is not even an asset that appreciates all that much. For every person who has seen their house go from $300k to $2M over thirty years there are many more who saw their house go from $300k to $300k over the same time span. It's like social security, we can talk about how in principle it's a bad and wasteful system but people didn't get a choice to participate and it's already eaten huge portions of their income for decades, you're damn right they're not willing to bear the entire burden of reforming the system alone.

Go ahead, find a way to balance the diffused costs so that we can all be better off, but don't just steal my money, distributed it evenly and pretend you didn't. Because we'll take every god damned cent back by force.

Homeowners created the system we live in such that it directly benefits them. So I’m fresh out of sympathy when you play the “that’s just the way it is” card, as though homeowners are blameless victims of circumstance. Again, crocodile tears don’t move me.

Any other investment, caveat emptor is in full effect. But when it comes to real estate, oh no, suddenly we need RULES. After all, poor Real Estate Mogul Wannabe #1,298,745 needs to eat. It’s not his fault they opened a gas station across from the slums he purchased at auction.

I still remember when they opened a perfectly legal Royal Farms across the street from the entrance to my quiet suburban neighborhood. Of course, the high maintenance, self-serving losers in my neighborhood went ballistic. I also remember getting a flier on my mailbox that read, “GOOD CHICKEN MEANS BAD NEIGHBORS.” It’s been 5 years now, and all that happened was I got a very convenient gas stop on the way to work, while the property value has doubled. May the morons I share a neighborhood with get ass cancer.

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It's not just homeowners, concentrated benefits / diffuse costs are a general problem - overfishing may benefit you, personally, now, but takes a bit away from other fishers now, and from you in the future, and persistent overfishing would necessitate regulation.

Similarly, doesn't a 'coasean' handling of the free market solution to residential slaughterhouses - pay the slaughterhouse creator to not build any - just let anyone extract value from a neighborhood by buying a few properties, saying "i will build a slaughterhouse if i'm not paid $XK"?

Similarly, doesn't a 'coasean' handling of the free market solution to residential slaughterhouses - pay the slaughterhouse creator to not build any - just let anyone extract value from a neighborhood by buying a few properties, saying "i will build a slaughterhouse if i'm not paid $XK"?

In a world where homeowners are hapless agency-less simpletons, yes. But it's not a wise long-term strategy for the potential slaughterhouse owner, people will wisen up to his tactics. There are countless ways businesses can extract money out of you now too, but competition fixes that issue just fine.

Might as well ask why people are allowed to have a say in the way their city/state/nation is run. Because we've accepted that from other principles. If you want to argue for the god-emperor to make every zoning decision, be my guest. Until then, let people who live there decide how they want to live, and suffer or reap the consequences.

let people who live there decide how they want to live

This is contradictory to letting people use their land that they own the way they like. People can decide how they live as long as they bear the cost of it instead of politically strongarming others into making decisions that benefit them.

Just empirically, people are not allowed to use their land however they like. There are innumerable restrictions, which is basically what this whole fight is about — which possible set of restrictions is optimal. The answer to that varies based on one's vantage point. "Do whatever you want" is not on the table because we live in a society, etc. It would be cool if Ancapistan existed but it doesn't because it's game-theoretically untenable.

Why do we have to be so soft on homeowners?

Because there are a lot of them and they vote in their own interests, and otherwise advocate for themselves, to a greater extent than opposing demographics. Insofar as this changes, preferential treatment of homeowners will also change.

I assume you already know this so possibly I'm being obtuse about what you were actually asking, or it was a rhetorical question?

We don't extend this level of hand-holding and thought about compensating business owners or owners of large amounts of stocks. Those things can rapidly lose their value as well and consist of a large part of individuals assets.

This isn't strictly true, for example there are assets you can't buy unless you're an accredited investor.

Ah - I assume that it's implicit that I think communities belong to the entire community, not to me personally. If the majority of people in the neighborhood think that inviting more hobos to hang out is the right thing to do and should probably be considered a new amenity, well, tough shit for me. As much as I'd like to be the dictator of my own fiefdom, I'd settle for collaborative local control of policies. I suppose equally implicit is that I reject the idea that anyone that owns a given yard can do as they like with it, free from government interference.

I think communities belong to the entire community, not to me personally.

But then what is the point of even owning property? If others want veto power over what I do with the land that I own, then they can buy it from me. If they can just coerce me to only do what they will allow, then owning property becomes completely useless.

If they can just coerce me to only do what they will allow, then owning property becomes completely useless.

But like, they can. Nonetheless, people choose to own property, because it still affords greater freedom to do [whatever] than renting. The set of things you're allowed to do when you're renting is smaller than the set of things you're allowed to do as a landowner / homeowner. This remains true even though the latter set does not contain "literally anything conceivable."

I don't agree. It's why I will never buy a house in an HOA: the entire point is to do what I want. As soon as neighborhood Karens are telling me what I can and can't do on the land I own, ownership is meaningless.

Idk where you live, but as far as I know, almost everywhere has a building code, at least in the US. I suppose a sufficiently rural area might offer more leeway.

Building codes do limit what you can do with your land (and are a non-trivial part of the NIMBY/YIMBY debate as they may include restrictions that greatly reduce density like parking or setback requirements), but HOAs have a reputation for having arbitrary and detailed restrictions on the use of your land like "your house may be painted one of these 4 colors".

Ah - I assume that it's implicit that I think communities belong to the entire community, not to me personally.

What defines a "community"? Is it your neighborhood? Your street? Literally just your family? The town? The state? The country? Right now most of these laws are passed at the municipal level, but municipalities can range in size from millions of people to a handful, and as current events in California indicate, if you change from town to state, you can get very different policies.

In general I don't think that "collective ownership" is a good framework for coordination problems. At some point, a plot of land (or building, etc) needs a person who is going to make decisions and be responsible for the outcome; rule by committee or democracy is marked by lots of public choice problems. A market with individual owners, and Coasian bargaining for externalities, is usually going to be better at capturing everyone's preferences given all of the relevant costs and other information. Complete bans are a very heavy-handed and unnecessarily extreme solution.

It's easy to say you support a policy, when the costs are spread among everyone else. For example, when you live in a neighborhood of all single family homes and drive everywhere, do you pay all of the costs for the roads, infrastructure, and other services? Often not. You might not want to live next to an unmarried couple, but are you willing to pay for all of the costs that come with forcing neighborhoods to be that way?

To take your argument about NIMBYism more generally: In the US at least, we are way past the point of just not wanting to live near homeless people. Highly-paid software engineers need to find multiple roommates just to live near the center of their industry. Professionals with families and white-collar jobs are forced to live an hour commute from downtown, because "home values" are literally sacred. In the most extreme cases, it exacerbates the very homeless problem it attempts to, well, not solve, but avoid. And it imposes, on other people, very similar externalities to the ones you are trying to avoid. Cars are a good example: NIMBYism inevitably requires lots of driving because everything is low-density and stores are required by law to be far away from homes. Driving is incredibly dangerous; car crashes kill several times more people each year than homicide in the US, and a substantial portion of those deaths are not drivers. They're also very loud, they pollute, etc.

It's easy to say you support a policy, when the costs are spread among everyone else. For example, when you live in a neighborhood of all single family homes and drive everywhere, do you pay all of the costs for the roads, infrastructure, and other services? Often not.

This is a non-sequitur / isolated demand at best, and wrong at worst. It sounds sensible to argue for the principle that you must pay for all the costs of services you use, except in practice no one has ever truly done that and it's much more practical to get people to pay for a portion of stuff they use. For example, on average 50% of road funding comes from gas taxes, and 50% of transit fares are subsidized. Both transit and road subsidies here are reasonable because infrastructure has economic benefits for all of society. If you told a transit operator that riders aren't paying for all of the costs of their services, they'd stare at you blankly and go, "of course they aren't; the point of infrastructure is to get them to their destinations, not to turn a profit".

In general, I am skeptical of Not Just Bikes and Strong Towns. Strong Towns especially since they've been shown to not be honest with their numbers, and Not Just Bikes for repeating Strong Towns's argument without any criticism, as he does in the video you linked to.

Driving is incredibly dangerous; car crashes kill several times more people each year than homicide in the US,

This rings hollow to me because a significant factor in both car crashes and homicide is a lack of accountability. First off, anti-police sentiment has been on the rise, resulting in less police and less police funding, so traffic enforcement goes down and along with it traffic safety. (Cue the arguments from activists about how pretextual traffic stops are just harassing minorities and resulted in the death of George Floyd and whatnot.) And of course with less police, there's more homicides. Next, judges and prosecutors release people that probably shouldn't be released, so you get cases where police end up pursuing a six-time felon whose license is suspended which hasn't stopped him from actually driving in the slightest.

I mean, yes, you can argue cars are just a bad of an externality as the homeless. But personally I'm like, well people have been railing against the police these past few years, what else did you expect?

Both transit and road subsidies here are reasonable because infrastructure has economic benefits for all of society. If you told a transit operator that riders aren't paying for all of the costs of their services, they'd stare at you blankly and go, "of course they aren't; the point of infrastructure is to get them to their destinations, not to turn a profit".

I believe that some transit can actually pay for itself. For example, the first NYC subway was private (the city took it over after refusing to allow them to raise the fare to account for inflation, bankrupting them). Japan currently has private train lines. If you don't care about that, then fine--but then "I just want to live how I want to" isn't valid either. If you expect that public services will be provided to you at below cost, then you should also expect that you might have to give up some of what you might want to benefit other people in turn.

I disagree that it's an isolated demand for rigor, because I oppose a broad array of government programs on similar grounds. Medicine and education are heavily subsidized, for example, and thus are over-consumed.

(This is somewhat outside the scope of NIMBYism specifically, but it's also the case that if you're going to subsidize some service, you should account for how effective it is and what the externalities are. Driving is low-capacity and has high externalities and negative side-effects, so it isn't a good choice to subsidize.)

In general, I am skeptical of Not Just Bikes and Strong Towns. Strong Towns especially since they've been shown to not be honest with their numbers, and Not Just Bikes for repeating Strong Towns's argument without any criticism, as he does in the video you linked to.

The numbers in the linked video are actually from a separate organization, Urban3. I don't really think that the linked comment "shows ST to be dishonest." gattsuru seems to agree that funding is coming from the state and local government, which is also something that ST has pointed out. They then complain about the fact that ST's comparison between 2 lots is (misleading? inaccurate?) because one lot has more businesses than the other, when in fact that is the whole point. Complaints about which things are being taxed (property vs gas etc.) seem to be irrelevant when the cost of replacing a single piece of infrastructure is 25% or more of the median household income. Overall I would describe this as "someone disagrees with them" not "they're being dishonest."

This rings hollow to me because a significant factor in both car crashes and homicide is a lack of accountability.

Why does it "ring hollow"? I agree that reckless driving doesn't get enough enforcement; I've previously complained about that. But I think this problem long predates BLM protests and backlash against police. Car crash fatalities had been declining prior to COVID, but this is due to the cars themselves being bigger and heavier with more features, but deaths of pedestrians and others outside of cars have been increasing. Even the use of the term "car accident" is arguably misleading; we already have a concept of negligence in law, but seem reluctant to even apply it to car crashes, even in theory. What the police do is irrelevant if the legislature and/or courts have decided that nobody is actually to blame. Also, any sort of meaningful enforcement is discouraged because, ironically, of how car-dependent we are. Preventing someone from driving, in most of the US, means they are entirely dependent on someone else to do things like work or buy food.

I am also skeptical that enforcement has/would have a big effect, but I would love to see some empirical research. However, even better than enforcement is prevention. There are ways to design roads and other infrastructure which are safer because they naturally cause drivers to be more careful. For example, posting a low speed limit on a sign does nothing if the road itself is straight with wide lanes. People tend to drive at the speed they feel comfortable, regardless of the posted limit, so rather than just posting a sign, make the road itself narrower.

Finally, the negative externalities of cars go well beyond deaths related to negligence. They're loud and they pollute, to give 2 examples.

I believe that some transit can actually pay for itself. For example, the first NYC subway was private (the city took it over after refusing to allow them to raise the fare to account for inflation, bankrupting them). Japan currently has private train lines.

Funnily enough, most urbanist discourse I've seen online is against privatization of trains and in favor of nationalization, e.g. so Amtrak will actually gain the right-of-way over freight rail that they ostensibly have on paper but isn't meaningfully enforced.

If you don't care about that, then fine--but then "I just want to live how I want to" isn't valid either. If you expect that public services will be provided to you at below cost, then you should also expect that you might have to give up some of what you might want to benefit other people in turn.

I'm a bit confused here at what you're arguing against. This seems... obvious to me, and not something I was saying? I'm not saying "I just want to live how I want to"; that's trivially impossible because we are all constrained by various external factors beyond our control. More to the point, all planning decisions go through a committee and people will argue over what the best possible plan is, which indeed may include some people having to give up something in order to benefit others as you said (that's called compromise). This is true even if public services aren't provided to you at below cost.

I disagree that it's an isolated demand for rigor, because I oppose a broad array of government programs on similar grounds. Medicine and education are heavily subsidized, for example, and thus are over-consumed.

Well good for you, at least. Though that position seems hard to square with how expensive healthcare and college is in the US.

(This is somewhat outside the scope of NIMBYism specifically, but it's also the case that if you're going to subsidize some service, you should account for how effective it is and what the externalities are. Driving is low-capacity and has high externalities and negative side-effects, so it isn't a good choice to subsidize.)

Yes, you should. But I believe subsidizing driving is extremely effective at getting people to their destinations (well, as long as you aren't Myanmar and build a 20-lane highway in the middle of nowhere). It seems hard to believe that this analysis is getting applied evenly to, say, buses in Tulsa, Oklahoma that are running at basically empty capacity (and will even waive your fare for the rest of the day), which I would consider not effective and incredibly wasteful in fact.

Complaints about which things are being taxed (property vs gas etc.) seem to be irrelevant when the cost of replacing a single piece of infrastructure is 25% or more of the median household income.

Sorry, I should have linked to the later reply:

Yes, but they're not right. Lafeyette Parish's budget is available online, and its total Operations Expenditures for the current year are 427 million USD, with an included 90,000 households. Assuming no taxes are paid by businesses or out-of-parish people, all operations expenditures together runs at 4.7k USD per household. Its Public Works expenditures, which include all transportation spending, end up 654 USD per household. Even assuming that the 3.3k USD number StrongTowns comes up with is correct, that still doesn't get to 9k USD infrastructure -- and that's defining 'infrastructure' so broadly as to include police, parks, recreation, information services, so forth, (and spotting them two years of inflation, too).

--

What the police do is irrelevant if the legislature and/or courts have decided that nobody is actually to blame.

I should've been clearer; this is also part of my point. Courts seem to let just about anyone out on bond these days no matter how bad of a crime they were arrested for. San Francisco recently had its prosecutor recalled because he kept just not prosecuting crimes. And this all stems from rhetoric of "restorative justice" along with complaints about minorities being unfairly persecuted.

My point is people will kill someone and then just get out of jail and then do it again, no matter if they did the killing by running them over with a car or stabbing them with a knife. Hence my feeling that it rings hollow to paint driving as uniquely worse than homicide when deaths from both sources are hampered by lack of meaningful enforcement.

Also, any sort of meaningful enforcement is discouraged because, ironically, of how car-dependent we are. Preventing someone from driving, in most of the US, means they are entirely dependent on someone else to do things like work or buy food.

Is this really an objection people take seriously? I certainly don't. Yes, it is a punishment to have to be dependent on someone else, and that will suck. In fact the point of punishment is to suck, so you will have a strong incentive to not do the thing that got you in trouble. In this case, you're less likely to be a dangerous, negligent driver. And personally, someone being dependent on someone else is the least of my worries if it's because they killed another person.

However, even better than enforcement is prevention. There are ways to design roads and other infrastructure which are safer because they naturally cause drivers to be more careful. For example, posting a low speed limit on a sign does nothing if the road itself is straight with wide lanes. People tend to drive at the speed they feel comfortable, regardless of the posted limit, so rather than just posting a sign, make the road itself narrower.

I feel like this would do nothing if the driver is drunk and not likely to care at all about how narrow the road is, which is what happened in the Strong Towns example of the State Street fatality that they just... shrug off. Charles Marohn prematurely dismisses it by saying something about how engineers consider drunk people too, even though I sincerely doubt that a speed bump or lane narrowing would've prevented this drunk driver from speeding right through anyway. And then to go further and then say "Someone needs to sue these engineers for gross negligence and turn that entire liability equation around. It’s way past time." is... certainly a take, I suppose.

Finally, the negative externalities of cars go well beyond deaths related to negligence. They're loud and they pollute, to give 2 examples.

I mean, trains are loud too, so again, seems like an isolated demand. I'm not inherently against loud things on principle either; if a train runs through your apartment, then just have good soundproofing. Pollution can be solved by electric cars, and in fact, many places around the world have already banned sales of new gas cars by 2030-2035. My point being that these externalities should be solved and not just diagnosed.

I'm a bit confused here at what you're arguing against. This seems... obvious to me, and not something I was saying? I'm not saying "I just want to live how I want to"; that's trivially impossible because we are all constrained by various external factors beyond our control.

It seemed to me to be the argument that the OP of this thread was making. NIMBYism means keeping people he doesn't like out of his neighborhood, which sounds good. That's why I said what I did--if public services are subsidized out of general tax funds, because they provide benefits to everyone, then that contradicts the use of government policy to serve particular citizens at the expense of others. But it sounds like you and they are making different arguments.

Well good for you, at least. Though that position seems hard to square with how expensive healthcare and college is in the US.

What do you mean? The subsidies are what make them expensive. Different parties pay for it and make spending decisions, which means that the normal incentive to spend less isn't there.

But I believe subsidizing driving is extremely effective at getting people to their destinations

It's pretty inefficient for any sort of populated area. A 3-lane highway has less capacity (in terms of people per hour) than a single light rail track. Houston's Katy Freeway reaches 13 lanes per direction at one point, and it's still congested. I agree that in sufficiently sparse areas, transit becomes inefficient. But in the US, we have cities with hundreds of thousands, or in some cases millions, of people, with borderline non-existent transit.

Sorry, I should have linked to the later reply:

Ok. That might be right, and I think I've seen this basic claim before, but I don't have time to check it all now. I think what happened is that the parish's actual spending is too low to pay for all the costs, and what they should have been spending was higher. In any event, the amount given still seems to be quite a lot for only the local taxes for an area with below-average income.

Hence my feeling that it rings hollow to paint driving as uniquely worse than homicide when deaths from both sources are hampered by lack of meaningful enforcement.

I think we're still talking past each other. My point was that these situations are similar in the sense of imposing negative externalities on others.

Is this really an objection people take seriously? I certainly don't. Yes, it is a punishment to have to be dependent on someone else, and that will suck. In fact the point of punishment is to suck, so you will have a strong incentive to not do the thing that got you in trouble. In this case, you're less likely to be a dangerous, negligent driver.

I think we agree, but my claim is that in practice it's not common enough to revoke a license (which doesn't even stop a lot of people) because it's seen as such a severe punishment. It shouldn't stop the courts from imposing it, but it should. If you drive dangerously and kill someone, you should just be in prison.

I feel like this would do nothing if the driver is drunk and not likely to care at all about how narrow the road is, which is what happened in the Strong Towns example of the State Street fatality that they just... shrug off. Charles Marohn prematurely dismisses it by saying something about how engineers consider drunk people too, even though I sincerely doubt that a speed bump or lane narrowing would've prevented this drunk driver from speeding right through anyway. And then to go further and then say "Someone needs to sue these engineers for gross negligence and turn that entire liability equation around. It’s way past time." is... certainly a take, I suppose.

Traffic calming is certainly not a panacea, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't have it. Not having ever driven drunk, I couldn't guess at whether it would be effective in that particular case.

As for negligence: Can you say that this argument is wrong? (I find this example fitting, given your link above--this is an example, completely typical in cities, of making pedestrians less safe to protect drivers who, most likely, made some sort of error).

I mean, trains are loud too, so again, seems like an isolated demand. I'm not inherently against loud things on principle either; if a train runs through your apartment, then just have good soundproofing. Pollution can be solved by electric cars, and in fact, many places around the world have already banned sales of new gas cars by 2030-2035. My point being that these externalities should be solved and not just diagnosed.

It's not isolated. Tax all the externalities (noise, congestion, pollution, danger, etc.) and let the market sort it out, sure. I think the externalities are much larger for cars than for almost any other mode of transit, and if we did that, cars would be much more expensive. But what we're currently doing doesn't make sense.

But it sounds like you and they are making different arguments.

That's probably the case. I admit that I'm very sympathetic to people who don't want to live near unpleasant or disruptive behavior, though. But maybe it's fine for them to live there if their externalities are taxed somehow?

What do you mean? The subsidies are what make them expensive. Different parties pay for it and make spending decisions, which means that the normal incentive to spend less isn't there.

Okay, this makes more sense than the assertion that they are over-consumed. Which was in contrast to the many tales of Americans actively refusing medical treatment because they'd rather die than pay the medical bills.

It's pretty inefficient for any sort of populated area. A 3-lane highway has less capacity (in terms of people per hour) than a single light rail track. Houston's Katy Freeway reaches 13 lanes per direction at one point, and it's still congested.

Yes, if your only metric is capacity, then a single light rail track wins hands-down over a 3-lane highway. However, there are usually other factors people consider in efficiency, such as the amount of people who actually use it, plus other harder-to-quantify factors like the fact that people using the highway can get off and on at any on/off-ramp, and can thus easily make journeys with a wide variety of starts, destinations, and stops, whereas people with the light rail must get on or off at specific stations, and the more stations you add, the slower the light rail becomes, and this limits the amount of starts and destinations people can get to.

I judge each project on a case-by-case basis; I personally wouldn't make generalized statements like saying a mode is inefficient "for any sort of populated area", and in the real world urban planners consider more factors than just capacity.

As for your claim that the Katy freeway reaches 13 lanes per direction at one point, is this actually true? The most lanes I could find at any point were 6 lanes each direction. I'm not counting ramps or tollways here, and I don't count frontage roads either since they have stoplights, bikes, and sidewalks, and freeway lane counts elsewhere don't include any parallel roads either. As for the congestion today, that can easily be explained by the fact that Houston is one of the fastest-growing metro areas in the US, and when the expansion was completed in 2011, congestion was definitely reduced, only to slowly be undone by the growing population. I think it makes intuitive sense that any significant population growth or density would put a strain on the transportation system; compare this to the trains in Mumbai which are packed full of people, because so many people live there in such a small area.

I agree that in sufficiently sparse areas, transit becomes inefficient. But in the US, we have cities with hundreds of thousands, or in some cases millions, of people, with borderline non-existent transit.

What, like Tulsa, Oklahoma (pop. 413,066)? There are plenty of buses there and they're pretty empty. And not for a lack of trying; the city keeps running the empty buses under the assumption that if they're there, people will use them, when that's clearly not the case.

As for negligence: Can you say that this argument is wrong? (I find this example fitting, given your link above--this is an example, completely typical in cities, of making pedestrians less safe to protect drivers who, most likely, made some sort of error).

I'm a bit confused by the pictures he showed. The pole seems to be mounted on a concrete bollard two or three feet above the ground, so I don't see how it follows that if a car veers off the road and hits it, the pole will shear away, when the car would just be stopped by the bollard.

But even assuming that the pole and shear are mounted at ground level, I guess the argument is not-even-wrong? I don't think it necessarily makes drivers safer, though. If the pole breaks away, then that will bring down traffic lights onto the ground with it, which can crash onto drivers on the roadway below. In fact if the driver isn't stopped by the pole then there's also the possibility that they will continue and crash into other vehicles too, if they're approaching from a side road heading towards another side road. If they're approaching from the middle of the intersection, then the pedestrian would be injured anyway (and maybe even pinned against the pole if it didn't break away).

So the narrative that traffic engineers have gross negligence for the regard of pedestrians in favor of drivers is completely unwarranted.

Okay, this makes more sense than the assertion that they are over-consumed. Which was in contrast to the many tales of Americans actively refusing medical treatment because they'd rather die than pay the medical bills.

There is over-consumption, because it's subsidized, which is why it's expensive. The case where it isn't subsidized then become ruinous.

Yes, if your only metric is capacity, then a single light rail track wins hands-down over a 3-lane highway. However, there are usually other factors people consider in efficiency, such as the amount of people who actually use it, plus other harder-to-quantify factors like the fact that people using the highway can get off and on at any on/off-ramp, and can thus easily make journeys with a wide variety of starts, destinations, and stops, whereas people with the light rail must get on or off at specific stations, and the more stations you add, the slower the light rail becomes, and this limits the amount of starts and destinations people can get to.

Transit becomes very flexible when you add in multiple forms of transportation, such as a walk or cycle near the station. Roads have plenty of their own issues, and will also slow down and/or run much below theoretical maximum capacity, for example due to lights, congestion, and crashes. In the cases where transit exists but is unused, it's usually because the city is designed to prioritize cars and so transit runs rarely, buses don't have their own right of way, it doesn't go lots of places, etc. Yes, there are reasons to have cars. But they're only necessary (edit: this should say, "only necessary for every trip") because of the specific way in which North American cities have been (re-) built since the end of WW2.

I judge each project on a case-by-case basis; I personally wouldn't make generalized statements like saying a mode is inefficient "for any sort of populated area", and in the real world urban planners consider more factors than just capacity.

Who are "real world urban planners"? In much of North America, they consider car capacity and congestion, and basically no other factors. I stand by the statement that cars are, as a general rule, inefficient for populated areas, because they take up so much space.

As for your claim that the Katy freeway reaches 13 lanes per direction at one point, is this actually true? The most lanes I could find at any point were 6 lanes each direction. I'm not counting ramps or tollways here, and I don't count frontage roads either since they have stoplights, bikes, and sidewalks, and freeway lane counts elsewhere don't include any parallel roads either. As for the congestion today, that can easily be explained by the fact that Houston is one of the fastest-growing metro areas in the US, and when the expansion was completed in 2011, congestion was definitely reduced, only to slowly be undone by the growing population. I think it makes intuitive sense that any significant population growth or density would put a strain on the transportation system; compare this to the trains in Mumbai which are packed full of people, because so many people live there in such a small area.

This is the description I found:

2 main lanes (six in each direction), eight feeder lanes and six managed lanes. The managed lanes carry mass transit vehicles during peak hours and are only made available to single-occupancy vehicles for a toll-fee during odd-peak hours.

I think however you count it, it's already a lot of capacity, and yet it's still congested, even though Houston is, as you point out, growing, with space for lots more people. Increasing capacity will temporarily improve congestion, but unless maximum demand is capped, it will never last. A combination of induced demand and population growth will put strain on any system if it can't adapt, but transit gives you much much more room to carry people. I mentioned light rail, but a full underground subway line can carry dozens of times more people than a lane of car traffic. It's also standard for transit to have the ability to implement congestion pricing, which is rare on roads.

What, like Tulsa, Oklahoma (pop. 413,066)? There are plenty of buses there and they're pretty empty. And not for a lack of trying; the city keeps running the empty buses under the assumption that if they're there, people will use them, when that's clearly not the case.

That's barely more than the population of Zurich, which has a ton of great transit options which get used by lots of people. I agree that simply running buses in an area that's not designed for it is unlikely to generate much ridership. There are several issues here. One is land use, where transit is often surrounded by parking and empty lots, on the expectation that people will drive to the station, rather than stores and homes. Another is inconsistency. If there's 1 bus or train every hour and it's always late, people won't bother trying to use it. Running more frequent service encourages ridership, and Zurich is probably running dozens of times more trains, trams, and buses than Tulsa, but they're still full. A third is traffic priority--in many cities outside the US, bus-only lanes are common, so buses can avoid congestion. Transit also often gets priority at intersections. These things make it faster than driving in traffic, even with stops to pick up and drop off passengers.

But even assuming that the pole and shear are mounted at ground level, I guess the argument is not-even-wrong? I don't think it necessarily makes drivers safer, though. If the pole breaks away, then that will bring down traffic lights onto the ground with it, which can crash onto drivers on the roadway below. In fact if the driver isn't stopped by the pole then there's also the possibility that they will continue and crash into other vehicles too, if they're approaching from a side road heading towards another side road. If they're approaching from the middle of the intersection, then the pedestrian would be injured anyway (and maybe even pinned against the pole if it didn't break away).

Breakaway infrastructure is substantially safer for drivers who hit in than a solid post or pole in the same location: https://youtube.com/watch?v=RCErGL2WIto

Any combination of events/circumstances is possible, but breakaway poles are beneficial to the driver in the most likely situation and so represent a net benefit. That's why they're very common.

I think the point of the argument is that engineers know that cars regularly drive into the area that pedestrians wait at high speed, but haven't done anything for the pedestrians, and in fact encourage them to stand in this exact spot.

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Car crash fatalities had been declining prior to COVID, but this is due to the cars themselves being bigger and heavier with more features, but deaths of pedestrians and others outside of cars have been increasing.

Not really.. Pedestrian deaths declined from 1979 (8096) to 2009 (4109) Non-pedestrian deaths dropped precipitously starting after 2005, more or less plateaued from 2010 to 2014, rose again until 2016, then fell until 2019. This cannot be explained by cars themselves being bigger and heavier with more features.

we already have a concept of negligence in law, but seem reluctant to even apply it to car crashes, even in theory.

Certainly we have it; it's what determines who is "at fault" in an accident. Even no-fault states apply it to some sorts of damages. Or are you looking to put people in jail for accidents (and thus discourage driving)? Negligence doesn't result in that.

That's still over a 50% increase in pedestrian deaths over about 10 years, enough to push it to the highest raw level since 1990, especially since the EU saw a substantial decline over the past decade. And the chance from 2020 to 2021 was massive.

This cannot be explained by cars themselves being bigger and heavier with more features.

It's not the only factor, but it's definitely one. SUVs are more dangerous to pedestrians than other cars, and the same factors that make a vehicle safe for its occupants can make others unsafe, encouraging an arms race.

Or are you looking to put people in jail for accidents (and thus discourage driving)?

I'm confused by this question. The whole point I'm making is that we use the word "accident" for a lot of car crashes that are preventable, because one or more drivers engaged in some sort of irresponsible or reckless behavior. Asking if I want to jail people for accidents is rather sidestepping the issue. If you speed and follow too close on the highway, resulting in a fatality, yeah, you should be in prison. That's manslaughter; the lack of intent to kill makes it not murder, but it's still generally a crime to behave recklessly and injure other people. A similar situation is literally one of the examples in the wikipedia page on manslaughter.

That's still over a 50% increase in pedestrian deaths over about 10 years, enough to push it to the highest raw level since 1990, especially since the EU saw a substantial decline over the past decade. And the chance from 2020 to 2021 was massive.

The change from 2020 to 2021 in non-pedestrian deaths was massive also. I would presume the 2020 and 2021 changes were mostly about COVID and lockdowns, in both cases.

It's not the only factor, but it's definitely one. SUVs are more dangerous to pedestrians than other cars, and the same factors that make a vehicle safe for its occupants can make others unsafe, encouraging an arms race.

The rise of the SUV and the general increase in size of cars happened both during the period while pedestrian deaths dropped, and while pedestrian deaths rose. Thus it cannot explain those phenomenon, no matter how beautiful the theory is.

I'm confused by this question. The whole point I'm making is that we use the word "accident" for a lot of car crashes that are preventable, because one or more drivers engaged in some sort of irresponsible or reckless behavior.

The term "accident" does not imply "not preventable", so yes, we use that word.

If you speed and follow too close on the highway, resulting in a fatality, yeah, you should be in prison. That's manslaughter; the lack of intent to kill makes it not murder, but it's still generally a crime to behave recklessly and injure other people.

You are conflating the various mentes rea here. Reckless behavior that results in a fatality is manslaughter. Merely negligent behavior is typically not, and even when it is, the standard for criminal negligence is generally higher than that for ordinary negligence. You are trying to say most traffic accidents should be treated serious crimes; the reason for this would seem to be to discourage driving.

The change from 2020 to 2021 in non-pedestrian deaths was massive also. I would presume the 2020 and 2021 changes were mostly about COVID and lockdowns, in both cases.

Yes. Car crashes went down, but fatalities went up--likely due at least in part to empty roads allowing for more speeding. (I wonder what this says about the idea that we should build more roads until there is no congestion?)

The rise of the SUV and the general increase in size of cars happened both during the period while pedestrian deaths dropped, and while pedestrian deaths rose. Thus it cannot explain those phenomenon, no matter how beautiful the theory is.

Phenomena can have more than 1 explanation. For example, from 1980 to 2010, the portion of people walking to work dropped by almost half: https://www.thetransportpolitic.com/databook/travel-mode-shares-in-the-u-s/

If fewer people are walking, there are going to be fewer pedestrian fatalities. That doesn't mean it's safer to actually be a pedestrian!

The term "accident" does not imply "not preventable", so yes, we use that word.

This is how I would interpret the word, but dictionary.com is... ambiguous: https://www.dictionary.com/browse/accident

e.g. "chance; fortune; luck:"

I believe there is research to the effect that people sometimes interpret "accident" as meaning "no one's fault" although I can't find it now. It's certainly the case that we don't use the word "accident" for plane crashes, or probably for most cases where someone causes damage by breaking the law. (If I shoot a gun into the air, and the bullet hits something or someone, is that an accident?)

It's even gotten to the point where the word is sometimes used for intentional acts!

You are trying to say most traffic accidents should be treated serious crimes; the reason for this would seem to be to discourage driving.

Most car crashes don't result in death or serious injury, so they wouldn't be "serious" crimes, but they might be somewhat more penalized than they currently are. As far as I know this is consistent with the law elsewhere--pushing someone is technically battery (though unlikely to be enforced), but if they fall back and crack their head open on the curb, it's manslaughter.

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In the US at least, we are way past the point of just not wanting to live near homeless people.

Citation needed. Can you point to a metropolitan area in the US that successfully implements YIMBY principles, keeps a handle on the vagrant problem, and generally results in superior outcomes? There's lots of NIMBY areas with good economic and social outcomes, but has YIMBY ever actually been implemented at scale in the US?

an you point to a metropolitan area in the US that successfully implements YIMBY principles,

I'm not aware of any that do a good job over the whole metro area, no (good enough to evaluate their effects in this way, at any rate). You could probably point to individual towns or neighborhoods, but these would probably be A) subject to selection bias because they're rare, B) too few in number, and C) surrounded by other places with different policies. Not Just Bikes made a video about a streetcar suburb of Toronto which seems pretty nice, and if there are any crowds of druggies, they haven't stopped housing prices there from rising faster than in the rest of the city (because of course, such places are mostly illegal to build now, so the supply is constrained).

However, I think you've misunderstood the point of this sentence. Policies generally associated with NIMBYism are not just about keeping vagrants or other obvious problem-causers away. This is clear from looking at the policies themselves, as well as NIMBY arguments, which involve things like property values.

Here's one example: The ski resort town of Vail has been fighting to keep the ski resort of Vail from building employee housing. The reason they give is bighorn sheep range, but they've approved several regular homes to be built in the area and didn't care about any measures the resort offered to protect the sheep. And I think it's pretty clear that resort employee housing is not going to suddenly attract homeless people to one of the most expensive resort towns in the world!

Similarly with opposition to e.g. a duplex or retail or a school. A neighborhood full of million-dollar homes is not suddenly going to be crawling with hobos and criminals because someone put a duplex up going for half a million each side or a small elementary school.

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